Excitement on Barley Mill Road in front of the Biden Residence/ Photo by my Mom

My family got advance warning last week that Barak Obama had picked Delaware Senator Joe Biden for his vice presidential candidate because they live near the Senator's home in Wilmington. My mother woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of helicopters racing back and forth from Washington or Illinois, and my Aunt Valerie passed out apples to the television crews waiting in the road outside the Biden residence.

Now that the word is out, the McCain campaign is making alot of noise about how Obama's choice of Biden is being made out of weakness -- to make up for Obama's perceived lack of foreign policy experience, or popularity among working class white Catholic voters. But picking Biden is hardly an act of desperation. Why on earth would you pick someone from rinky-dink Delaware unless you wanted to be judged on your own merits? Biden carries no great constituency along with him: Delaware has just three electoral votes, and was leaning towards Obama anyway.

I'm not sure how relevant it is to scan Biden's foreign policy record to see what's it in store for the Middle East. As vice president he would probably have just a marginal role in influencing foreign policy. And besides, his policies are pretty standard centrist American fare: diplomacy backed by military muscle, wary of an attack on Iran, strong on support for Israel, etc. One of his bolder ideas -- the tripartate division of Iraq along ethnic and religious lines, has fallen by the wayside now that the country has stabilized post-surge. (Though it may yet come back with a vengeance once the American withdrawal begins.)

What's more relevant about the Biden pick is what it says about how an Obama presidency is going to treat the rest of the world. There's a saying that war is the only way American learn geography (which might explain why many Americans don't know where Delaware is.) But that makes it all the more ironically inspiring that a lawmaker from a small-time state became the head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Biden, a man who takes the Amtrak train home from Washington almost every evening, not only pays attention to what's going on in the world, he pays attention before the bombs start droppping. You know he actually came to Lebanon in 2005, after the Syrians withdrawal, on one of his many trips to the region? He didn't have anything particularly memorable to say -- Lebanese elections are confusing even to Lebanese -- but at least he made an effort. There aren't many points to be picked up by an American politician visiting an Arab country the size of Delaware.

Just doing your homework and showing up may not be enough to reverse the damage done during the last eight years. And the next administration may need a lot more creative idea's than Joe Biden's if it hopes to stem the decline of American power and prestige in the world, let alone make any contribution to something as monumentally difficult as peace in the Middle East. But it's a start. That and passing out apples.

--Andrew Lee Butters/Beirut

credit: Gettyimages

I'm trying to think back on where our Mediterranean voyage went horribly wrong. Was it the heavy sea and wind that pitched our sailboat up and down like a rubber duck in a jacuzzi? The fact that the Israeli navy was probably jamming the communications of the peace boats we were trying to rendezvous with on the high seas? Or was it that our sly skipper Shmuel was in cahoots with the Israeli authorities and was cheerily trying to sabotage our mission?

The plan seemed perfectly do-able: a small group of journalists would charter a boat and set a course northeast from the port of Ashdod so that we would meet up with two vessels loaded with peace activists who were trying to break Israel's sea blockade on Gaza. We would witness what happened when the two ships tried to break into Israel's military exclusion zone around Gaza.

Enter Captain Shmuel who looks like a sun-crisped heavyweight wrestler, a slab of a man at the helm of his sleek 38 foot sloop. His rates were piratical. Shmuel was jovial and knew his way around every aspect of sailing except when it came to charting our course. Then he would sit rubbing his big head vigorously, as if friction would make his brain cells work faster. He would pencil in lines on his map and then leave them half erased. The whole thing looked like a mathematical equation gone messily awry. The truth is Shmuel was a great guy but his forte was taking tourists up and down the coast drinking beer and occasionally catching a fish.

His crew: eight Israeli and foreign journalists. Shmuel didn't really pack any food because he assured us that we'd be catching plenty of tuna as we careened up and down the roller-coaster waves to our destination. We didn't catch any tuna –in fact, our fishing line got tangled in the propeller-- but that was OK because one of us was violently seasick and spent most of the voyage with his head stuck over the side, retching. I don't know about the other crew, but that killed my appetite for raw tuna.

The coordinates of the two peace ships were kept a secret, which was silly because the Israel navy had been tracking them since they left Cyprus on Friday morning. Finally, they got in touch with us, gave us their location and asked Shmuel for our coordinates. But the captain on the activist ship “Free Gaza” called back and told Shmuel, “If your coordinates are right, that would put you directly offshore from Beirut.” Oops. Shmuel snorted and started rubbing his head furiously again, getting those brain molecules all stirred up. The rendezvous would be in an hour, he said. Or was it five hours? Shmuel wasn't really sure.

We'd hired the sloop for 24 hours, but Shmuel was getting sulky. (It turned out that he'd gone ahead and chartered the boat anyway to a party for a sunset cruise.) Besides, the sea sick journalist was groaning in misery, and we were starting to feel a bit sorry for him.

Meanwhile, the Israeli navy decided that it was bad PR to risk a high seas confrontation with a boat filled with peace activists that included an 81 year-old American nun and ex-British PM Tony Blair's sister-in-law. So the Israelis let the vessels through to Gaza's harbor, where the activists were greeted by joyous Palestinians.

But that was later. We were still searching frantically for the 'Free Gaza' ships. Meanwhile, all communication with the two vessels went dead. Activists on board later told us that the Israelis were probably jamming the signal. The storm had thrown us and them off course, so we scanned the heaving horizon. Nothing. I used to read Greek mythology and think: how could Odysseus and all those sailors get so badly blown off course, when the Mediterranean is such a dinky little pond? As a Californian, my idea of a large body of water is the Pacific Ocean. But if you're on a tiny boat, looking for two other tiny boats, the Mediterranean can seem awful big. Later we calculated that we'd missed the two boats by about 30 miles. It might as well have been 500 miles. I'm surprised Odysseus ever made it home –or that we did.

By Tim McGirk/Somewhere in the Mediterranean