"He’s a total team player"

Biden joined other top advisers in the Oval Office on the morning of McChrystal’s forced retirement for the final debate over McChrystal’s fate. He also was one of the first to suggest Gen. David Petraeus as McChrystal’s replacement, despite occasional clashes with the general over Afghanistan and Iraq war policy, according to a senior administration official.

Later that day, Biden pulled Petraeus aside after a meeting Obama convened in the White House Situation Room to say that he was “100 percent” behind the new Afghanistan commander and the counterinsurgency approach he initially questioned last fall…

Having Biden around is critical for Obama, a relative novice on foreign policy who was in high school when Biden was clambering up the seniority ladder on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

“Biden’s the voice of experience in the White House on this stuff,” said Leslie Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, who once co-authored a plan with Biden to divide Iraq into three ethnically based federal districts.