From Monday night’s Fox News All-Stars.

On Vice President Biden’s optimistic talk on Iraq now as opposed to his pessimism in July 2007:

Well, when I hear [the] vice president saying that he’s giving us assurances — ‘Absolutely, there’s going to be a unity government’ — this is the wrong way to go about it, I think. First of all, you shouldn’t announce it publicly if you are working behind the scenes. It gives the impression that this is a U.S. creation, the coalition that he says will emerge, and it undermines the legitimacy and the independence of such a government.

Secondly, we are not exerting that influence behind the scenes. We have a very weak ambassador. We have a president who’s shown no interest whatsoever in Iraq. He talks only about ending the war and leaving, not about success.

And — we have an administration that is linked and tied to a rigid withdrawal schedule arbitrarily chosen by Obama a year and a half ago, thinking we would have a stable government now. But in the absence of it, we have a drawdown, which weakens whatever influence America has in the first place.

So for all of those reasons we’ve had little influence. The Iranians have had influence on the shaping of the government, the Saudis have, and the Syrians and the Turks, each riding its own horse, each creating a stalemate. We have not.

What essentially has happened with the Biden speech is we’re talking loudly and carrying no stick at all. 

On whether President Obama will ever praise President Bush for the surge:

I don’t think I’ll live ever to see that, but I don’t care about whether he’s gracious or not. I care about if he’s effective. At the time of that speech [against the surge by then-Senator Obama on the Senate floor] what Democrats argued is: We don’t need a military surge, we need a diplomatic surge. And the Republicans are always cowboys who want to use war.

In fact it was a fatuous argument because at the time diplomacy would have been useless. We won the war militarily. That was Bush and Petraeus.

As a result, when they handed it over at the inauguration in 2009, the Obama administration had one task, a diplomatic task. Right? That’s what Democrats are [supposedly] good at. A year and a half [to] get an election done, [and get] a government in place. It has absolutely failed on that. It had one task, a diplomatic task, and it’s left us in a situation where we’re winding down, we’re leaving, and the government is extremely unstable — and all that was spent in Iraq is now at risk.

On Iran’s new unmanned drone bomber:

Well, it looks like I was wrong. Obama had some success now with the outreach and diplomacy. The Iranians have responded with diplomacy of their own … the “Ambassador of Death.”