In the 2008 Democratic primary season, Hillary Clinton got hit repeatedly for her vote in favor of the 2002 Iraq War resolution. Her chief opponent, Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, had been a vocal opponent of military action in Iraq, which proved an important element in his upset win.
A dozen years later, another prominent senator from that era who backed the Iraq War resolution, Joe Biden, is the front-runner for the Democratic nomination. With the passage of time, the war has been denounced by much of the general public as a mistake. Yet, it’s still an open question whether Biden, who went on to serve eight years as Obama’s vice president, will be hurt by that vote nearly 17 years ago.
The issue reared its head Wednesday during the second night of Democratic debates, when a Democratic primary rival, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, boasted of voting against the Iraq resolution as a backbencher of the House minority. That prompted one of the moderators, CNN’s Jake Tapper, to ask Biden why he had voted to authorize the Iraq invasion.
“I did make a bad judgment, trusting the president saying he was only doing this to get the inspectors in and get the U.N. To put inspectors in,” Biden said Wednesday. “From the moment ‘Shock and Awe’ started, I was opposed to the effort and outspoken as much as anyone at all in the Congress and administration.”
That statement, though, paints a revisionist picture of Biden’s approach to Iraq. As ranking member on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in the late 1990s, and then its chairman from June 2001 to January 2003, Biden proved a hawk in his desire to depose Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.
Biden described Iraq as one of America’s chief foreign adversaries and repeatedly raised questions about whether international inspectors could ever reasonably track Saddam Hussein’s chemical and biological weapons programs.
“I think you and I believe and many of us believe here as long as Saddam’s at the helm there is no reasonable prospect you or any other inspector is ever going to be able to guarantee that we have rooted out, root and branch, the entirety of Saddam’s program relative to weapons of mass destruction,” Biden told chief United Nations weapon inspector Scott Ritter during a Senate hearing in September 1998.
Like many lawmakers, the 9/11 attacks provided an opening, eventually, for regime change in Iraq. Biden centered his chief concerns regarding Iraq around the leadership of Hussein, who he said was a source of constant destabilization in the region.
“If Saddam Hussein is still there five years from now, we are in big trouble,” Biden said in February 2002 at an event with the Delaware National Guard.
By July of that year, Biden, as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, began holding congressional hearings over a possible invasion of Iraq. Although the hearings were ostensibly to voice both the pro and anti sides of the potential war, Biden made his leanings explicit their opening day, when he released a New York Times op-ed outlining his concerns about Hussein.
“If we wait for the danger to become clear and present, it may be too late. That is why some believe removing Mr. Hussein from power is the better course,” Biden wrote.
Those hearings gave the Bush administration and members of Congress in favor of war in Iraq more political capital to give President George W. Bush’s administration room take military action. In September 2002, Biden and the rest of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee drafted a resolution outlining the parameters of a potential conflict with Iraq.
“We are trying to give the president the power that he needs and get a large vote,” Biden said at the time.
While the Senate’s resolution ultimately failed in the face of a more expansive one from the House, Biden would be one of 77 senators who voted in favor of war. Biden was among 29 Democrats voting in favor, while 21 opposed the measure.
And it marked a turnaround from his vote nearly a dozen years earlier to oppose authorization of military force in the Persian Gulf to counter Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Iraq the previous August. In that January 1991 vote, approved 52-47, only Democrats voted in favor. Biden was among 45 opposing the use of force for the Gulf War: a conflict widely seen as a rousing U.S. victory.
Even as the war continued, despite his remarks at the Democratic debate, Biden remained supportive, even after the so-called “Shock and Awe” strategy by the Bush administration.
“I personally think this job is doable, or I wouldn’t have voted for us going into Iraq in the first place. I think it is doable. I no more agree — just for the record — with your assessment that “Iraq is the hotbed of terror” now than I did when your assertions about Al Qaeda connections at the front end,” Biden told the Senate, months after the initial invasion. “And I voted to go into Iraq and I’d vote to do it again.”
