With his front-runner status solidifying since big wins on Super Tuesday, former Vice President Joe Biden backed away from and obfuscated his voting record in favor of the Iraq War during George W. Bush’s presidency.
In an interview ahead of the Michigan primary election on Tuesday, Biden told Lawrence O’Donnell on MSNBC’s The Last Word that he voted in support of the Iraq War even though, internally, he had reservations about the veracity of claims that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had “weapons of mass destruction” and only voted to authorize military force to stop a war.
“I didn’t believe [Hussein] had those nuclear weapons. I didn’t believe he had those weapons of mass destruction,” Biden said. “What happened was we went in, determined that they hyped what in fact was occurring. There was no concrete proof of what he was doing — and they still went to war.”
But Biden, who was chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee at the time of the Iraq War, was a leading Democratic supporter of the president, repeatedly saying it was the duty of the United States to “take him [Hussein] down.” When George W. Bush cited U.S. intelligence and claimed Iraq had chemical and biological weapons in 2002, then-Sen. Biden helped pass the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution when he voted “yea” in support of it.
“There’s a lot of us who voted for giving the president the authority to take down Saddam Hussein if he didn’t disarm,” said Biden during a CNN interview in March 2003. “And there are those who believe, at the end of the day, even though it wasn’t handled all that well, we still have to take him down.”
O’Donnell pressed Biden on his foreign policy judgment, suggesting Sen. Bernie Sanders, his rival in the 2020 Democratic nomination contest, may have shown better foresight in his decision to vote against authorization of the war.
“When we look back on it, can we say that Sen. Sanders’s judgment on that was better than yours?” O’Donnell asked.
“The argument was because Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, so he said that ‘I need to be able to get the [United Nations] Security Council to agree to send in inspectors to put pressure on Saddam to find out whether or not he’s producing nuclear weapons,'” Biden replied. “At the time, I said, ‘that’s your reason, alright, I get it.'”
Biden also claimed, “The reason I voted the way I did was to try to prevent a war from happening.”
But the former senator struck a vastly different tone when giving a full-throated defense of removing Iraq’s brutal dictator in a speech to the Brookings Institution in July 2003, months after the war in Iraq began.
“Saddam Hussein is no longer in power, and that is a very good thing,” Biden said. “We still haven’t heard a single clear statement from the president of the United States of America articulating his policy in general and specifically that securing Iraq will cost billions of American dollars, require tens of thousands of American troops for an extended period of time, and that it’s worth it, and, most importantly, that it is in our national interest to stay the course — a view that I strongly hold.”
Biden noted that “some in my own party have said that it was a mistake to go to Iraq in the first place and believe that it’s not worth the cost, whatever benefit may flow from our engagement in Iraq,” but argued that “the cost of not acting against Saddam I think would have been much greater, and so will be the cost of not finishing this job.”
The then-senator claimed “anyone who can’t acknowledge that the world is better off without [Saddam], with all due respect, I think is out of touch. That was the case against Saddam, and the president made it well.”
Last week, Biden turned his back on two Iraq War veterans who confronted the Delaware Democrat during an event in Oakland, California, on Super Tuesday about his voting record on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
“My brothers and sisters died in Iraq and Afghanistan. He enabled that to happen,” shouted Air Force veteran Michael Thurman. “He is disqualified. No way he can be president. They are dead. Millions are dead in Iraq. He will not be allowed. Trump is more anti-war than Joe Biden.”
Biden, whose son Beau served during the invasion, pushed for war with Iraq years before he voted for the authorize military force following terrorist strikes on the United States.
“I think you and I believe, and many of us believe here, as long as Saddam is at the helm, there is no reasonable prospect you or any other inspector is ever gonna be able to guarantee that we have rooted out, root and branch, the entirety of Saddam’s program relative to weapons mass destruction,” said Biden during a 1998 Senate hearing. “The only way, the only way we’re going to get rid of Saddam Hussein is we’re going to have to start it alone, start it alone, and it’s gonna require guys like you in uniform to be back on foot, in the desert, taking the son of a … taking Saddam down.”
More than 5,000 U.S. troops died during the Iraq War and an estimated 600,000 Iraqi civilians may have died in the first 40 months of the war alone.
