In a speech expressing concern over escalating tensions between the United States and Iran after President Trump’s decision to kill Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani, Joe Biden told supporters at a fundraiser in New York that he got into politics because of his opposition to the Vietnam War.
“He has to understand that he cannot take this nation to war with Iran, without the informed consent of the American people. We’ve been through this, this debate over the last 40 years. It’s what got me involved in public life over 50 years ago, war in Vietnam,” the former vice president said Friday morning in the offices of the Skadden Arps law firm. “And the idea that he can take us into a conflict potentially with a country of 80 million people in the Middle East, without the consent of American people — and doing it by tweet — is just preposterous.”
Biden’s remarks come as the Democratic field have found themselves on the defensive over the president’s aggression toward Iran, a country that has been labeled by the federal government as a state-sponsor of terrorism. Although most candidates have acknowledged that Soleimani, the general who headed Iran’s elite military Quds Force, is responsible for the deaths of Americans and civilians in the Middle East, they have all expressed concern over whether the Trump administration has a plan for any potential blowback from Iran.
“But the question is — this administration has given us no confidence that they have a plan or a strategy with how to deal with the aftermath of the strike,” Biden, 77, said.
In past speeches, Biden has implied that the political and cultural turmoil of the late 1960s and early 1970s is what inspired him to first run for office. In August, Biden recalled the chaos of 1968, when his “political heroes,” Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., were both assassinated. During that New Hampshire town hall, Biden questioned what would have happened if former President Barack Obama was killed in office.
Biden first ran for office in 1969 on a platform of affordable housing, winning a spot on the New Castle County Council. He served two years before running for Senate in 1972, eventually beating a Republican incumbent.
The concern over Trump’s Iran policy comes as he has faced continued scrutiny from his party’s left-wing base over his role in helping launch the Iraq War. Throughout the campaign, Biden has repeated the falsehood that he opposed the war after the March 2003 invasion.
Beyond being one of the war’s most vocal Democratic advocates, Biden was defending his Senate vote in favor of military action as late as six months after its start.
“I’m having second thoughts only about the degree of confidence I placed in the administration to know what to do after Saddam was taken down,” he said in an interview. In April 2004, Biden told called for a surge of troops to the country “to get things under control.”
[Related: Biden confuses Iraq and Iran in foreign policy speech]
