Biden’s Record on Iraq War
Twice in the last five weeks, Joe Biden has claimed that despite voting to authorize military force against Iraq in 2002, he opposed the Iraq war from “the moment” it began. That’s not accurate, and Biden now says he misspoke.
The public position taken in the lead-up to and early days of the Iraq war has been a litmus test for many presidential candidates.
Sen. Bernie Sanders proudly boasts about his vote — while serving as a member of the House in late 2002 — against authorizing use of military force against Iraq. While running for president, Donald Trump repeatedly claimed that he publicly opposed the Iraq war before the March 19, 2003, invasion, though we looked into it and could find no evidence that he ever did.
As chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when the authorization vote was cast, Biden was at the forefront of the debate about what course to pursue with Iraq. As a result, he was also frequently quoted in the press and spoke numerous times from the Senate floor, providing ample evidence of his position over time.
Biden was a consistent critic of the way the Bush administration handled the war: Its failure to exhaust diplomatic solutions, its failure to enlist a more robust group of allies for the war effort, and the lack of a plan for reconstruction of Iraq. Some of his comments proved to be quite prescient, including his warnings about the likely higher-than-expected cost and length of the war, and the complexity of “winning the peace” once Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s regime was toppled.
But Biden never outright opposed military action in Iraq in the immediate days after the start of the invasion, as he claimed. He now admits his recent comments went too far.
Biden’s Iraq Comments in 2019
During the second Democratic primary debate on July 31, Biden said his “bad judgment” in voting to authorize President George W. Bush to use military force against Iraq in 2002 was “trusting the president saying he was only doing this to get inspectors in and get the U.N. to agree to put inspectors in.”
In days before the 2002 vote, Bush
