![]() Vice President Dick Cheney declared definitively that Saddam Hussein was building an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction - a claim echoed by American intelligence officers, who were called to Congress to detail those weapons, and by the media outlets who quoted them. The Bush administration’s campaign for war powers began in the summer of 2002. How he got to that point involves several twists. And he did so at a time when the majority of Americans did not support taking immediate military action. He did so as a top-ranking Democrat in the Senate: the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The simple truth is that Biden voted to give Bush broad power to go to war with Iraq. ![]() Biden voted for - and helped advance - the Bush agenda “What’s the central reason that Congress approved the war? Key Democrats like Biden crossed over and made a deal with Bush,” says Robert Naiman, with the anti-interventionist Just Foreign Policy group. Now a decade and a half later, as voters decide if Biden should represent the Democrats against Trump, they will have to decide if Biden’s checkered history with Iraq may impede him from the ultimate prize. Lawmakers knew from the beginning the shakiness of the Bush administration’s case for going to war with Iraq, and Biden not only went along with it, he championed it. “The sense in the Senate was that there was a pathway out of this thing, and the Bush administration blew it.”īut Biden’s fiercest critics point out that the timeline doesn’t add up. “There’s plenty of room to criticize him, but I don’t think this a purely cynical case of revisionism,” one former Democratic Senate aide told Vox about his Iraq record. Biden has long touted a dedication to working on the inside, maintaining civility and forming bonds with even those he vehemently disagrees with. Those close to Biden describe his record on Iraq as one less moored in policy than in personal connections. ![]() Ferrell/Congressional Quarterly/Getty Images Joe Biden sits with Republican members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee at the start of a hearing on September 26, 2002. Sanders, then a member of the House of Representatives, was vocal in opposition. In the fall of 2002, Biden committed what anti-war activists call the “original sin” by voting for the war when he was chair of the Foreign Relations Committee. Bernie Sanders - with congressional records that stretch back to the start of the Iraq War. To hear the former senator and vice president tell it, Biden was one of the many high-profile Democrats who voted to authorize the Iraq War after the 9/11 attacks, only to regret it immediately after.īut his record, well documented in speeches on the Senate floor, congressional hearings, and press interviews from 2001 through his time in the White House, is that of a senator bullish about the push to war who helped sell the Bush administration’s pitch to the American public - and of a vice president who left an unmistakable imprint on President Barack Obama’s backing of a dictator in Iraq.īiden, whose campaign didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment, is one of two 2020 Democratic presidential candidates - the other being Sen. “He got them in and before you know it, we had ‘shock and awe.’” He said he needed the vote to be able to get inspectors into Iraq to determine whether or not Saddam Hussein was engaged in dealing with a nuclear program,” Biden told NPR in September, explaining his Senate vote. “ looked me in the eye in the Oval Office. Joe Biden says that when deciding whether to vote in favor of invading Iraq in 2002, he took President George W.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |