What outrage will some DUers gin up about about Joe tomorrow?

[DrFunkenstein]

67. Refusing To Allow Dissenting Voices To Question The Rush To Invade Iraq?

During the summer of 2002, as the Bush Administration was pushing for war, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, under Biden, had the opportunity to hear from any number of academics, former foreign service officials, United Nations personnel, and others specializing in Iraq. Public statements and leaks from the administration in the preceding months had been filled with false claims regarding Iraq’s military capabilities and links to terrorist groups while insisting a U.S. invasion and occupation of that country would go smoothly, with minimal casualties or other negative consequences.

When the hearings commenced on July 31, eighteen witnesses were called, none of whom challenged the administration’s claims that Iraq was in possession of chemical and biological weapons and a nuclear weapons program. All three witnesses who addressed the question of Al-Qaeda claimed that Iraq directly supported the Islamist terrorist group.

Despite overwhelming opposition among academics and foreign service officers familiar with the region, among the twelve witnesses who addressed whether the United States should invade, six were supportive, four were ambivalent, and only two opposed it. Among the witnesses was former Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, whom Biden insisted was credible despite multiple perjury indictments for lying before Congress and his history of grossly exaggerating the military capabilities of Nicaragua, Cuba, the Soviet Union, and other designated enemies of the United States.

Throughout the hearings, Biden insisted that Iraq was a threat to U.S. national security and that “regime change” was a legitimate U.S. policy. And he expressed skepticism that renewed inspections would work.

Scott Ritter, the former chief U.N. weapons inspector, noted just prior to the hearings, “For Senator Biden’s Iraq hearings to be anything more than a political sham used to invoke a modern-day Gulf of Tonkin resolution-equivalent for Iraq, his committee will need to ask hard questions—and demand hard facts—concerning the real nature of the weapons threat posed by Iraq.”

But Biden had no intention of doing so, refusing to even allow Ritter—who knew more about Iraq’s WMD capabilities than anyone and would have testified that Iraq had achieved at least qualitative disarmament—to testify. (Ironically, on Meet the Press in 2007, Biden defended his false claims about Iraqi WMDs by insisting that “everyone in the world thought he had them. The weapons inspectors said he had them.”)

Biden also refused to honor requests by some of his Democratic colleagues to include in the hearings some of the leading anti-war scholars familiar with Iraq and Middle East. Nor did Biden call some of the dissenting officials in the Pentagon or State Department who were willing to challenge the alarmist claims.

Ritter accused Biden of having “preordained a conclusion that seeks to remove Saddam Hussein from power regardless of the facts and . . . using these hearings to provide political cover for a massive military attack on Iraq.”

Had Biden allowed for additional hearings with a witness list more representative of the widespread opposition by those actually familiar with Iraq, it is possible the vote in the Democrat-controlled Senate authorizing the war could have turned out differently, and tragedy would have been averted.

https://progressive.org/dispatches/the-other-reason-biden-shouldnt-run-Zunes-190402/