Joe Biden's Vote for War

[booley]

43. Biden wanted to remove Saddam years before the Iraq Invasion

Regime change was official US policy for Iraq. And Biden agreed with that policy.

Biden’s earlier suggestion that “taking Saddam down” was the only way to guarantee an end to the WMD program left little doubt where Biden would later come down on the issue.

Biden’s grilling of Ritter is important because it gives context to claims Biden later made: First, that when he voted in favor of the invasion of Iraq as a senator, he did not mean to vote for war, but hoped the resolution would empower inspectors to get back into Iraq and monitor the program. And second, that he never believed Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

On the first claim, Biden told NPR last year that former President George W. Bush “looked me in the eye in the Oval Office. 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. … He got them in and before you know it, we had ‘shock and awe.’”

But according to Biden’s own statements in 1998, he believed that Hussein could never be trusted to eliminate his program, no matter how many inspectors were admitted.

In October 2004, by which time it had become clear there were no WMDs, Biden told an audience at the Council on Foreign Relations, “I never believed they had weapons of mass destruction.”

In fact, as Biden had said in 1998, he believed not only that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, but no amount of inspections or diplomacy could guarantee their removal. That, he told Ritter, could only be done by “guys like you in uniform to be back on foot in the desert taking this son of a — taking Saddam down.”

https://theintercept.com/2020/01/07/joe-biden-iraq-war-history/

And if we look at what Biden was saying in 2003, he makes it clear he did not regret that vote, he would have done it again. (as he explains here at 15:34 in) His problem wasn't' the invasion. His problem was how the Bush administration handled the occupation and rebuilding afterword.

https://www.c-span.org/video/?177659-1/us-policy-iraq