It may fit with official agendas to focus on the dispute between Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren at this week’s Democratic primary debate. At least partly, that’s because it lets former Vice President Joe Biden off the hook on Iraq, just as there is finally some attention to foreign policy. People hear the word “mistake” and want it to end there, but Biden’s actual position on the Iraq invasion is indefensible. Biden and his surrogates, such as former Secretary of State John Kerry, continue to claim that he did not favor the 2003 invasion of Iraq. This is false.
Sen. Bernie Sanders’ camp has just highlighted a video of Biden speaking at the Brookings Institution in July 2003, after the invasion, in which he expresses support for “finishing this job” in Iraq and says: “The president of the United States is a bold leader and he is popular.” [That video link from David Sirota on Twitter no longer exists, but that clip is currently here.]
As far as showing Biden’s support for the war, that video is the tip of the iceberg.
In that address to Brookings (video) Biden makes brazen pro-war falsehoods, claiming that Saddam Hussein “violated every commitment that he made. He played cat and mouse with the weapons inspectors. He failed to account for the huge gaps in weapons declarations that were documented by UN weapons inspectors and submitted by them to the UN Security Council in 1998, and every nation in that Council believed he possessed those weapons at that time. He refused to abide by any conditions.”
Hellbound and Down 