Joe Biden’s Iraq Memories The former Vice President omits a few details about his strategic misjudgments.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/joe-bidens-iraq-memories-11564786933
Foreign policy was barely discussed at the Democratic presidential debates this week, and not in a good way when it was. The main point seemed to be to stop “endless war,” which sounds like Donald Trump as a candidate in 2016.
That includes Joe Biden, who as a former Vice President and veteran of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee should know better. Yet when criticized about his 2002 vote for the Iraq war, Mr. Biden had a memory lapse.
“I did make a bad judgment, trusting the President [George W. Bush] saying he was only doing this to get inspectors in and get the U.N. to agree to put inspectors in,” Mr. Biden said. “From the moment ‘shock and awe’ started, from that moment I was opposed to the effort, and I was outspoken as much as anyone at all in the Congress and the Administration.”
Mr. Biden forgets that he was also a loud critic of Saddam Hussein, had been so for many years, and also worried that the dictator might have weapons of mass destruction. Everyone knew that the vote in 2002 was about authorizing a potential military intervention.
But Mr. Biden didn’t stop there this week. “Secondly,” he added, “I was asked by the President [Barack Obama] in the first meeting we had on Iraq, he turned and said, ‘Joe, get our combat troops out,’ in front of the entire national-security team. One of the proudest moments of my life was to stand there in Al-Faw Palace and tell everyone that we’re coming—all our combat troops are coming home.”
Mr. Biden is trying to make a virtue out of a tragic strategic blunder. The total withdrawal of U.S. troops in 2011 set the stage for the rise of Islamic State, and the takeover of Mosul and much of Iraq by the “caliphate.” By 2014 U.S. forces were fighting again in Iraq, and it took five years to defeat the caliphate after the premature Obama-Biden withdrawal.
Mr. Biden will run on his foreign-policy chops, but on Iraq he supported the war, then turned against it when the going got tough, then opposed the 2007 Bush surge that finally won the war, then supported a withdrawal that let the enemy regroup. That isn’t a record to boast about.
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