Reviewing Biden’s record on Iraq is like rewinding footage of a car crash to identify the fateful decisions that arrayed people at the bloody intersection. He was not just another Democratic hawk navigating the trauma of 9/11 in a misguided way. He didn’t merely call his vote for a disastrous war part of “a march to peace and security.” Biden got the Iraq war wrong before and throughout invasion, occupation, and withdrawal. Convenient as it is to blame Bush—who, to be clear, bears primary and eternal responsibility for the disaster—Biden embraced the Iraq war for what he portrayed as the result of his foreign policy principles and persisted, most often in error, for the same reasons.
Biden contextualized the war within an assertion that America has the right to enforce its standards of behavior in the name of the international community, even when the international community rejects American intervention. While Biden, as the senior Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for most of the war, had unique prominence for his views, they didn’t come out of nowhere. For while Biden bullshitted through his September NPR interview, he also said something true: “I think the vast majority of the foreign policy community thinks [my record has] been very good.” That will be important context should Biden become president. He’s the favorite of many in Democratic foreign policy circles who believe in resetting the American geopolitical position to what it was the day before Trump was elected, rather than considering it critical context for why Trump was elected.
Early in 2002, Biden became alarmed that the Bush administration was prematurely losing focus on Afghanistan in favor of Iraq, which Bush’s advisers had decided to invade soon after 9/11. Yet that did not drive Biden into opposition. Instead, by the summer of 2002, with the foreign relations committee gavel in his hand, Biden held a series of hearings to start “a national dialogue” on Iraq. He postured as picking no side at all, to avoid “prejudic[ing] any particular course of action.” Biden’s position meant Bush, at the height of his popularity and without the obstacle of the opposition party’s premier foreign policy voice, could do as he liked.