How Biden’s Iraq War vote has and hasn’t shaped his foreign policy as president
W. James Antle III
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President Joe Biden voted 20 years ago to go to war in Iraq. Unlike Hillary Clinton, this did not prevent him from subsequently reaching the White House. The vote has so far been a mixed bag in terms of predicting his actions as commander in chief.
Biden was widely viewed as a standard liberal hawk during his 36 years in the Senate, though he often went with the Democratic flow. He voted against the first Gulf War, but afterward lambasted President George H.W. Bush for not going all the way to Baghdad and deposing Saddam Hussein. Iraq was a large part of the case progressives made against Biden in the 2020 Democratic primaries, to little effect.
Whatever can be said for Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, he did not govern as a liberal hawk when ending America’s longest war. His approach to the war in Ukraine, where he has sought to increase the costs of Russia’s invasion without involving U.S. or NATO forces directly in the fighting, is more complicated.
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On Ukraine, Biden has been criticized both for drawing the United States into a proxy war with nuclear-armed Russia with no limiting principle or endgame and also for being too diffident to help Kyiv achieve victory.
The president’s travel schedule illustrates the tension. Biden was criticized for being among the last national leaders to visit Kyiv and meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. When he finally did so while in Europe for broader international talks, he was pilloried for not being in East Palestine to survey the Ohio train derailment wreckage instead.
Some of this reflects divisions in the Republican Party independent of Biden’s own policies. There is a burgeoning populist movement within the GOP, boosted by former President Donald Trump, that has joined with the libertarian wing in expressing skepticism of foreign aid and wars. But there remain influential hawks inside the party who tend to view Biden’s foreign policy as too weak.
The latter group of Republican lawmakers took the lead in denouncing Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, which is now under investigation by the new House majority. But even Republicans who agreed with the underlying policy, such as Trump, whose administration had negotiated an even more aggressive withdrawal timeline, panned the execution.
“Today, the terrorist threat has metastasized beyond Afghanistan,” Biden said when announcing his withdrawal decision. “So, we are repositioning our resources and adapting our counterterrorism posture to meet the threats where they are now significantly higher: in South Asia, the Middle East, and Africa.”
Biden voted to authorize the war in Afghanistan in response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, but his role in the Iraq War was greater. He not only voted to permit the invasion, but as the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he played a large role in securing the expansive authorization for use of military force that President George W. Bush sought to pursue regime change.
Biden and other top Democrats who voted to allow the war, which included half the Senate Democratic caucus at the time, were at least as important to the invasion taking place as Vice President Dick Cheney and his allies.
“In my judgment, President Bush is right to be concerned about Saddam Hussein’s relentless pursuit of weapons of mass destruction and the possibility that he may use them or share them with terrorists. These weapons must be dislodged from Saddam Hussein, or Saddam Hussein must be dislodged from power,” Biden said.
As he did with the first Gulf War, Biden eventually repudiated his vote when it became unpopular. Then as president, he sought to complete the conversion with a pivot away from the Middle East, this time maintaining his position in the face of intense public backlash.
“When I made the decision to end the U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan, I judged that it was not in the national interest of the United States of America,” Biden said, invoking realist arguments against a continued military presence there.
What happens in Ukraine may be more indicative of the continuity between Biden’s Iraq War vote and his presidential record. There, much of the story remains to be written.
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Biden’s assumption of so great a portion of Ukraine’s defense costs while leaving the endgame substantially up to Kyiv has opened him up to charges of missing an opportunity for greater burden-sharing with European allies. His reluctance to provide offensive weaponry has other detractors calling into question his commitment to Russia’s defeat.
Members of both camps are fond of quoting former Defense Secretary Robert Gates. “I think he has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades,” he wrote in 2014.