President Joe Biden was one of the liberal hawks who helped then-President George W. Bush go to war in Afghanistan and Iraq. He may preside over the end of both wars as commander in chief.
The House voted last week, with Biden’s blessing, to repeal the authorization for the use of military force in Iraq. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat, has said the upper chamber will take up the measure “this year.”
Schumer is the third consecutive Senate Democratic leader who voted for the Iraq War. Biden makes three out of the last four Democratic presidential nominees who did the same, becoming the first to win the White House. He served as vice president under the one Democratic standard-bearer who did not vote for the war — Barack Obama, who was not in Congress at the time but delivered an anti-war speech as a state lawmaker.
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Biden has already pledged to complete the withdrawal from Afghanistan by Sept. 11, the 20th anniversary of the terrorist attacks that led to the war. A Republican strategist called the use of that specific target date “flat tone-deaf,” preferring former President Donald Trump’s original May deadline.
Still, winding down U.S. involvement in both conflicts would be a fulfillment of Trump’s pledge to stop fighting “endless wars” and a change to how Biden was perceived by the Left during last year’s Democratic primaries.
Biden’s Iraq War vote was one of the main issues his opponents, especially Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, used against him. Biden referred to his vote as a “mistake,” saying he had hoped the Iraq AUMF would help the Bush administration pursue diplomacy, “trusting the president saying he was only doing this to get inspectors in and get the U.N. to agree to put inspectors in.” Sanders claimed he knew at the time that Bush officials were “lying through their teeth.”
At the time, Biden was the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He had partnered with Republican Sens. Richard Lugar of Indiana and Chuck Hagel on legislation that would have allowed Bush to destroy Iraqi weapons of mass destruction with United Nations approval but required a separate authorization of force for a wider war. But after House Democratic leader Dick Gephardt came out for the broader AUMF that permitted Bush to invade Iraq and topple Saddam Hussein, Biden voted to go to war. In a speech at the time, he said the resolution was not a “rush to war” but rather a “march to peace and security.”
“There’s a lot of us who voted for giving the president the authority to take down Saddam Hussein if he didn’t disarm,” Biden told CNN after the war started. “And there are those who believe, at the end of the day, even though it wasn’t handled all that well, we still have to take him down.”
But during the 2020 campaign, Biden suggested he turned against the war faster. “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 in the administration,” he said in an early Democratic primary debate. He repeated the claim in a subsequent interview with National Public Radio.
In a September 2019 interview with a Manchester, New Hampshire, television station, Biden conceded he “misspoke.” His foreign policy adviser Antony Blinken, now the secretary of state, said the same in a statement to the Washington Post. “I said I was immediately against the war,” Biden said. “I was against the war internally and trying to put together coalitions to try to change the way in which the war was conducted.”
While many Republicans have also come to support withdrawal from Afghanistan and repealing the Iraq War authorization, most of the party’s congressional leadership oppose these moves. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, called the former a “grave mistake,” while Rep. Michael McCaul of Texas, the top Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said the latter was being done “without basic due diligence.”
A recent Economist/YouGov poll found that 58% support pulling out of Afghanistan, compared to 25% who were opposed. A poll by the same firm conducted last year for the libertarian Charles Koch Institute found three-fourths of the public supports bringing troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan.
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Biden supporters believe it will be a major accomplishment if the president is able to turn the page on both wars.
“The Biden legacy is recognition that ham-handed military action that has cost the lives of thousands of brave young Americans and emptied the treasury of trillions of dollars is not an effective means of influencing events in areas halfway around the world,” said Democratic strategist Brad Bannon. “It also means we can focus our defense posture towards the Pacific Rim, where the real threat to American security lies.”
