Iraq war

At the Democratic debate in Des Moines, Iowa Tuesday, Senator Bernie Sanders took former Vice President Joe Biden to task for his support of the war in Iraq during the Bush administration.

Sanders said he never believed what he was told by the Bush administration about the war and made every effort to stop the armed conflict from happening.

“The war in Iraq turned out to be the worst foreign policy blunder in the modern history of this country,” Sanders said. “As Joe well knows, we lost 4,500 brave troops. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died. We have spent trillions of dollars on that endless war, money which should go into health care and education and infrastructure in this country.”

“Joe and I listened to what Dick Cheney and George Bush and [Donald] Rumsfeld had to say,” Sanders continued. “I thought they were lying. I didn’t believe them for a moment.”

“I took to the floor,” Sanders added. “I did everything I could to prevent that war. Joe saw it differently.”

Sanders’ comments came after Biden expressed his view that his vote to authorize military force in Iraq in 2002 was a “mistake.”

“I said 13 years ago it was a mistake to give the president the authority to go to war if, in fact, he couldn’t get inspectors into Iraq to stop what was thought to be the attempt to get a nuclear weapon,” Biden said. “It was a mistake and I acknowledge that.”

Biden said he would only send troops into battle “very, very reluctantly” and then, only for the right reason.

“We should not send anyone anywhere unless the overwhelming vital interests of the United States are at stake,” Biden said. “They were not at stake [in Afghanistan]. They were not at stake in Iraq and it was a mistake in vote. But I think my record overall, on everything we’ve done, I’m ready to compare it to anybody’s on this stage.”

Biden has told reporters that he was in opposition to the Iraq War from its inception, saying that he opposed President George W. Bush’s decisions.

“From the moment ‘shock and awe’ started,” Biden said during the Democratic debate in July 2019, “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.”

Before the decision to invade Iraq was made, Biden was the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. In 2002, Biden voted to allow the usage of military force against Iraq.

“It is appalling that after 18 years Joe Biden still refuses to admit he was dead wrong on the Iraq War,” said senior adviser to Bernie Sanders’ campaign Jeff Weaver in a Saturday statement. “Unlike 23 of his Senate colleagues who got it right, Biden made explicitly clear that he was voting for war, and even after the war started, he boasted that he didn’t regret it.”

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez took aim at Joe Biden in a Wednesday tweet, criticizing the former vice president for his support of the Iraq War, his record of trying to freeze funding to Social Security and saying he’d be “open to a Republican running mate.”

Biden has come under significant criticism, particularly from fellow presidential hopeful Senator Bernie Sanders and his supporters, for his vote on the resolution that allowed President George W. Bush’s Iraq invasion and Biden’s repeated efforts to curb Social Security funding while in Congress. Ocasio-Cortez, a New York Democrat, has repeatedly criticized Biden, even suggesting earlier this month that they shouldn’t be in the same political party.

“I don’t understand why some folks run as if the internet doesn’t exist. Joe Biden helped sell the invasion of Iraq and spent years working to cut social security, Medicare, and Medicaid. He’s open to a Republican running mate,” the progressive congresswoman, who has endorsed Sanders’ campaign, tweeted Wednesday,

“Spin it however you want, but those are the facts,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote, sharing a post by the Vermont senator criticizing Biden on Social Security.

In Sanders’ original tweet, the Vermont senator wrote: “Let’s be honest, Joe. One of us fought for decades to cut Social Security, and one of us didn’t. But don’t take it from me. Take it from you.”

With the post, he shared a video featuring audio of Biden calling for freezing spending on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

The quote featured in the clip was from a 1995 speech Biden made in the Senate. “When I argued that we should freeze federal spending, I meant Social Security as well,” he said at the time. “I meant Medicare and Medicaid. I meant veterans’ benefits. I meant every single solitary thing in the government. And I not only tried it once, I tried it twice, I tried it a third time, and I tried it a fourth time.”

Biden has insisted that his remarks about Social Security have been taken out of context, denying that he ever wanted to cut funding to the programs. He has also promised that he will not support such cuts if elected.

As Ocasio-Cortez noted, Biden also voted in favor of the congressional resolution that led to the Iraq War. “I do not believe this is a rush to war. I believe it is a march to peace and security,” he said at the time. However, when it became clear that Bush would invade the country and not try to resolve tensions with diplomacy, Biden urged the administration to pursue the latter approach.

At the end of last month, Biden said during a town hall in New Hampshire that, if nominated, he would be open to choosing a Republican as his vice president.

“The answer is I would [consider a Republican], but I can’t think of one now,” he said. “There is some really decent Republicans that are out there still, but here’s the problem right now: Of the well-known ones, they’ve got to step up.”

In an interview with New York magazine in early January, Ocasio-Cortez pointed to her strong political differences with the former vice president. “In any other country, Joe Biden and I would not be in the same party, but in America we are,” she said .

American Veterans who risked their lives in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars are increasingly opposing foreign interventionism that continues to dominate the Washington, DC, political establishment.

The latest Pew Research Center survey on the issue finds that 64 percent of Veterans say the Iraq War is “not worth fighting,” along with 62 percent of all American adults who agree. Only 33 percent of Veterans say the Iraq War is worth fighting.

Likewise, nearly 60 percent of Veterans and all American adults say the Afghanistan War was not worth the fight. Less than 40 percent say the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan was worth fighting.

(Pew Research Center)

In interviews with the New York Times , Veterans explained their support for President Trump’s effort to end what he has dubbed the “endless wars” across the Middle East which has cost hundreds of thousands of lives.

“All in all, it is a lot of wasted lives and money and time and effort spent to accomplish a goal we never accomplished,” said 31-year-old Tyler Wade, who received a Purple Heart for his service in Afghanistan, told the Times .

Veteran Dan Caldwell said American men and women signed up to defend their homeland against terrorists, not to nation-build whole countries and remain until stability in the region is regained.

“For conservative-leaning veterans, we signed up to defend our country,” Caldwell said. “We didn’t sign up to build girls schools in the Al Anbar Province. We had friends killed or wounded in action; it wasn’t clear for what.”

Veteran Amber Smith, 37-years-old — who served in Afghanistan and Iraq between 2005 and 2008 — said the minority of Veterans in Congress who continue to support U.S. military intervention in foreign countries do so at the expense of their brothers and sisters in the uniform.

“We gave it nearly two decades, thousands of U.S. lives and hundreds of billions of dollars, and we have learned at this point there is no military solution to the conflict in Afghanistan,” Smith told the Times . “There are a few veterans in Congress who are very pro-military-involvement in the Middle East. Well, they already fought that fight. They are not going back. As we have seen, when Trump talks about reducing troops, everyone in D.C. becomes unhinged. Unfortunately, the U.S. service members pay the consequences for that.”

Even when it comes to the U.S. intervention in Syria, Veterans by a majority oppose the effort. The Pew Research Center survey found that 55 percent of Veterans said U.S. involvement in Syria is “not worth it” while almost 60 percent of American adults agreed.

(Pew Research Center)

Former President George W. Bush led the U.S. into war in Afghanistan and Iraq with more than 4,500 Americans dying in Iraq — including more than 3,500 killed in combat — and up to 205,000 Iraqi citizens dying in the war since March 2003.

In total, Bush’s post-9/11 wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and intervention in Pakistan have resulted in the deaths of between 480,000 and 507,000 people — including nearly 7,000 American soldiers who had deployed to the regions.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder .