page_title: Political positions of Joe Biden
section_title: Iraq
hierarchical_section_title: Political positions of Joe Biden / Foreign and military policy / West Asia / Iraq
caption_attribution_description: On Jan. 26-27, 2007 at Gallaudet University in Washington DC, SEIU local union leaders individually questioned eight Democratic presidential hopefuls—Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY), Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL), Sen. Joe Biden (D-DE), Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), former Sen. John Edwards (D-NC), Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT), Gov. Bill Richardson (D-NM), and former Gov. Tom Vilsack (D-IA) —about where they stand on the issues that matter most to SEIU members: affordable health care, good jobs, and retirement security.
context_page_description: Joe Biden served as Vice President of the United States from 2009 to 2017 and in the United States Senate from 1973 until 2009. A member of the Democratic Party, he made his second run for President of the United States in the 2008 presidential election, later being announced as Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama's running mate in 2008. He was elected Vice President in 2008 and reelected in 2012. In April 2019, Biden announced his 2020 presidential campaign. He became the presumptive Democratic nominee in April 2020 and will face Republican incumbent Donald Trump in the November 2020 election.
  Over his career, Biden has generally been regarded as belonging to the mainstream of the Democratic Party. Biden has been described as center-left and has described himself as such. His policies emphasize the needs of middle-class and working-class Americans and have drawn political support from those groups. Various commentators and observers have likened Biden's views and proposals to the populism of Ted Kennedy, whom Biden cites as a mentor, and to the Christian democracy of continental Europe.
context_section_description: In 1990, after Iraq under Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, Biden voted against the first Gulf War, asking: "What vital interests of the United States justify sending Americans to their deaths in the sands of Saudi Arabia?" In 1998, Biden expressed support for the use of force against Iraq and urged a sustained effort to "dethrone" Hussein over the long haul. In 2002, as Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he stated that Hussein was "a long-term threat and a short term threat to our national security" and that "We have no choice but to eliminate the threat. This is a guy who is an extreme danger to the world. He must be dislodged from his weapons or dislodged from power." Biden also supported a failed resolution authorizing military action in Iraq only after the exhaustion of diplomatic efforts. Biden subsequently voted in favor of the 2002 resolution that authorized the 2003 invasion of Iraq, saying, "I will vote for this because we should be compelling Iraq to make good on its obligations to the United Nations. Because while Iraq's illegal weapons of mass destruction program do not — do not — pose an imminent threat to our national security, in my view, they will, if left unfettered. And because a strong vote in Congress, as I said, increases the prospect for a tough, new U.N. resolution on weapons of mass destruction, it is likely to get weapons inspectors in, which, in turn, decreases the prospects of war, in my view."
  During the Iraq War, Biden consistently criticized the George W. Bush administration for "its failure to exhaust diplomatic solutions, its failure to enlist a more robust group of allies for the war effort, and the lack of a plan for reconstruction of Iraq." He criticized Bush in March and April 2003 for failing to make robust diplomatic efforts to avert war, but said at the time that it was "the right decision" to "separate him (Hussein) from his weapons and/or separate him from power." In an interview of Meet the Press in November 2005, Biden said of his 2002 vote to authorize the use of force: "It was a mistake. It was a mistake to assume the president would use the authority we gave him properly. ... We gave the president the authority to unite the world to isolate Saddam. And the fact of the matter is, we went too soon. We went without sufficient force. And we went without a plan." In 2007, Biden strongly opposed Bush's "troop surge" in Iraq, calling it a "tragic mistake." He promoted legislation to repeal and replace the 2002 resolution that authorized the war, arguing that it was no longer necessary because Hussein had been removed for power and executed, and because no weapons of mass destruction were ever found in Iraq. The replacement resolution favored by Biden would provide that U.S. troops could combat terrorism and train Iraqi forces, but begin a "responsible drawdown" of U.S. troops that would end in the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq.
  In May 2006, in an op-ed in the New York Times, Biden and Leslie H. Gelb, the president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, proposed a plan for a decentralized, federal Iraq, with a relatively weak central government with strong Sunni, Shiite, and Kurdish regional administrations that would govern largely autonomously within their own regions. Under the plan, there would not have been a partition of the country, but the central government would have its responsibilities limited to areas of common concern, such as "border defense, foreign policy, and oil production and revenue sharing." The goal of the plan was to halt the high level of sectarian violence in Iraq between Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds. Biden likened the plan to the 1995 Dayton Agreement, which led to an end to the Bosnian War.  The plan received a mixed reception. A non-binding "sense of the Senate" resolution in support of the plan, sponsored by Biden and Senator Sam Brownback (Republican of Kansas), passed the Senate in a September 2007 on a 75–23 vote. However, the proposal was opposed by Bush administration and many Iraqi political parties, including the United I
caption: Joe Biden speaking
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