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STEPHEN ZUNES, zunes at usfca.edu, @SZunes
Zunes is a professor of politics and coordinator of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of San Francisco. He just wrote the piece “There’s No Evidence Iran Is Responsible for the Deaths of Hundreds of Americans” for The Progressive.

Newsweek reports that in response to criticism about his role in the invasion of Iraq, Biden said: “I don’t respond to Bernie’s ridiculous comments. … Bernie’s got enough baggage.” The Hill reports: “In response to an Iowa voter who expressed concern about Biden’s foreign policy record, the former vice president over the weekend said that he opposed the Iraq War ‘from the very moment’ it began in 2003, according to CNN.

“’The president then went ahead with “Shock and Awe,” and right after that — and from the very moment he did that, right after that — I opposed what he was doing and spoke to him,’ Biden said of President Bush on Saturday.”

Zunes has noted: “More than three months after U.N. inspectors returned, Biden defended the imminent launch of the invasion by saying, ‘I support the president. Diplomacy over avoiding war is dead. … I do not see any alternative. It is not as if we can back away now.’ He added, ‘Let loose the dogs of war. I’m confident we will win.’

“He then co-sponsored a resolution supporting Bush and the invasion.

“Despite the fact that three months of unfettered inspections had revealed none of the chemical weapons, biological weapons, nuclear programs, or sophisticated delivery systems Bush and Biden claimed Iraq possessed, Biden insisted in May 2003 that, ‘There was sufficient evidence to go into Iraq.’” See accuracy.org news release: “Biden’s Escalating Iraq War Lies.”

REESE ERLICH, ReeseErlich2 at hotmail.com, @ReeseErlich
Erlich is author of Iran Agenda: The Real Story of U.S. Policy and the Middle East Crisis and is interviewing sources in Iran to get first-hand reactions to the assassination.

See recent interview with him: “What’s really going on with the US and Iran?” In response to the question: “Does Iran pose a danger to U.S. national interests?” Erlich responded: “Iran’s government is a right-wing, religious-based regime that represses its own people. It seeks regional influence, mainly in countries with large Shia populations such as Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen and Bahrain, but also Syria. Washington cares little about human rights violations in Iran or anywhere else. It wants to reestablish a pro-U.S. regime in Iran that will allow U.S. oil companies to once again dominate the economy. The people of the U.S. have no national interest in protecting oil company profits. Recent events have shown that people in the region don’t want to be dominated by any foreign power, whether the U.S. or Iran.”

STEPHEN ZUNES, zunes@usfca.edu
Professor of politics at the University of San Francisco, Zunes wrote the piece “The U.S. Hypocrisy on Ukraine.” Regarding the U.S. government’s recent condemnation of Putin’s annexation of Ukrainian territory, Zunes notes that the U.S. government is the “only government to recognize Israel’s illegal annexation of the Syrian Golan Heights and Morocco’s illegal annexation of Western Sahara.”

His latest piece — “As Iraq War Vote Anniversary Nears, Don’t Forget Who Was Responsible” — notes that Biden and other prominent Democrats voted to authorize the invasion of Iraq in October 2002 — and have lied about their records.

On Oct. 7, 2002 just ahead of the Congressional vote, Bush put forward the case for war in a speech in Cincinnati, which IPA immediately critiqued in detail, citing Zunes and other analysts.

The Bush administration had begun the push for invasion one year after 9/11. See video clips of Dick Cheney and Bush making numerous false and deceptive statements.

Biden in his speech for war 20 years ago claimed Saddam Hussein “possesses chemical and biological weapons” and “is seeking nuclear weapons” and “for years he has prevented the UN inspectors from uncovering those weapons.”

Biden has claimed: “From the moment ‘shock and awe’ started, from that moment, I was opposed to the effort.”

But Zunes notes: “Biden defended the imminent launch of the invasion by saying, ‘I support the president. Diplomacy over avoiding war is dead. … I do not see any alternative. It is not as if we can back away now.’ He added, ‘Let loose the dogs of war. I’m confident we will win.’

“Soon after the launch of the invasion, despite the fact that four months of unfettered inspections had revealed none of the chemical weapons, biological weapons, nuclear programs or sophisticated delivery systems he claimed Iraq possessed, Biden insisted that ‘there was sufficient evidence to go into Iraq.'”

The invasion of Iraq began 17 years ago from Thursday.

As the nation and the world face the coronavirus pandemic, Stephen Zunes is among several prominent analysts featured in a recently-released mini-documentary narrated by Danny Glover, “WORTH THE PRICE? Joe Biden and the Launch of the Iraq War” about the crisis of the Iraq war and Biden’s pivotal role in backing the invasion with disastrous results.

At the Sunday night CNN debate, Biden again falsified his support of the war: “I learned I can’t take the word of a president when in fact they assured me that they would not use force. Remember the context, the context was the United Nations Security Council was going to vote to insist that we allow inspectors in to determine whether or not they were in fact producing nuclear weapons or weapons of mass destruction. They were not.”

STEPHEN ZUNES,  zunes at usfca.edu, @SZunes
Zunes is a professor of politics and coordinator of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of San Francisco.

He just wrote the piece “Would Joe Biden, Like Hillary Clinton, Lose to Donald Trump Over the Iraq War?”

Zunes said today regarding Biden’s claims at the debate: “Bernie Sanders correctly observed that everyone knew at the time that this was a vote for war. The bill’s title, ‘Authorization for the Use of Force’ was just that: an authorization for President Bush to invade Iraq. There were no conditions regarding the return of inspectors or anything else. Furthermore, at the time of the vote, the Iraqi government had already agreed unconditionally to the return of the weapons inspectors and it was already clear that the UN Security Council was going to rigorously enforce their resolution regarding Iraqi compliance with the inspections regime regardless of what the Senate did. Finally, Biden at the time never said anything about finding out whether Iraq had chemical weapons, biological weapons, and a nuclear weapons program. As he had been doing even prior to the Bush administration, he was insisting categorically that they did.”

Biden made a series of false assertions on Iraq during an interview with MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell on Monday night.

Biden claimed: “I didn’t believe he had those nuclear weapons, I didn’t believe he had those weapons of mass destruction” as MSNBC’s O’Donnell nodded approvingly. But in his floor speech for war in October 2002, Biden claimed Saddam Hussein “possesses chemical and biological weapons” and “is seeking nuclear weapons” and “for years he has prevented the UN inspectors from uncovering those weapons.”

Two U.S. soldiers were just killed in Iraq. See video of a veteran recently confronting Biden.

STEPHEN ZUNES, zunes at usfca.edu, @SZunes
Professor of politics and coordinator of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of San Francisco, Zunes said today: “As chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2002, Biden stated that Saddam Hussein had a sizable arsenal of chemical weapons as well as biological weapons, including anthrax, and that ‘he may have a strain’ of smallpox, despite UN inspectors reporting that Iraq no longer appeared to have any weaponized chemical or biological agents. And even though the International Atomic Energy Agency had reported as far back as 1997 that there was no evidence whatsoever that Iraq had any ongoing nuclear program, Biden insisted that Saddam was ‘seeking nuclear weapons.’

“After refusing to allow former chief weapons inspector Scott Ritter to testify before his committee that Iraq had achieved at least qualitative disarmament, Biden defended his false claims about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction on ‘Meet the Press‘ in 2007, by insisting that ‘everyone in the world thought he had them. The weapons inspectors said he had them.'”

SAM HUSSEINI, cell: samhusseini at gmail.com, @samhusseini
Senior analyst with the Institute for Public Accuracy, Husseini said today: “Biden has been lying about Iraq for years, at times brazenly. When the Iraqis honestly were saying in 2002 that didn’t have WMDs, Biden said Saddam Hussein was lying. When he was asked about his record in 2007, Biden replied: ‘The real mystery is, if he [Hussein], if he didn’t have any of them left, why didn’t he say so?’ And Tim Russert let him get away with that then. Instead of scrutinizing claims, major media have continuously both pushed lies about the Iraq war and enabled politicians who did so. And the lies never really stopped. Unlike Trump who just repeats the same brain dead lie over and over, many of the Iraq war lies morphed and became more sophisticated.

“On Monday, Biden claimed that he voted for the war authorization ‘to try to prevent a war from happening’ to get the UN Security Council to approve inspectors. But the congressional vote happened on October 11 — well after Iraq had agreed to the UN’s demand that the inspectors be allowed back in. (See Sept. 16, 2002 New York Times report: “UN Inspectors Can Return Unconditionally, Iraq Says.” This was immediately after a delegation organized by the Institute for Public Accuracy had gone to Iraq.)

“And Biden posing last night as though he was a statesman by asking for a second UN resolution on Iraq before the invasion (as with this falsehood-laden Washington Post oped published exactly 17 years ago today) is completely disingenuous. In early March, British intelligence analyst Katharine Gun had exposed that the U.S. and Britain were illegally spying on the UN in order to coerce other members to vote for war. This was widely ignored in the U.S. media, but caused many UN Security Council members to resist a second forced resolution. So Biden asking for a second resolution but still backing invasion, as he did, is completely dishonest.” (See piece for FAIR on the Katharine Gun case: “Film ‘Official Secrets’ Is Tip of Mammoth Iceberg.”)

“As for Biden’s claim that Hussein ‘for years [Hussein] has prevented the UN inspectors from uncovering those weapons,’ the fact is that the 90s inspection regime, UNSCOM, ended in 1998 not because of Iraqi action as was constantly claimed by the establishment, but because Bill Clinton withdrew the inspectors to launch the Desert Fox bombing campaign just before his scheduled impeachment vote. Withdrawing the later inspections regime, UNMOVIC, was also be how Bush launched the 2003 invasion.”

Husseini’s recent pieces include “It Is Remarkable — and Dangerous — How Little Scrutiny Biden Has Received for Supporting Iraq War.” See related accuracy.org news release, including “Kerry Covers up Iraq War Falsifications” about when he appeared on Chris Hayes’ show.

Zunes is among several prominent analysts featured in a just-released mini-doc narrated by Danny Glover, “WORTH THE PRICE? Joe Biden and the Launch of the Iraq War” and produced by Mark Weisbrot.

STEPHEN ZUNES, zunes at usfca.edu, @SZunes

Zunes is a professor of politics and coordinator of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of San Francisco. He is among several prominent analysts featured in a recently-released mini-documentary narrated by Danny Glover, “WORTH THE PRICE? Joe Biden and the Launch of the Iraq War,” and produced by Mark Weisbrot.

Biden has continued making misleading claims at many of the debates so far with minimal scrutiny. On ABC last month, Biden claimed “I trusted George Bush to keep his word. He said he was not going to go into Iraq. He said he was only using this to unite the United Nations to insist we get inspectors in to see what Saddam was doing.”

Zunes debunked this false narrative, which Biden has repeated over and over, in a piece last year, “Biden Is Doubling Down on Iraq War Lies.” Well after the invasion, Biden continued supporting Bush: “Nine months ago, I voted with my colleagues to give the president of the United States of America the authority to use force, and I would vote that way again today,” Biden said at the Brookings Institution on July 31, 2003. “It was a right vote then, and it’ll be a correct vote today.”

Zunes wrote: “Biden had been calling for a U.S. invasion of Iraq since 1998, pushed the war authorization through the Democratic-controlled Senate, and abused his role as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to suppress testimony by scholars, former U.N. inspectors, and other knowledgeable authorities opposed to the war. However, it is his support for the invasion long after it became evident that Iraq was not actually a threat to its neighbors — much less the United States — which raises the question as to whether his motivation was not in fact about national security as he claimed, but about oil and empire.

“Indeed, after the U.S. conquest, he began pushing the dangerous and destabilizing divide-and-rule strategy of splitting Iraq into three countries along ethnic and sectarian lines.”

Zunes said today: “Democratic presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg, the former Republican mayor of New York, was a staunch supporter of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. As recently as last month, Bloomberg stated that he has no regrets over supporting the illegal conquest. Though he acknowledges that it was a ‘mistake,’ he insists that Bush, Cheney and others who pushed the country to war based on false claims that Iraq possessed dangerous weapons, weapons programs, and weapons systems ‘did it honestly.’ In the aftermath of the invasion when no such weapons were found, Bloomberg then tried to justify it by making the bizarre claim that the secular Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein was involved in the 9/11 attacks by the Islamist Al-Qaeda network. As the war dragged on four years after the invasion and Congressional Democrats proposed legislation to set up timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. forces, he blasted the proposed legislation as irresponsible and ‘untenable.’ Like Biden, Bloomberg is a dangerous militarist who as president could very well get the United States involved in other illegal, unnecessary, and disastrous wars.”

For more: Sam Husseini, senior analyst with accuracy.org on the podcast “Intercepted”: “Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, and the Rewriting of Iraq War History” with journalist Jeremy Scahill. Also see Husseini’s piece from January on Salon: “Joe Biden won’t tell the truth about his Iraq war record — and he hasn’t for years” and relevant past accuracy.org news releases.

STEPHEN ZUNES, zunes at usfca.edu, @SZunes
Zunes is a professor of politics and coordinator of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of San Francisco. He is among several prominent analysts featured in a just-released mini-doc narrated by Danny Glover, “WORTH THE PRICE? Joe Biden and the Launch of the Iraq War” and produced by Mark Weisbrot. The documentary traces the central role that Biden — who was then chair of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee — played in ensuring the Iraq invasion was executed in 2003. 

Biden has continued making misleading claims at many of the debates so far with minimal scrutiny. On ABC earlier this month, Biden claimed “I trusted George Bush to keep his word. He said he was not going to go into Iraq. He said he was only using this to unite the United Nations to insist we get inspectors in to see what Saddam was doing.”

Zunes debunked this false narrative, which Biden has repeated over and over, in a piece last year, “Biden Is Doubling Down on Iraq War Lies,” in which he notes: “More than three months after U.N. inspectors returned, Biden defended the imminent launch of the invasion by saying, ‘I support the president. Diplomacy over avoiding war is dead. … I do not see any alternative. It is not as if we can back away now.” He added, ‘Let loose the dogs of war. I’m confident we will win.’ He then co-sponsored a resolution supporting Bush and the invasion.’

For more: Sam Husseini, senior analyst with accuracy.org on Intercepted: “Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, and the Rewriting of Iraq War History” with journalist Jeremy Scahill. Also see Husseini’s piece from last month on Salon: “Joe Biden won’t tell the truth about his Iraq war record — and he hasn’t for years” and relevant past accuracy.org news releases.

Zunes said today: “Democratic presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg, the former Republican mayor of New York, was a staunch supporter of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. As recently as last month, Bloomberg stated that he has no regrets over supporting the illegal conquest. Though he acknowledges that it was a ‘mistake,’ he insists that Bush, Cheney and others who pushed the country to war based on false claims that Iraq possessed dangerous weapons, weapons programs, and weapons systems ‘did it honestly.’ In the aftermath of the invasion when no such weapons were found, Bloomberg then tried to justify it by making the bizarre claim that the secular Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein was involved in the 9/11 attacks by the Islamist Al-Qaeda network. As the war dragged on four years after the invasion and Congressional Democrats proposed legislation to set up timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. forces, he blasted the proposed legislation as irresponsible and ‘untenable.’ Like Biden, Bloomberg is a dangerous militarist who as president could very well get the United States involved in other illegal, unnecessary, and disastrous wars.”

CNN and the DNC are holding a debate this evening.

JULIE HOLLAR, jhollar at fair.org, @FAIRmediawatch
Hollar is senior analyst for FAIR’s Election Focus 2020 project. She just wrote the piece: “Steady Hand Joe: Turning Biden’s support for Iraq War into foreign policy ‘experience.'”

She writes: “If journalists were consistently calling out Biden’s Iraq War lies — not to mention reminding viewers and readers that the war cost hundreds of thousands of human lives, aside from a financial cost in the trillions of dollars — their worn-out tropes about Biden’s foreign policy ‘steadiness’ would be incredibly difficult to sustain.” See from FAIR: “Iraq and the Media: A Critical Timeline.”

SAM HUSSEINI, samhusseini at gmail.com, @samhusseini
Senior analyst with the Institute for Public Accuracy, Husseini wrote the piece “With this week’s debate, Joe Biden is now pushing his Iraq war falsehoods to the max,” which was published by Salon in September.

Husseini said today: “While Biden and his surrogates like John Kerry continue to falsely claim that he was not for the Iraq invasion, the Sanders camp has rightly highlighted more documentation, including video, of his support for the Iraq invasion after it happened, like his statement about Bush at the Brookings Institution in July 2003: ‘The president of the United States is a bold leader and he is popular.’

“But it’s the tip of the iceberg. That address to Brookings (video) itself contains brazen pro-war falsehoods, with Biden claiming that Saddam Hussein ‘violated every commitment that he made. He played cat and mouse with the weapons inspectors. He failed to account for the huge gaps in weapons declarations that were documented by UN weapons inspectors and submitted by them to the UN Security Council in 1998, and every nation in that Council believed he possessed those weapons at that time. He refused to abide by any conditions.’

“It’s a pack of lies. The Iraqi government released a massive amount of information in 2002, it agreed to allow the UN weapons inspectors in well before the Congressional vote that authorized war — a vote that Biden has claimed was justifiable to give Bush a stronger hand in getting inspectors into Iraq. Additionally, the prior weapons inspection regime, UNSCOM, was ended in 1998 not because Saddam Hussein kicked them out, but because Bill Clinton ordered them withdrawn on the eve of his scheduled impeachment vote to make way for the Desert Fox bombing campaign.

“It’s remarkably fitting that the Biden camp has put out Kerry on this issue since Kerry’s falsifications regarding Iraq are remarkably similar to Biden’s. Kerry might be the Democratic senator whose record helped the Iraq war as much as Biden’s. This notably led to his contortions in the 2004 election when he was the Democratic Party nominee and lost to George W. Bush.

“When I questioned Kerry in 2011 about his vote for the Iraq invasion, he claimed that ‘I didn’t vote for the Iraq war. I voted to give the president authority that he misused and abused. And from the moment he used it, I opposed that.’ Another lie. Kerry actually attacked the notion of a withdrawal from Iraq at that point, even saying in December of 2003: ‘I fear that in the run-up to the 2004 election the administration is considering what is tantamount to a cut-and-run strategy,’ effectively taking position even more militaristic that Bush.” Also see from August 2004 from CNN: “Kerry stands by ‘yes’ vote on Iraq war.”

Husseini added: “It’s remarkable how little scrutiny Biden has gotten for his role in the Iraq invasion. Sanders has mostly criticized Biden’s vote, but Biden was chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and has been criticized by leading analysts and weapons inspectors for the hearings he presided over that led to war. Tulsi Gabbard, viewed by many as an antiwar candidate, has outright let Biden off the hook. At a debate last year, Gabbard said of Biden: ‘He was wrong — he said he was wrong.’ Thus, Biden may be positioned to become the Democratic nominee — and face Trump in the general election — with minimal scrutiny for his major role in the worst policy decision of our lifetimes. He’s also in a worse position to take on Trump’s phony ‘America First’ isolationism than Hillary Clinton was in 2016.”

See interview with Husseini: “The Entire U.S. Establishment Helped Lie Their Way into the Iraq War.” And for FAIR: “Film Official Secrets Is Tip of Mammoth Iceberg.”

CommonDreams reports: “#JoeVotedForTheWar Trends After Sanders Camp Fires Back at Biden’s Denials of Support for Iraq Invasion.” Julie Hollar recently wrote for FAIR: “Steady Hand Joe: Turning Biden’s support for Iraq War into foreign policy ‘experience.’” Former Sen. John Kerry has been outspoken in his defense of Biden’s Iraq invasion record. See “Kerry’s Endorsement of Biden Fits: Two Deceptive Supporters of the Iraq War” by IPA executive director Norman Solomon.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting: “U.S. Warns Iraq It Risks Losing Access to Key Bank Account if Troops Told to Leave.”

Jim Lobe and Derek Davison write in Responsible Statecraft: “Has the Trump Administration Now Launched a ‘Maximum Pressure’ Campaign Against Iraq?” Asking: “In the last three years, Trump has increasingly aligned Washington’s Middle East policies with Netanyahu. He’s slashed aid to the Palestinians, moved the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, and recognized Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights. He’s withdrawn from and systematically violated the nuclear deal with Iran (JCPOA [Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action] ), declared the IRGC [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] a terrorist organization, assassinated Soleimani, and pursued his ‘maximum pressure’ campaign against Iran. Do his latest moves to bully and threaten (possibly with support for partition) Iraq constitute a new ‘maximum pressure’ campaign and an even greater alignment with the Israeli Right?”

The prior champion of partitioning Iraq was Biden; see from the July 30, 2007 New York Times: “Biden plan for ‘soft partition’ of Iraq gains momentum.”

IMAD KHADDURI, khadduri.imad at gmail.com
Now retired in Toronto, Khadduri is author of the book Iraq’s Nuclear Mirage: Memoirs and Delusions and blogs at Free Iraq. He worked on the Iraq nuclear program and left the country in the late 1990s. See a piece in the Irish Times from Jan 6, 2003 on him: “Iraq has no N-weapons, claims expatriate scientist.”

In 2006, he appeared on an accuracy.org news release: “Myth: Israel’s Strike on Iraqi Reactor Hindered Iraqi Nukes.” Khadduri states that the Iraqi nuclear program was peaceful — until Israel bombed their Osirak Iraqi reactor in 1981.

RAED JARRAR, jarrar.raed at gmail.com, @raedjarrar
Jarrar is an Iraqi-born human rights activist and writer based in Washington, D.C. He just wrote the piece “Iraq’s Vote to Kick Out U.S. Troops Reflects Growing Anti-Imperialist Movement.”

He was recently quoted by USA Today: “The U.S. and Iran are seen by the majority of Iraqis as partners in crime when it comes to supporting these sectarian militias,” Jarrar said. “The right move is to de-escalate, withdraw all U.S. troops from Iraq, and end U.S. military aid to the Iraqi government and its deadly sectarian militias.”

John Kerry is now actively campaigning for Joe Biden, touting his experience and ability to get things done. The two were the most notable Democratic backers of the Iraq invasion resolution in 2002, with Biden chairing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee during the buildup to war.

STEPHEN ZUNES, zunes at usfca.edu, @SZunes
Zunes is a professor of politics and coordinator of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of San Francisco. In August, he wrote the piece “Biden Is Doubling Down on Iraq War Lies.”

Zunes said today: “Kerry [video] and Biden [video] were among the right-wing minority of Congressional Democrats who sided with Bush and Cheney over the Iraq War, rejecting pleas from Middle East scholars, State Department veterans, peace and human rights advocates and others who warned them that invading that oil-rich county was illegal, unnecessary, and would be utterly disastrous. Both men falsely claimed that Iraq had reconstituted illegal weapons, weapons programs, and weapons systems despite former UN inspectors and arms control experts informing them otherwise. And, despite claims to the contrary, both men strongly supported Bush’s decision to invade the country even after UN inspectors returned and no proscribed material was found. Kerry appears determined, as he did in endorsing Hillary Clinton against Bernie Sanders four years ago, to prevent the Democratic Party from having an anti-war nominee. Indeed, Biden is the only one of the twenty-odd candidates who actively supported the invasion. Kerry’s pro-war stance so alienated his anti-war Democratic base that it cost him a close election he otherwise would have won. Nominating Biden would likely have the same result.”

See recent piece by Norman Solomon, executive director of IPA: “Kerry’s Endorsement of Biden Fits: Two Deceptive Supporters of the Iraq War.”

Zunes wrote a piece on Kerry in 2013, noting: “To justify his claims of an Iraqi nuclear threat, Senator Kerry claimed that ‘all U.S. intelligence experts agree that Iraq is seeking nuclear weapons.’ The reality, of course, was that much of the U.S. intelligence community was highly skeptical of claims that Iraq was attempting to acquire nuclear materials, and this fact was widely circulated in academic journals, the mainstream media, and in intelligence reports.”

In an accuracy.org news release from 2013 titled “Kerry Covers up Iraq War Falsifications,” Sam Husseini of IPA noted: “When I questioned Kerry in 2011 about voting to authorize the Iraq war, he said: ‘I didn’t vote for the Iraq war. I voted to give the president authority that he misused and abused. And from the moment he used it, I opposed that.’ [see video at 2:30] However, a look at the record shows that after the Iraq invasion, Kerry did the opposite, outflanking Bush’s war stance in 2003: ‘I fear that in the run-up to the 2004 election the administration is considering what is tantamount to a cut-and-run strategy.’”

Zunes notes that just after Bush launched the Iraq invasion, “Senator Kerry praised him, co-sponsoring a Senate resolution declaring that the invasion was ‘lawful and fully authorized by the Congress’ and that he ‘commends and supports the efforts and leadership of the President.'” See from CNN in 2004: “Kerry stands by ‘yes’ vote on Iraq war.”

Presidential candidate Joe Biden is now claiming about the 2003 Iraq invasion: “Yes, I did oppose the war before it began.”

Biden has been claiming: “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.”

That claim was made by Biden in the second DNC debate and received virtually no scrutiny except for the piece by Mideast scholar Stephen Zunes, “Biden Is Doubling Down on Iraq War Lies.”

Biden repeated the claim recently on NPR and did receive some scrutiny. The Biden camp claimed he “misspoke” — but then reiterated the central claim, that Biden “was immediately clear in his opposition to how we got into the conflict” — an explanation the Washington Post accepted.

Now, independent journalist Michael Tracey, who interviewed Biden in New Hampshire recently, reports that Biden is now claiming that he opposed the invasion of Iraq even before it started; see his piece and video, which contains audio of Biden’s most recent remarks.

Of course, Biden voted for the war authorization bill in October 2002 and, as  Zunes has amply documented, stood by that vote after the invasion started.

Tracey also writes: “When I reminded Biden that if he opposed the war all along, he could have joined 23 of his Senate colleagues in voting against authorizing it, he replied: ‘No, no, because they argued against authorizing the ability to get the United Nations to go back in with inspectors. We needed the Security Council to get a vote to put inspectors in to determine whether or not there was any nuclear activity going on.'”

This statement is wrong on several levels. Perhaps most obviously, in mid-September, before the congressional vote, Iraq had agreed to allow weapons inspectors back in. On Sept 16, 2002, the New York Times reported: “U.N. Inspectors Can Return Unconditionally, Iraq Says.” (This was immediately after a delegation organized by the Institute for Public Accuracy had gone to Iraq.)

Biden did initially back a bill along with Republican Sen. Richard Lugar which would have somewhat constrained Bush’s capacity to launch an invasion at his whim. But the Bush administration opposed the measure — and Biden voted for the legislation giving Bush the leeway he wanted. See Biden’s speech.

Available for interviews:

SAM HUSSEINI, sam at accuracy.org, @samhusseini
Husseini is senior analyst with the Institute for Public Accuracy and has written extensively on U.S. policy on Iraq. See his recent piece: “Film Official Secrets Is Tip of Mammoth Iceberg.”