Fact-Check: Joe Biden Claims Bush Tricked Him into Voting for Iraq War

In Joe Biden’s endless quest to win the Democratic presidential nomination—having failed in 1988 and 2008, he’s hoping that the third time is the charm—Biden is now saying that the only reason he voted in support of the Iraq War back in 2002 was that he trusted then-President George W. Bush. In other words, in Biden’s new telling, it’s Bush’s fault for lying to him.

As Biden said on Saturday:

The mistake I made was trusting President Bush, who gave me his word he was using it for the purpose of getting inspectors in to see what was going on, whether they were producing nuclear weapons.

It was, indeed, a big question back then, whether or not Saddam Hussein would allow inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Commission into Iraq. Much time was spent going back and forth on what sites and areas the inspectors could, or could not, inspect. And yet everyone knew that the Bush administration wanted to do invade Iraq, not only to eliminate the threat of weapons of mass destruction (there weren’t any, of course), but also as part of its larger neoconservative vision of nation-building Middle East countries into peaceable democracies (the same approach that was then being tried, without much success, in Afghanistan). . .

So again: Biden is portraying himself as not an Iraq hawk at all, but simply as someone too trusting. Such naivety might seem like a strange affect for a man who turned 60 in 2002, having already served in the Senate for five terms, including long stints on the Foreign Relations Committee. Indeed, in 2002, he was the chairman of that august committee. (Read more from “Fact-Check: Joe Biden Claims Bush Tricked Him into Voting for Iraq War” HERE)

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