Washington (AFP) – Joe Biden, who announces the departure of American troops from Afghanistan on Wednesday, likes to present himself as an opponent of America’s “endless wars”, also haunted by his controversial vote in favor of intervention in Iraq in 2003.
The current 78-year-old President of the United States has done and remakes his mea culpa for giving, while at the head of the influential Senate Foreign Affairs Committee, the green light to the invasion of Iraq as part of Republican George W. Bush’s “war on terror”.
This nearly twenty-year-old vote remains an indelible stain on the record of a long political career. Debate after debate, his main opponent in the Democratic primary for the November presidential election, Bernie Sanders, criticized him for his choice live on television.
And, each time, the same contrite look of the septuagenarian.
“I made an error in judgment,” he admitted for example in July 2019.
But the confession remains partial, and reveals Joe Biden’s tormented relationship to his country’s wars.
To hear him, the democratic tenor was especially wrong at the time to “trust” President Bush who would have assured him that he had asked Congress for authorization to use force to exert diplomatic pressure on Saddam’s regime. Hussein. As soon as the attack was finally launched in March 2003, “I expressed my opposition”, he pleaded.
The facts are different. In the summer of 2003, several months after the outbreak of hostilities, Senator Biden was still vigorously defending his initial vote and the need to “remove Saddam from power”.
It is only later that he will change his mind, faced with the American stalemate. And that he will plead forcefully, as Barack Obama’s vice-president, in favor of the withdrawal from Iraq which ended in 2011.
“I was responsible for withdrawing 150,000 soldiers from Iraq – and my son was part of it,” he defended during the presidential campaign.
Except that in this case, the departure of American troops is today considered by most observers as another serious mistake: Iraq, plunged into chaos, was gradually nibbled by the jihadist group Islamic State, rendering inevitable a new international intervention under American command from 2014.
In fact, Joe Biden has never shown great consistency in military matters.
He voted against the first Gulf War in 1991, which is now often considered a success.
– Getting mad –
Initially favorable, on the other hand, to intervention in Afghanistan like almost the entire American political class traumatized by the attacks of September 11, 2001, he finally espoused the weariness of American opinion in the face of these interminable, costly foreign operations. and murderous.
The sending of his eldest and beloved son, Beau Biden, to Iraq during the 2000s, when he himself campaigned for the White House with Barack Obama, certainly contributed to this turnaround.
It was as the father of a soldier at war that he became vice-president. And it is in unison with thousands of families that he will defend, for eight years, great caution when it comes to engaging force abroad.
His reservations are now known about the perilous operation – crowned with success – to eliminate the leader of al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, in Pakistan in 2011.
Even better known are his rants against sending reinforcements to Afghanistan in 2009.
The new president was urged by the Pentagon to deploy thousands of additional troops to make a difference against the Taliban. Its vice-president opposed it.
Their envoy for Afghanistan, Richard Holbrooke, subsequently reported a memorable altercation.
Also convinced that the war could not be won from a military point of view, the diplomat had pleaded with Joe Biden, whom he had known for a long time, in favor of increased support for the Afghans, in particular to preserve the rights of women scorned by the Taliban.
“I am not sending my boy back there so that he risks his life in the name of women’s rights!”, The vice-president was then carried away.
Joe Biden had finally lost his fight, and Barack Obama had deployed 17,000 additional troops.
But the trend has since reversed, with a gradual reduction in American forces. Now President of the United States, Joe Biden can finally show consistency in announcing their total withdrawal by the 20th anniversary of September 11.
