Mayor Pete Buttigieg slammed former Vice President Joe Biden on Sunday over then Sen. Biden’s vote in favor of the Iraq War.
In an interview on Iowa Public Television, the 2020 presidential candidate and mayor of South Bend, Ind., called Biden’s vote for the Iraq War resolution the “worst foreign policy decision” in his lifetime.
“I certainly respect the vice president but this is an example of why years in Washington is not always the same thing as judgment,” Buttigieg said. “He supported the worst foreign policy decision made by the United States in my lifetime, which was the decision to invade Iraq.”
Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee at the time, Biden voted for the resolution that authorized President George W. Bush to attack Iraq if Saddam Hussein refused to give up weapons of mass destruction he was suspected of having.
The former vice president would later say that his vote was “bad judgment.”
Speaking to reporters after a campaign event in Knoxville, Iowa, Buttigieg could not quite bring himself to question whether Biden’s foreign policy judgment disqualified him from being president.
I asked Pete Buttigieg if Biden’s Iraq vote is disqualifying– he told me “Anybody is qualified to run if they meet the basic Constitutional threshold & then the voters get to decide, & part of what they’re going to decide on is based on our judgment.” https://t.co/6FahejBFgg pic.twitter.com/OrAzmKGpi9
— DJ Judd (@DJJudd) December 29, 2019
“I think that anybody is qualified to run if they meet the basic Constitutional threshold and then the voters get to decide, and part of what they’re going to decide on is based on our judgment — experience, sure, but also judgment,” he said.
“It’s certainly a question that reflects on foreign policy judgment at a time like this when it’s so precarious for the people of the U.S.,” Buttigieg added. “Obviously, my judgment is different when it comes to a lot of these issues.”
Buttigieg, 37, served six years as an intelligence officer in the Navy Reserves, which included a six-month deployment to Afghanistan.
As seen in the clip above, NBC News reporter Shaquille Brewster noted that the Iraq War vote is something Biden has faced before.
“This is definitely not an attack that is relatively new for Vice President Biden. Many candidates have brought up and mentioned that Vice President Biden supported the war in Iraq,” Brewster said Sunday on MSNBC Live.
“This is a point that Bernie Sanders made on the campaign trail just earlier this week when he said that President Trump would ‘eat Biden’s lunch’ on issues like the Iraq War vote, on support for a free trade deal,” he added.
Sanders made the comment during an interview with the Los Angeles Times.
“[There are] people who run the same old, same old type of campaign. And you know, Joe Biden is a personal friend of mine, so I’m not here to attack him,” Sanders told the paper. “But my God, if you’re a Donald Trump and you got Biden having voted for the war in Iraq, Biden having voted for these terrible, in my view, trade agreements, Biden having voted for the bankruptcy bill. Trump will eat his lunch.”
When told of the remark by a reporter, Biden laughed and said, “Tell him to come and I’ll give him some dessert at the White House.”
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The longest-tenured writer at BizPac Review, Tom grew up in Maryland before moving to Central Florida as a young teen. It is in the Sunshine State that he honed both his passion for politics and his writing skills.
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