'Bravo… Now Do the Iraq War': After Hyde Reversal, 2020 Candidate Seth Moulton Reminds Biden of Other Position He May Want to Retract

WORLDVOGUENEWS September 13, 2020

After 2020 presidential candidate Joe Biden bowed to pressure and announced he no longer supports the anti-choice Hyde Amendment, Rep. Seth Moulton on Friday applauded Biden for reversing his position and said he should do the same for the Iraq invasion he voted for as a senator in 2002.

“Bravo to Joe Biden for doing the right thing and reversing his longstanding support for the Hyde Amendment,” tweeted Moulton, who is also a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate. “It takes courage to admit when you’re wrong, especially when those decisions affect millions of people.”

“Now do the Iraq War,” added Moulton, an Iraq War veteran.

Moulton’s tweet on Friday was not the first time he has criticized Biden for supporting the invasion of Iraq.

“It was a mistake,” Moulton said of Biden’s vote in an interview on CNN earlier this month. “Because we should’ve been a lot more careful about going into Iraq. We should have questioned the intelligence. We should have made sure that we exhausted every opportunity before we put young American lives in danger.”

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Biden’s vote in favor of the invasion of Iraq is one of his many past positions that, according to critics, show he is out of touch with the current direction of the Democratic Party.

“Joe Biden stands in near complete opposition to where the center of energy is in the Democratic Party today,” progressive advocacy group Justice Democrats said after Biden announced his candidacy in April. “We don’t need someone who voted for the Iraq War, for mass incarceration, and for the Bankruptcy Reform Act while voting against gay marriage, reproductive rights, and school desegregation.”

Biden is the only 2020 Democratic presidential candidate who voted for the Iraq invasion. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)—the only other presidential contender who was in Congress during the build-up to the invasion—voted no as a member of the House.

“Joe voted for the war in Iraq,” Sanders told ABC last month, highlighting the contrasts between himself and the former vice president. “I led the effort against it.”

As Norman Solomon wrote for Common Dreams in March, the problem “wasn’t just that Biden voted for the Iraq war on the Senate floor five months before it began.”

“During the lead-up to that vote, in August 2002, as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee,” Solomon wrote, “he presided over sham hearings—refusing to allow experts who opposed an invasion to get any words in edgewise—while a cavalcade of war hawks testified in the national spotlight.”

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