Hawk Democrat Joe Biden's Pre-2010 Record On Foreign Policy Issues Revisited

Most U.S. peace movement and anti-imperialist/anti-war left movement supporters in the United States opposed the Democratic Clinton administration's decision to militarily attack people in Serbia in 1999 and the Republican Bush II-Cheney administration's decision to militarily attack and occupy Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003.

Yet former U.S. Vice-President and 2020 candidate for the Democratic Party's 2020 presidential nomination, Multi-Millionaire Joe Biden, supported the decision of the U.S. power elite's government officials to use its Pentagon war machine to attack Serbia in 1999, to attack Afghanistan in 2001 and to attack and occupy Iraq in 2003, when he was a U.S. Senator.

As Jules Witcover recalled in his 2010-published Joe Biden: A Life of Trial and Redemption book:

"With [Bill] Clinton assuming the presidency in early 1993, Biden...called for NATO air strikes on Serb positions...Biden joined his Delaware Republican colleague, Senator William Roth, in calling on NATO to bomb the Serbian heavy artillery...To Biden's chagrin, Milosevic remained Yugoslavia's...leader...In March 1999 Biden introduced a resolution in the Senate authorizing Clinton to take action...and with Clinton's approval NATO air strikes began. At one point Clinton told Biden he was considering halting the bombing, but Biden urged him otherwise...Biden continued to make trips to the Balkans, insisting that Milosevic be seized and turned over...for trial as the war criminal Biden had proclaimed him to be...

"...The Foreign Relations Committee [Joe Biden] moved quickly to demonstrate his solidarity with Bush administration in its response to...9/11. In October [2001] he [Biden] called Secretary of State [Colin] Powell before the committee and lauded him and the president...In early January [2002] he flew to the war zone...On leaving Kabul, Biden...emphasized that in his view U.S. participation in a multinational military force was essential to restore order against the Taliban, not simply as a peacekeeper but `with orders to shoot to kill. Absent that,' he said, `I don't see any hope for this country.'...

"...Biden held full Foreign Relations Committee hearings on July 31 [2002] and August 1 [2002]...Biden, in opening the hearings, seemed to accept the idea that the Iraqi dictator had the fearful weapons [of mass destruction]...Biden said, `These weapons must be dislodged from Saddam Hussein, or Saddam Hussein must be dislodged from power.'...

"...House Democratic Leader Dick Gephardt persuaded his Senate counterpart, Tom Daschle, to urge fellow Democrats to vote for the Bush use-of-force resolution in October [2002], providing a congressional green light for the eventual invasion of Iraq...On October 10, 2002, the Bush war resolution passed the House, 296-133, and the next day the Senate, 77-23, with Biden voting for it...Biden then joined Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, the party's eventual 2004 presidential nominee, and Senator Hillary Clinton of New York...in voting for the Bush resolution on the same dubious grounds...Biden resisted the notion, raised in the fall [of 2005] by Representative John Murtha of Pennsylvania, for an immediate drawdown of American forces in Iraq. In a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, Biden said...`the hard truth is that our large military presence in Iraq is necessary.'...When liberal Democrats in Congress in 2007 sought to cut off funding for the war...Biden refused to use denial of funding as a tool to end the war..."

And as a U.S. Vice-President between 2009 and 2017, "Biden's recommendation...was a key ingredient in Obama's initial decision in his first few weeks as president to send 21,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan [in 2009]...," according to the same book.

Despite his pre-2010 record of pushing for and/or supporting morally wrong and militaristic White House foreign policy decisions prior to 2010 that violated the UN Charter, international law and the Nuremberg Accords, the 77-year-old Hawk Democrat Biden apparently still believes he's morally qualified to try to continue to position himself to become president of the United States on January 20, 2021. Yet, ironically, as Jules Witcover observed in his 2020 Joe Biden: A Life of Trial and Redemption book:

"According to an interview with Newsweek...Biden...told Obama [in 2008], `The good news is that, I'm 65 and you're not going to have to worry about my positioning myself to be president...'"

Perhaps the now multi-millionaire former U.S. president Obama-- whose Hawk Democratic administration initially escalated U.S. military intervention in Afghanistan, continued to militarily occupy Iraq, waged drone war in Pakistan, waged war for regime change in Libya and initiated a covert war for regime change in Syria between 2009 and 2017--might not be worrying about Biden now attempting to position himself "to be president" in 2021?

But, given Joe Biden's pre-2010 record on foreign policy issues, U.S. peace movement and anti-war/anti-imperialist left activists should, perhaps, be worrying now about what kind of foreign policy decisions Hawk Democrat Biden will make if he moves into the White House oval office on January 20, 2021?

Multi-Millionaire Joe Biden's Pre-2010 Political Record Revisited

As Jules Witcover recalled in his 2010-published book, Joe Biden: A Life of Trial and Redemption, the former U.S. Democratic Vice-President and current 2020 Multi-Millionaire candidate for the Democratic Party's 2020 presidential nomination, Joe Biden, was "elected to the New Castle County Council" in Delaware "at the age of 27 and to the U.S. Senate at 29" after the then "young Joe tap-danced through an elite...prep school, the University of Delaware, and the Syracuse Law School."

But, according to the same book, as late as 1972 "Biden told a Young Democrats' Convention in Dover...that he was against legalization of marijuana and...against granting amnesty to anyone who fled the country to avoid" the Vietnam Era "draft;" and that "he flatly opposed school busing to combat segregation."

So, not surprisingly, after Biden "became the first senator to endorse" Trilateral Commission member Jimmy Carter's presidential candidacy "and agreed to chair" Carter's "national campaign steering committee" in March 1976, Biden "joined Bill Roth, his senior Delaware Republican colleague, in sponsoring a bill to bar an federal court from ordering busing;" and "veteran NAACP leader Clarence Mitchell accused Biden and Roth of being motivated by `racism...deep in the state of Delaware," according to the Joe Biden: A Life of Trial and Redemption book.

During the 1980's, Biden became a member of the Corporate Democrats' Democratic Leadership Council that Multi-Millionaire Bill Clinton was also a member of during the 1980's; and in the 1990's and early 21st-century Biden apparently began representing the special corporate interests of the U.S. banking industry as a U.S. Senator. As Jules Witcover recalled in his Joe Biden: A Life of Trial and Redemption book:

"David Bakerian, president and CEO of the Delaware Bankers Association, said Biden was cooperative in the repeal of a Depression-era antitrust law that had built a `firewall' between the banking industry and businesses designed to inhibit ownership of banks by large corporations..."

According to the same book, "in 2006 Bank of America acquired MBNA [Maryland Bankers National Association] and became Delaware's top private employer;" and "after the 1996 election, records at the Federal Election Commission indicated that MBNA executives and employees had given Biden $62,850 [equal to over $105,000 in 2020], the largest bloc of contributions from any source, under another fund-raising approach known as bundling."

Coincidentally, the Joe Biden: A Life of Trial and Redemption book also noted in 2010:

"In 2008 the New York Times reported that in 2003 Biden's younger son, Hunter, after graduating from law school was hired by MBNA `as a management consultant and' MBNA `quickly promoted him to executive vice president.' Thereafter, the Times said, he became a partner in a Washington lobbying firm with an annual retainer of $100,000 `to advise it on the Internet and privacy issues,' and in June 2008 Senator Biden paid his son's law firm $143,000 [equal to over $174,000 in 2020] for `legal services.'...

"The New York Times meanwhile reported that Hunter Biden had received consulting fees from MBNA from 2001 to 2005 at a time when his father was working for passage of a bankruptcy protection bill sought by the credit card industry. The story said Biden voted four times for the bill before it finally cleared the Senate in 2005. It also said Biden was one of only 5 Democrats who voted against requiring credit card companies to give better warnings about the consequences to consumers of paying only minimum required monthly payments..."

And in the early 21st-century, 2020 Democratic Party presidential primaries candidate Biden, himself, also recalled that "every current law on the books in America today regarding illicit drugs, drug abuse, drug sentencing, the courts--I wrote it, as chairman of the [U.S. Senate] Judiciary Committee, as a member of 30 years."

Yet most people in the United States in 2020 now realize that what helped create a system of mass incarceration of African-Americans and poor whites in the USA in the 21st-century were the "current law on the books in America today regarding illicit drugs, drug abuse, drug sentencing, the courts" that Biden apparently "wrote."