War Policy Dominates Democratic Debate After Trump’s Iran Strike
Sanders Faults Biden on Iraq War Vote in Democratic Debate
(Bloomberg) -- The top Democratic presidential candidates used the final debate before the Iowa caucuses to make their case to be commander-in-chief less than two weeks after President Donald Trump took the biggest foreign-policy risk of his presidency by killing a top Iranian general.
The six contenders argued for a reduced U.S. role in the Middle East after two decades in Iraq, and also Afghanistan -- a point Pete Buttigieg brought home by remembering fellow soldiers who were too young to remember Congress’s decision to go to war in 2002.
Senator Bernie Sanders went after former Vice President Joe Biden for his support of the Iraq war, which Sanders called one of the “two great foreign policy disasters of our lifetimes.” The other, he said, was the Vietnam War. Both conflicts, he added, “were based on lies.”
“Joe and I listened to” Dick Cheney, George W. Bush and Bush’s defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld. “I thought they were lying,” Sanders said. “I didn’t believe them for a moment. I took to the floor. I did everything I could to prevent that war. Joe saw it differently.”
Biden said he’s long acknowledged that his Iraq war vote was a “big, big mistake” but worked hard as vice president to get U.S. forces out of war zones. Still, he added, there continues to be a role for Special Forces, working with allies, even as Sanders and Senator Elizabeth Warren said they would pull out troops completely.
“We should stop asking our military to solve problems that cannot be solved militarily,” Warren said.
All the Democratic candidates on stage at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, opposed Trump’s decision to kill Iranian General Qassem Soleimani this month, saying it threatened to further destabilize the region.
Buttigieg, an Afghanistan war veteran and former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, said U.S. involvement should be limited, proposing that Congress should have to renew its authorization for military force every three years.
The first question in the Des Moines Register/CNN debate tested each candidate on their qualifications as commander-in-chief. That’s been a selling point for Biden, but his past foreign policy positions have come under new scrutiny — from the right and the left — for his support of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
But the encounter will likely be best remembered for an exchange between Sanders and Warren over whether a woman can win the 2020 presidential election.
Sanders flatly denied reports he told Warren in 2018 that a woman couldn’t win the White House.
“I didn’t say it,” Sanders said. “Anybody who know me knows that it’s incomprehensible to say that a woman could not be president of the United States.”
But Warren pounced nonetheless.
“Look at the men on this stage — collectively, they have lost 10 elections,” she said. “The only people on stage who have won every single election they’ve been in are the women.”
The issue has strained a previously civil competition between Sanders and Warren, who are fighting for the same progressive voters.
Drug Prices
Asked about the high cost of prescription drugs, Warren defended her proposal for the government to manufacture generic drugs.
“Let’s give them a little competition,” Warren said of pharmaceutical companies.
Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, who often criticizes Warren’s plan to abolish private insurance, said she was open to the proposal on generics but would first let Medicare negotiate the price of drugs and allow imports of cheaper drugs from other countries.
Biden and Buttigieg are in a competitive four-way battle with Sanders and Warren for the campaign’s first contest: The Iowa caucuses on Feb. 3. Also participating in the debate were Klobuchar and billionaire investor Tom Steyer.
Tuesday’s debate was the last such forum before the caucuses. It’s particularly important for the senators — Sanders, Warren and Klobuchar — who will have to break away from campaigning as soon as this week to be sworn in as jurors in Trump’s impeachment trial. After that, the trial could require their presence at the Capitol for weeks.
Warren said it’s her constitutional duty to be present during the impeachment trial. “Some things are more important than politics, she said.
Klobuchar said impeachment was a “decency test” comparable to the McCarthy hearings of the 1950s. If the Republican-led Senate doesn’t allow for witnesses to be called in the trial, she said of Trump, “they might as well give him a crown and scepter.”
While the Democratic primary contest started with the most diverse field of candidates in history, only white candidates made it to Tuesday’s debate stage. Senator Cory Booker dropped out of the race on Monday while Andrew Yang, Representative Tulsi Gabbard and Deval Patrick all missed the polling and fund-raising requirements to qualify for the January debate.
Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who is also seeking the Democratic nomination, is self-funding his campaign so he didn’t meet the donor requirement to participate. Bloomberg is the founder and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News.
To contact the reporters on this story: Gregory Korte in Washington at gkorte@bloomberg.net;Misyrlena Egkolfopoulou in Washington at megkolfopoul@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Wendy Benjaminson at wbenjaminson@bloomberg.net, John Harney, Michael Shepard
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