Joe Biden’s Haunted Legacy in Iraq

If Joe Biden wins the 2020 presidential election, he will be haunted by an old problem: the U.S. war in Iraq.

It’s an issue he has struggled with since 2002, when he cast a Senate vote that led to the U.S. invasion, and throughout his time as vice president—and one at the heart of an identity crisis engulfing the Democratic Party on foreign policy.

Uncertainty over how and when the U.S. should engage overseas defined the Obama administration’s failures in new wars in Syria and Libya, as well as in old ones in Afghanistan and Iraq. And that uncertainty persists in the confused and often evasive rhetoric various Democratic-primary candidates use as they wrestle with articulating a coherent vision of America’s role in the world.

Biden stands out from the crowd for his long record on foreign affairs and on Iraq in particular, where he has played a defining role not just in the war itself but in its chaotic aftermath, which enabled the rise of the Islamic State. While Biden touts his foreign-policy experience as one of his qualifications for office, his rivals bill Iraq as a prime example of his bad judgment.

The criticism tends to focus on Biden’s Senate vote for a resolution authorizing military force in Iraq, which George W. Bush used to justify his invasion. But his time leading Iraq policy during Barack Obama’s first term is more relevant to the present moment. Whoever wins the presidency in 2020 likely will confront a similar dilemma to the one Biden then faced: a lingering U.S. troop presence, a war-weary U.S. public, and an enemy that is down but not yet defeated.

This story begins in early 2009, after Obama swept into office promising to end the deeply unpopular war in Iraq. There were still 150,000 American soldiers in the country. The newly inaugurated president turned