Joe Biden Says He Voted for the Iraq War ‘To Try to Prevent a War from Happening’

Former Vice President Joe Biden has said he voted for the war in Iraq as an attempt to prevent war. The Democratic presidential candidate told MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell on Monday that he didn’t believe Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

“Look, the reason I voted the way I did was to try to prevent a war from happening,” Biden said.

“Remember, the threat was to go to war. The argument was because Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. So [former President George W. Bush] said ‘I need to be able to get the Security Council to agree to send in inspectors to put pressure on Saddam, to find out whether or not he’s producing nuclear weapons.'”

“I didn’t believe he had those nuclear weapons. I didn’t believe he had those weapons of mass destruction,” Biden went on.

“What happened was we went in, determined that they hyped what, in fact, was occurring. There was no concrete proof of what he was doing, and they still went to war.”

Biden’s comments contradict what he said back kin 2003. At the time, he was a senator and said publicly that he saw enough evidence to support the Bush administration’s claim that Hussein had WMDS. No such weapons were ever found in Iraq.

Biden admitted he’d made a mistake but said ‘the idea that Bernie Sanders’ judgment on foreign policy is superior to mine, I’m anxious to debate him on that question.’

Watch the video above, via MSNBC.