To Obama’s credit he was on the record in the run up to Iraq as opposed to the war. But one wonders if he would have actually voted against it in the Senate had been there in 2002. Given his proclivity to duck hard votes in the Illinois Senate, I doubt he would have opposed the war in the U.S. Senate.

And, as explained by Gene Healy in this National Review article, his decision to tap Biden as his VP only reinforces my doubts:

A Profile in Cowardice
Joe Biden shirked his Constitutional responsibilities on the Iraq war.

By Gene Healy

In Friday’s presidential debate on foreign policy (assuming the show still goes on), we can be sure that Barack Obama will hit John McCain hard for supporting what Obama has called a “dumb war” in Iraq. But in doing so, Obama has at least one major handicap to overcome: his running mate.

In October 2002, Sen. Biden voted to authorize the Iraq war. “I made a mistake,” he now says — he had “vastly underestimated” how incompetent the Bush administration would be in prosecuting the war.

So has Biden changed his position on Iraq? Not really. In October 2002, when the congressional vote was held, Biden, like most members of Congress, was in favor of avoiding accountability and punting the question of war or peace to the president. And Biden remains firmly in favor of avoiding accountability for Iraq today. That tells us something about Joe Biden’s judgment and integrity. More importantly, it tells us a lot about the health of Congress as a political institution, and about the erosion of Congress’s power to declare war.

As James Madison put it, “In no part of the Constitution is more wisdom to be found, than in the clause which confides the question of war or peace to the legislature, and not to the executive department.” But Biden, and a majority of senators and House members, ignored that wisdom in 2002 and voted for a use-of-force resolution that handed a “blank check” to the president, as Sen. Robert Byrd rightly observed at the time. True, the resolution features some boilerplate about exhausting other options before using force, and prominent lawmakers have used that language to suggest they didn’t “really” vote for war. But the operative clause of the resolution — “The President is authorized to use the Armed Forces of the United States as he determines to be necessary and appropriate” in order to defend American national security and enforce U.N. resolutions regarding Iraq — left it up to the president to decide whether and when to initiate the war.

Read the whole thing.