Seventeen years after the invasion of Iraq, the war remains a live wire for many voters in the Democratic Party .

Joe Biden , who was chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee at the time, voted for the war along with 28 other Democratic senators and all but one Republican.

But Biden has been distancing himself from his vote, making it seem like he was against the endeavor from the beginning.

Biden had to defend his record on the Iraq War right at the top of the Democratic debate in Des Moines on Tuesday.

I was asked to bring 156,000 troops home from that war. Which I did. I led that effort, Biden emphasized.

It was a mistake to trust that they [President George W. Bushs administration] werent going to go to war. They said they were not going to go to war, he added. They said they were just going to get inspectors in. The world, in fact, voted to send inspectors in, and they still went to war. From that point on, I was in the position of making the case that it was a big, big mistake, and from that point on, I moved to bring those troops home.