"Following recent efforts by media outlets to paint a picture that his opposition to past U.S. wars—from the Vietnam War when he was a young man to voting against the 2003 invasion of Iraq as a member of Congress—was something he might want to apologize or account for, Bernie Sanders on Friday released a video on Friday to make clear why he opposed those "disastrous" military misadventures and will continue to fight against similar follies in the future.

"I make no apologies to anybody, that when I was a young man—before I was elected to anything—I opposed the war in Vietnam," says Sanders, a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, in the less than two-minute video. "And I know what that war did to my generation. And when I was a member of the House, I helped lead the effort against the war in Iraq, because I knew that Cheney and Bush and these other folks were lying about weapons of mass destruction."

The decision to invade Iraq in 2003, Sanders adds, was the "worst foreign policy blunder in the modern history of the United States.""