President Biden accidentally referred to Putin’s war in “Iraq” when answering questions from the press, a year after former president George W Bush made the same gaffe. Both men played crucial roles in the push to invade Iraq.
Asked on Wednesday whether the short-lived Prigozhin rebellion was a sign that Putin was weakening, Biden replied, “It’s hard to tell really. But he’s clearly losing the war in Iraq.”
During the 2020 presidential race, Current Affairs’ Nathan J Robinson wrote the following about Biden’s pivotal role in manufacturing support for the Iraq invasion:
In 2003, Biden was “a senator bullish about the push to war [in Iraq] who helped sell the Bush administration’s pitch to the American public,” who “voted for — and helped advance — the Bush agenda.” He was the war’s “most crucial” senate supporter. Biden repeated the myth that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, saying that “these weapons must be dislodged from Saddam Hussein, or Saddam Hussein must be dislodged from power.” The resulting war was one of the most deadly catastrophes in the history of U.S. foreign policy — the Iraqi death toll was in the hundreds of thousands or possibly even the millions, and 4,500 American troops died.
That Biden’s decomposing brain would find the word “Iraq” when reaching for the word which means “nation that has been illegally invaded by an evil government” is positively Freudian.
In May of last year during a speech in Dallas, George W Bush made a similar Freudian confession, saying, “The result is an absence of checks and balances in Russia, and the decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq. I mean, of Ukraine.”
After correcting himself with a nervous chuckle, Bush broke the tension with the words, “Iraq too. Anyway.” He then quipped that he is 75 years old, leaning harder on his “Aw shucks gee willikers I’m such a goofball” persona than he ever has in his entire life.
I defy you to find me anything that is more quintessentially representative of the state of the US empire than these two clips. Two decaying empire managers fumbling around in their skulls for the name of nation that’s been invaded by murderous thugs, and coming up with the name of the nation they themselves invaded. It’s truly a thing of beauty.
It’s absolutely ridiculous that they’re trying to charge Putin with war crimes while these two mass murderers are walking free. As American law professor Dale Carpenter has said, “If citizens cannot trust that laws will be enforced in an evenhanded and honest fashion, they cannot be said to live under the rule of law. Instead, they live under the rule of men corrupted by the law.” This is all the more true of laws which would exist between nations.
It’s not a “whataboutism” to say it’s absurd to charge Putin with war crimes without charging men like Bush and Biden — it’s a completely devastating argument against the claim being made. If the law doesn’t apply to everyone, then it’s not the law, it’s just corruption. It’s a tool of the powerful.
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This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.
