Every Presidential Election Since The Iraq War Has Featured Candidates Who Supported It
The most powerful government on earth has still yet to
have a single presidential election that doesn't feature a
prominent candidate who supported one of the most evil
things that government has ever done.
The United
States has done many, many
profoundly evil things
2003 invasion of Iraq is surely in the top ten. It killed
over a million human beings, destabilized an entire region,
led to the rise of ISIS and Al Nusra and facilitated a rush
of new Middle Eastern interventionism, all to no benefit for
the American people whatsoever, and it is utterly
unforgivable.
Yet there have been no consequences for
it. No real changes of any kind were made to American
military, governmental, political or media institutions to
ensure that a similar atrocity never happens again, because
the drivers of US foreign policy had every intention of
doing it again. There weren't even any real political
consequences for it, as evidenced by the fact that
politicians who supported it have been ascending to
Democratic and Republican presidential nominee status ever
since.
This is insane. The fact that every electoral
contest for commander in chief of the most powerful military
in the history of civilization has featured at least one
candidate who supported one of the most evil things ever
done in the blood-soaked history of their nation is too
insane to really put into words. And it says so much about
the state of the US political system today.
The
current Democratic presidential nominee is a particularly
egregious example of this fact, having not just supported
the Iraq invasion but played a leading role in pushing it
through. Current Affairs explains:
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 themyth that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction,
saying
that
“these weapons must be dislodged fromSaddam 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 eventhe millions
, and 4,500 American troops died. Andthat’s just the dead: countless more were left permanently
maimed, to suffer with PTSD for the rest of their lives. For
every dead person, there is a family who will struggle
forever to get over their loss. This is no trivial issue: In
selecting a commander in chief, you want someone who
doesn’t launch catastrophic wars of
aggression.
Before Biden it was
Hillary Clinton, who as a US senator not only voted
in support
promoted it
year after the invasion said
she had no regrets about doing so
"No, I don't
regret giving the president authority because at the time it
was in the context of weapons of mass destruction, grave
threats to the United States, and clearly, Saddam Hussein
had been a real problem for the international community for
more than a decade," Clinton told Larry King in April
2004.
Unlike Clinton and Biden, their opponent Donald
Trump was in no position to actively facilitate the Iraq
invasion since he wasn't in politics at the time, but in
point-blank by Howard Stern "Are you for invading Iraq?"
and he answered in the affirmative. If Trump was unable to
see Iraq clearly from the political sidelines at the time,
there's no reason to believe he'd have done any better than
Biden and Clinton had he been a sitting US senator in 2002
with the immense pressures to conform that were being
implemented by the Bush administration in 2002.
Before
them it was Republican nominee Mitt Romney in 2012, who
had previously said
that "It was the right decision to go into Iraq. I supported
it at the time; I support it now."
This was long after
all the facts were in and it had obvious for years from even
an amoral cost-to-benefit analysis that the Iraq invasion
was a disaster based on lies that caused mountains more
problems than it solved.
Before that it was John
McCain in 2008, who during his miserable psychopathic excuse
for a life supported invading not just Iraq but damn
near everyone else as well
And in 2004 it was
John Kerry running against the butcher himself George W
Bush, who had
just voted
The
more you think about it, the more outrageous it becomes. The
most powerful elected official in the most powerful
government on earth with the most powerful military force
the world has ever seen should not be prone to making
horrifically evil decisions, and it's insane that this even
needs to be said.
The way principled leftists and
anti-imperialists are shamed as privileged and petty
whenever they point out the record of a candidate on this
crucial matter is disgusting. This is not some kind of
pedantic quibble, it's the bare minimum requirement for such
an immensely powerful position. The argument that the Iraq
invasion was supported by most prominent politicians at the
time is not a defense of those politicians, it's an
indictment of mainstream American politics.
Nobody who
supported the Iraq invasion should be working in politics at
all. They shouldn't be able to find employment anywhere more
prominent or influential than a cash register. It's entirely
legitimate for any voter to reject anyone who supported the
unforgivable invasion of Iraq, and indeed to reject the
entire political system that gave rise to
them.
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