While the saccharine continues to ooze from the mainstream media for the incoming Biden Administration, the real iron fist of what will be the Biden foreign policy is starting to materialize. As if on cue, major bombings in Baghdad – by ISIS…remember them? – have opened the door for the Biden Administration to not only cancel President Trump’s troop drawdown from Iraq but to actually begin sending troops back into Iraq.
Is this to be Iraq War 4.0? 3.7? 5.0? Anybody’s guess.
If Biden uses this sudden – and convenient – unrest in Iraq as a trigger to return US troops (and bombs), it should not surprise anyone. As Professor Barbara Ransby points out in this video, Biden did much more to make the disastrous 2003 attack on Iraq happen than just vote “yes” on the authorization to use force. As Professor Ransby reminds us, Biden used the full power of his position as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to ensure the Senate approved George W. Bush’s lie-based war on Iraq. Biden prevented any experts who challenged the “Saddam has WMDs and he’s about to use them” narrative from being heard by Members of Congress, guaranteeing that only the pro-war narrative was heard.
As much as Bush or Cheney, Biden owns the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, which killed a million Iraqi civilians. And he may well be taking us back.
One figure in the Biden Administration who will play a pivotal role in returning the US to its hyper-interventionism in the Middle East is Secretary of State nominee Anthony Blinken. As a Biden Senate staffer in 2003, he helped the then-Foreign Relations Committee Chairman put together a pro-war coalition in the Democratic Party to support President Bush’s Republican push for invasion.
Later on Blinken was Obama’s Deputy National Security Advisor, where he successfully made the case that destroying both Libya and Syria were fantastic ideas. Both countries drowned in the Obama Administration’s “liberation” bloodbath and neither country has recovered from the “democracy” brought by Washington, but being a neocon foreign policy ideologue means never having to say you’re sorry.
And Blinken isn’t.
Not surprisingly, Blinken is a favorite of the AIPAC-bankrolled Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, which, as Phil Giraldi reported, Tweeted that Blinken would be part of a “…superb national security team. The country will be very fortunate to have them in public service.”
We have Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) to thank for at least bringing up the fact that Blinken has blundered from foreign policy disaster to foreign policy disaster – which only gets you promoted in Washington DC. In Blinken’s confirmation hearing, Paul reminded Blinken of his addiction to intervention in the Middle East and how that has worked out for everyone.
Paul reminded the Secretary of State nominee that his only criticism of the Syria “regime change” plan was that the US did not successfully overthrow Assad. But…the US was using jihadist proxies to overthrow the secular Assad, so what does this say about Blinken’s judgement?
“The lesson of these wars,” said Paul, is that ‘regime change’ doesn’t work!”
Paul added:
Even after Libya you guys went on to Syria wanting to do the same thing again… it’s a disaster.
You got rid of one ‘bad guy’ and another ‘bad guy’ got stronger.
Yes, Senator Paul is right. “Regime change” doesn’t work. It kills or destroys the lives of the most vulnerable. The poor and the innocent. The US enemies may occasionally find themselves on the wrong end of a noose or a knife rape, but it is the civilians who always suffer when they are “liberated” by Washington.
Buckle up, as incoming Senate Majority Leader Schumer advised, there’s a whole lot of interventionism in the queue. There’s a whole lot of death and destruction to be unleashed by Biden, Blinken, and their gang of “humanitarians.”
