President Joe Biden bragged Tuesday night about bringing “onslaught” to Iraq – but not the one you’re probably thinking of.
Biden said that “if anybody told you – and my staff wasn’t so sure, either – that we’d be able to bring all of Europe together in the onslaught on Iraq and get NATO to be completely united, I think they would have told you it’s not likely. The one thing that Putin counted on was being able to split NATO.”
Biden: “[Putin] is clearly losing the war in Iraq” pic.twitter.com/dKt6yWWGFx
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) June 28, 2023
But, as he gave away by referencing Putin, Biden wasn’t talking about that Iraq. He was talking about the Iraq that’s also conveniently located right next door to Ukraine.
We can be sure of this because he doubled down Wednesday on his commitment to the war in “Iraq,” telling reporters that Russian President Vladimir Putin “is clearly losing the war in Iraq, he’s losing the war at home and he has become a bit of a pariah around the world” when asked about the Wagner Group’s coup attempt that took place over the weekend.
This isn’t the first time Biden has had difficulty distinguishing the two countries, which are several thousand kilometers apart, on different continents, populated by different ethnic groups and speak different languages. Biden previously switched the two up in November, though he quickly corrected himself.
As a reader, you could be mistaken for thinking that Biden was referencing the Iraq war of the 2000’s, because Biden played his role in that too. He was the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in the leadup to the war, and voted in favor of its authorization, stating at the time it would be a “march to peace and security.” Oops!
Dylan Housman contributed to this report.