West News Wire: According to John Kerry, special representative for climate change in Washington, the US-led invasion of Iraq was entirely different from the ongoing crisis in Ukraine.
He appeared on the LCI Sunday night program hosted by Darius Rochebin, who had previously conducted an interview with him in 2017 for a Swiss publication. In a video clip from the interview that Rochebin posted, he questioned Kerry about the West’s accusation of Russian aggressiveness with regard to Ukraine. According to the French journalist, the 2003 invasion of Iraq constituted an actual war of aggression because it was predicated on the fabrication that Baghdad had hidden WMDs.
Kerry answered, “No,” “Because, you know, President [George W.] Bush has never even been the subject of a formal process of direct accusation.”
He added that there had been “abuses” in the course of that conflict, and that he “spoke out against them.” When Rochebin asked him directly whether the Iraq War had been a crime of aggression, Kerry repeatedly denied it.
“No, No, No. Well, you didn’t know it was a lie at the time. The evidence that was produced, people didn’t know that it was a lie,” the former diplomat said, before telling Rochebin that he doesn’t intend to “re-debate the Iraq War” at this point.
Kerry also asserted that he felt the war was wrong at the time and was against it. However, he did cast a vote in favour of the invasion in the Senate. When Rochebin pressed Kerry about the apparent double standard, Kerry started talking about “climate justice.”
Saddam Hussein, the president of Iraq, was charged by the Bush administration with possessing chemical and biological weapons as well as having some connection to the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington. The so-called “evidence” for WMDs presented to the UN Security Council and the media was wholly faked, and no such weapons were ever discovered. Likewise, no link was ever found between Baghdad and Al-Qaeda.
The 2003 invasion and the subsequent occupation of Iraq was carried out without UN approval, by what Bush called a ‘coalition of the willing’. The US, the UK, Australia and Poland provided troops for the attack, though Washington later claimed 44 more countries had offered some kind of support.
Kerry ran against Bush in 2004 but lost. He later served as secretary of state in the Barack Obama administration, and was appointed climate change ambassador by the current president, Joe Biden, in 2021.
