During the 2016 election, a topic that somehow managed to peak its ahead amongst the vast insanity of that campaign was that of the Iraq War.
Donald Trump repeatedly made references to the proximity of Bush, Clinton and Obama to the conflict, chiding both Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton for their respective involvements, or affiliations with those who were protagonists. In 2020, after almost a year of pandemic and with almost 4 years of relative peace in the United States foreign policy, people have forgotten how vicious American foreign policy had become between 2001 and 2016.
The world had been subjected to images of Saddam Hussein being hung, Colonel Gaddafi being slaughtered in the streets (with Hillary Clinton laughing about it), not to mention the infamous Abu Ghraib torture pictures. The United States had become synonymous with a brutality that many of its citizens regularly accuse other nations of harbouring.
The now deceased journalist Robert Fisk, wrote a piece in 2018 which reflected upon this impulsive violence. For him, Kim Jong-Un had, in 2018, become an equivalent to Saddam. Threatening to build a deadly arsenal, shrouded in secrecy, Kim Jong Un, like Saddam had become something of a figure for the West to lampoon as a mock dictator. Fisk, who had observed the Middle East with a close eye for decades, rued that Trump had not been President during the time of Hussein and the outbreak of the Iraq War, as Trump would have been more likely to have talked to the Iraqi leader than to have hung him and destroyed his country.
One person who would have gone to war with Saddam, in fact actually helped to bring about the war with Saddam, was then Senator Joe Biden.
Biden has tried revisionist approaches to this. He has since tried to paint himself as someone who was misled and who immediately regretted his decision, however this is simply untrue. As the Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Biden would have been as privy to the information available as anyone regarding a possible invasion of Iraq. He used this position to arrange Senate Committee hearings that warned the public of Saddam’s impending danger, talking up the weapons of Mass Destruction which would bring ruin to the world.
“In my judgment, President Bush is right to be concerned about Saddam Hussein’s relentless pursuit of weapons of mass destruction and the possibility that he may use them or share them with terrorists.’
“These weapons must be dislodged from Saddam Hussein, or Saddam Hussein must be dislodged from power,” said Biden in August 2002. “President Bush has stated his determination to remove Saddam from power, a view many in Congress share.”
Biden refused to allow voices critical of the war to be heard during the Congressional meetings, choosing instead to give the impression of broad support for the invasion of Iraq.
Remarkably, by 2004, Biden was telling the Council on Foreign Relations that ‘I never believed they had weapons of mass destruction’.
In 2009, President Barack Obama asked Vice President Joe Biden to oversee his policies in Iraq. What followed was a nightmare. The botched US withdrawals, from 2011 onwards, left a vacuum that was to be filled by ISIS. Christians were slaughtered in large numbers alongside the Yazidis and other ethnic groups. The nun mark became an international symbol of Christian persecution, painted outside of the homes of Christians who would be targeted by the terrorists. Families were murdered, raped, enslaved, crucified. Hell on earth.
Europe was flooded with the wider effects of this too, ISIS affiliates decapitated a Catholic priest in France, refugees fleeing the war became involved in incidents such as the one at New Year’s in Cologne, terror took to the streets of Nice, ploughing through innocent French people and leaving a startling image of dead child beside their teddy bear on the promenade.
But of all those who suffered, the Christians of Iraq suffered most profoundly. Alongside 1 million dying in the war itself, 83% of Christians in Iraq were either displaced or killed between its beginning and present day.
This sad saga was not some fleeting incident wherein Biden was duped. He was the one duping others. In fact, he had been advocating for the overthrow of Saddam as far back as 1998.
Many, on the rare occasion that the war is now discussed, will still assume that Iraq was a war for oil. Perhaps it was in some measure. But many have forgotten that in 2003, a greater number referred to it as a ‘Crusade’. This talk is still being hyped up even this past week by President Erdogan of Turkey, who has shown little sympathy for three Catholics murdered in Nice.
We, as Christians, need to rethink the wider implications of our votes. Much of the Catholic opposition to voting for Biden has been focused on abortion, a mistake in a country with such high abortion rates. Instead, opposition to Biden’s claims to be a practicing Catholic should have focused upon the fact that he has been fatal to his brothers and sisters in Iraq, Syria and Libya over the course of these past two decades.
If Joe Biden is elected as President tomorrow, all of the signs point towards more suffering and displacement for Christians in the Middle East, and by extension those in Europe. All the while, the people who cast that vote, Americans, will remain relatively unharmed by the impact of their decision. And that tragedy is where discussions over faith and conscience should really be effectively fostered.
We wish that Joe Biden had listened to Pope John Paul II in 2003, when he begged the United States not to proceed with their illegal war. As do the long suffering people of the Middle East.