(Photo: Bastiaan Slabbers/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
By Charles Wofford
Question: What happens if you kill several pedestrians because of a driving mistake?
Answer: You lose your license, probably do a lengthy prison sentence, and pay some hefty fines.
Question: What happens if you kill hundreds of thousands of people because of a “mistake” in governance?
Answer: You get to run for president.
In 8th grade, I marched with about a thousand others in downtown Flagstaff, AZ against the impending war in Iraq pushed by the Bush Administration. I was one of many: the war in Iraq saw some of the largest anti war demonstrations in recorded history, with over 3,000 separate events from 2002 through 2003, often happening simultaneously across multiple continents. I remember enduring the petty warmongering of my school teachers, some of whom thought that we ought to also invade North Korea, unaware – or uncaring – that millions would have died. I remember being told time and again that the Iraqi people did not understand democracy and we had to teach them how civilization worked. I recall the Bush Administration declaring that it would no longer respect the sovereignty of nations, but would seek out and destroy “terrorists” (a vague label with varying definitions even within the U.S. government) wherever it found them. It was a declaration of war against the entire world. I remember how apparently respectable intellectuals like Christopher Hitchens revealed themselves as false prophets, conveniently becoming wealthier and better known in the process.
Now, as then, only the far-right fringe supported the invasion. But in 2003, those people happened to be in power. Because the war was based on a lie, everyone who died in it died in vain. American soldiers did not die supporting our freedoms or rights; they died to further the corporate interests of oil tycoons such as then-Vice President and ex-CEO of Halliburton Dick Cheney. It also means that the hundreds of thousands of slain Iraqis were not merely killed, but murdered. The foundational claim of the entire war was a lie. Therefore it was not justified, and the unjustified taking of another’s life is called murder. The United States leaders who waged that war are responsible for the murders of thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.
The war in Iraq was an atrocity. It destroyed an entire country and cast an entire region into chaos. According to a study by The Lancet, over 600,000 Iraqis had died by the end of 2006 from both violence and infrastructure ruination caused by the war, a number which is surely much higher now in 2020. Even more horrifying, Iraq has been turned into a radioactive dump. The catastrophic effect of radiation poisoning on the population is well documented, despite attempts to cover it up. Cancer rates are significantly higher in Iraq than in any industrialized nation, and congenital birth defects are extremely common. Even American soldiers are developing cancer at elevated rates. The depleted uranium used by the U.S. military in Iraq has a half life of 4.5 billion years, which means that we can expect the sun to turn into a red giant by the time Iraq is clean again. The poisoning of a nation is an atrocity on top of the war itself, and especially so in this time of global ecological crisis. This is Hitler level destruction, and Joe Biden was right there supporting it. Now he wants to be president, because, in his own words, he “knows more than most people know,” since he’s “been around a long time.”
How can Joe Biden say that this crime, this atrocity for which he voted, was a mistake? How can he look himself in the mirror having supported the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of people and just say “oops?” How can he look at this radioactive genocide and not recognize his complicity? Does not his very failure to do so add to the case that he is unfit to lead? He says he voted for the war to try and prevent a war, which makes no sense. Biden has been criticized for seeming out of touch, and people are wondering about his mental fitness. But even back in 2003, he showed an inability to make sound judgments. Moreover, at the time of his vote on the Iraq War, Biden was the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, an ideal spot to have a privileged view into the evidence for and against the war. His excuses do not add up; even an 8th grader had better judgment. To be a leader means to some degree to anticipate, to see further than others. Does Joe Biden see further than others?
It is one thing to make a mistake, to make a serious mistake, or even to make a mistake that hurts people. But if Joe Biden genuinely recognized any wrongdoing, he would not be running for president. Should not the magnitude of his error disqualify him from holding public office, especially the highest office in the land? Should he not at least have the decency to let someone else lead the country? This is not like using the wrong form of “there” in a high school essay, or buying decaf; this error resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and enormous ecological destruction. What is this man doing running for president at all?
Were the United States held to the standards of international law, Joe Biden would face a lengthy prison sentence, as would Hillary Clinton, Adam Schiff, and other senators and representatives who supported that war. The leaders and architects such as President George Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Secretaries of State Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, and others would likely have been executed. The same would be true of those generals who first put depleted uranium into U.S. weaponry starting back in the first Gulf War. After all, we put Nazis to death at Nuremberg merely on grounds of conspiring against peace.
Having protested the Iraq Atrocity, I cannot now in good conscience vote for someone who supported it (no, I did not vote for Clinton in 2016 and I do not regret that decision). What kind of choice is it between voting for a rapist or voting for a war criminal? Who will lecture me on Donald Trump as “the most dangerous president in history” (Sanders)? Who would dare bring up “lesser evilism” when Joe Biden is party to mass murder? Who will presume to take the moral high ground when defending someone who was “tricked” by the oh-so-cunning Bush Administration into supporting an atrocity?
Charles Wofford is pursuing a PhD in historical musicology at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
