Senator J.D. Vance (R-OH) tore into the Senate’s approval of a $95 billion aid package to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan during a speech to the chamber earlier this week. He compared the narrative to propaganda used to draw America into the Iraq War.
History, he believes, is repeating itself. And it’s repeating itself on the same level of incompetence when it comes to dealing with the region.
“There is another historical analogy that I think is worth pointing out, and that is the historical analogy of the early 2000s,” Vance railed.
“Now, in 2003, I was a high school senior, and I had a political position back then: I believed the propaganda of the George W. Bush administration that we needed to invade Iraq, that it was a war for freedom and democracy, that those who were appeasing Saddam Hussein were inviting a broader regional conflict.”
“Does that sound familiar to anything that we’re hearing today?” he asks. “It’s the same exact talking points 20 years later with different names. But have we learned anything over the last 20 years? No, I don’t think that we have.”
Sen. @JDVance1 compares the propaganda from the establishment that pushed us into the Iraq War, to the propaganda pushing for unlimited funding and escalation in Ukraine today ????????????
“It’s the same exact talking points 20 years later with different names.” pic.twitter.com/XZuQF62PiN
— Andrew Surabian (@Surabees) April 23, 2024
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Is Ukraine And Iraq War Propaganda The Same?
Senator Vance said that today’s Ukraine propaganda is similar to that surrounding the Iraq War. That, by beating the war drums, we will achieve success rather than engaging in competent diplomacy.
“We learned that if we talk incessantly about World War II, we can bully people and cause them to ignore their basic moral impulses and lead the country straight into catastrophic conflict,” he laments.
The Congress today says we must provide endless military aid to Ukraine to avoid further war, and to stop greater death and destruction.
In the early 2000s, they gave us the ‘weapons of mass destruction’ excuse. A narrative that we must fight to stop greater death and destruction. That argument led to a nearly 9-year war in Iraq that cost countless military and civilian lives.
Likewise, the war in Afghanistan lasted so long that some of the people who fought in it weren’t even born yet on 9/11.
RELATED: George W. Bush Accidentally Condemns ‘Unjustified and Brutal Invasion of Iraq’
Iraq War Too, Had Bipartisan Support
Critics of the Iraq war and the preceding intelligence failure involving weapons of mass destruction have become more prevalent.
The war effort was authorized at the time by a bipartisan vote in both the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate in October 2002.
The Iraq War resolution passed the House by a vote of 296-133, and the Senate 77-23.
But those votes were based on faulty intelligence. Are we operating in Ukraine under the same faulty talking points and information?
Former President George W. Bush made one of the all-time Freudian slips in 2022 when he attempted to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and accidentally stepped on a rake.
Former President George W. Bush: “The decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq. I mean of Ukraine.” pic.twitter.com/UMwNMwMnmX
— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) May 19, 2022
Speaking on the topic of democracy, Bush condemned Russia where “elections are rigged” and “political opponents are imprisoned or otherwise eliminated from participating in the electoral process.”
Sound familiar?
“The result,” he said, “is an absence of checks and balances in Russia and the decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq.” Paging Dr. Freud.
Right now there are no checks and balances on US aid to foreign nations. There are no checks and balances on our own border protection.
Vance, meanwhile, slammed European countries for not taking greater responsibility in coming to Ukraine’s aid. Perhaps their propaganda isn’t as effective as our own.
“For three years, the Europeans have told us that Vladimir Putin is an existential threat to Europe,” the senator states. “And for three years, they have failed to respond as if that were actually true.”
The United States Congress though, has continuously been duped into providing an open spigot of taxpayer money to one of the most corrupt nations in Europe.
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