Biden's Gaffes Are Back -- He Can't Even Keep Iraq and Iran Straight
Joe Biden’s bent toward mangling language has been quiet for a while – but it just came back with a bang.
In a speech Tuesday in New York City, according to The Daily Caller, the former vice president surpassed even some of his own mistakes of recent months — like confusing what state he was in.
This time, he managed to confuse a country the United States military has occupied for 15 years with a nation it has been in a virtual state of war with for four decades.
President Trump is responding with surgical, tactical force Iranian aggression
Joe Biden is running to take his job—but he can’t even remember the difference between Iraq and Iran
This is the “foreign policy expert” of the Democratic field?
?
— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) January 7, 2020
“The Iran parliament,” Biden said. “The Iran parliament voted to eject all American and coalition forces from the country, and however you may feel about American military presence in the Middle East, there’s a right way and a wrong way to draw down our troops.”
It was not, of course, the Iran parliament that did any such thing. It was the Iraq parliament that did that.
It might seem like a small slip of the tongue to confuse the country of Iraq — population about 40 million — with Iran, population over 80 million.
But as anyone who’s paid even glancing attention to world affairs for the past few decades, there’s difference between the two that’s much bigger than a single letter of the alphabet.
Since the 1979 Islamic revolution, Iran has been one of the United States’ most virulent opponents on the world stage, acting as a state sponsor of terrorism with “death to America” being practically a national motto.
An American voter should expect a contender for the presidency to know as much.
Even Democrats should expect that.
Check out a longer segment of the Biden speech here to get some context:
But the problems with Biden’s faux pas go beyond simply mistaking one letter for another. His speech also lacked a crucial context.
While Iraq’s parliament did indeed vote to expel U.S. troops on Sunday, according to The Associated Press, on Monday things had changed.
According to the U.K. Guardian, Iraqi members of parliament and the country’s current prime minister have backed off on their demands for a U.S. troop withdrawal — possibly because President Donald Trump threatened to impose sanctions on the country.
It’s not clear whether Biden and his team were aware of that development on Tuesday, but they should have been.
Then again, if Biden can’t keep straight the names of two of the most important countries in the Middle East as far as U.S. interests are concerned, maybe asking him and his staff to keep up on current events is too much.
At any rate, Biden critics on social media, who have been a little light on Biden-isms lately, were back on the gaffe in force.
They’ve been touting him as a foreign policy expert for years and he has always been one sandwich shy of a picinic.
— JP Duffy (@JPDuffy8) January 7, 2020
I don’t think Biden knows where he is.
— Bulldog (@bfolda) January 7, 2020
#SleepyJoe Biden the so called “Foreign policy expert” is the reason Trump has to clean up the Obama administration’s mess in the middle east.
Iran is a terrorist Dictatorship that murders it’s own people and Americans.
Obama and Biden failed to address Iran while in office.
— America First (@redwing01svt) January 7, 2020
That last one states the case.
No matter how liberals try to spin history, the fact of the matter is that Iran is a bloodthirsty theocracy that has spent the past 40 years engaging in a proxy war with the United States and Israel (“Great Satan” and “Little Satan,” respectively).
Former President Barack Obama’s experiment with appeasing the murderous mullahs was a disaster, and left the Islamic Republic even more dangerous than before (thanks to eased sanctions and pallets of obscene amounts money delivered under shady circumstances).
Among Trump’s many jobs has been dealing with the fallout of that mess.
There’s not a Democrat in the 2020 field who’s willing, or able, to assert American interests in the Middle East the way Trump has — and the drone strike last week that killed Iranian Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani is just a sign of how seriously he’s taking it.
Meanwhile, the Democratic front-runner has largely counted it a success that he’s kept his own mouth from getting him in trouble lately (except for with some coal miners), but even that run of luck seems to be over.
Tuesday’s speech wasn’t the only proof that Joe Biden isn’t the man to step in to the Oval Office now, but it’s as good as any.
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