George W Bush’s Iraq-Ukraine gaffe is a reminder of western double standards

Until the video clip hit social media, the claim that there was any parallel between Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and any recent war waged by the US or Nato was effectively confined to the alternative media, at least in the English-speaking world. No longer.

Speaking in Dallas, in his home state of Texas, George W Bush – otherwise known as Bush 43 – embarked on a full-throated attack on Russia’s attack on Ukraine, in a speech singing the praises of electoral democracy, only to muff the punchline in spectacular fashion. It had been, he said, “the decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq... I mean of Ukraine”.

The former US president was shown laughing off his mistake in typical George W fashion – for those who remember the levity he sometimes seemed to attach to his responsibilities as “leader of the free world”. The man who had introduced us to such coinings as “misunderestimate”, putting “food on your family” and the rest had just goofed again, except now he could now blame his linguistic confusion on his age (75), which he duly did.

I am not sure, though, that his gaffe can be left there. At the very least, it seems to show how deeply entrenched the Iraq war still is in this president’s consciousness, even 20 years on. He surely knows that, whatever his (somewhat thin) achievements as president, this tragically misguided adventure remains a stain on his presidency and will define his place in history, too.

Lest we forget: in 2003 the United States, enthusiastically assisted by the UK under Tony Blair, launched a military operation against Iraq, designed to disarm the country and change the regime. The pretext was their belief that Iraq had retained chemical weapons even after they were supposed to have been destroyed. They saw themselves as doing the world a favour. There was also the context of 9/11, which destroyed the United States’ sense of its own security.

Whether or not you think Bush and Blair “lied” about Iraq’s “weapons of mass destruction” – and I don’t – the best gloss that can be put on the Iraq war is that it was a horrendous mistake, reflecting preconceived ideas, over-egged intelligence, and undue heed for a group of persuasive exiles intent on taking power themselves. Saddam Hussein may have been toppled with relative ease, but what had been billed as a “cakewalk” by the more gung-ho members of the US administration went terribly wrong.

The US and British proved unequal to their obligations as occupying powers, and Iraq descended into civil war. Nearly 5,000 US service personnel were killed and 200 from the UK. Figures for Iraqi casualties remain inexact, but veer between several hundred thousand and a million. The country became a hotbed of instability in the region and a whole generation of Iraqis have grown up in insecurity.

But it is not necessary to catalogue the human and material cost of the Iraq war to understand why it still draws so much opprobrium internationally. While Bush and Blair had the support of their legislatures for military action, the UN Security Council never approved the use of force. It was an illegal war, with catastrophic consequences, for which neither of the two national leaders most responsible – or their countries – have ever been held to account.

This is how it is seen in Russia, but also in many other countries, where the Iraq war is held up as a prime example of western double standards: of how the United States and others either flout the rules when it suits them or rewrite them to reflect their interests. Nor is Iraq regarded as unique. It is seen as only the most heinous of several examples. They could include Afghanistan – was a war really the best response to 9/11? – as well as many of the practices associated with the war on terror: “rendering” suspects to “black sites” in third countries, the use of torture, the extra-legality of detention at Guantanamo Bay.

For Russia, the Nato bombing of Serbia is seen as another illegal use of military force, while it sees the toppling of Muammur Gaddafi in Libya as a subversion of the UN Security Council resolution that authorised intervention. Moscow also cites the anarchy that followed the US-led interventions in Iraq and Libya as a reason why it intervened in Syria – less to keep Bashar al-Assad in power than to prevent the sort of power vacuum that had generated chaos elsewhere.

Now I should stress here – and I have not seen even Russia try to make this argument – that these US-led interventions can in no way be used to justify Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The point is rather that the reasons given by the US and its allies for invading Iraq and for its other disastrously failed adventures elsewhere have quite a lot in common with the rationale advanced by Russia for its “special military operation” in Ukraine: to disarm a country it saw as failing to comply with an international agreement (in this case the Minsk accords), and to avert what it saw – quite wrongly in my view, but that is another matter – as a threat to Russia’s security, given the weapons and training Ukraine was receiving from Nato.

To keep up to speed with all the latest opinions and comment, sign up to our free weekly Voices Dispatches newsletter by clicking here

And while Moscow’s stated reasons for invading Ukraine might be widely derided across the west – where the war is seen as an illegal grab for territory or a last ruthless attempt to keep Ukraine within its sphere of influence – the reluctance of many other countries, including China and India and much of what is called the “global South”, warrants a lot more consideration than it has generally received. Russia might be a pariah in the western world, but the global picture is different.

It might also be worth asking how different the wars in Iraq and elsewhere might look to the west, had they been reported from the ground in the same way that the Ukraine war is being reported, from the perspective of a civilian population suddenly finding itself on the receiving end of multipronged attacks from a much bigger and more powerful enemy.

Two years ago, the BBC screened a documentary which tried to do some of that retrospectively. Once Upon a Time in Iraq won awards, but came too late to rekindle in any significant way the indignation that many opponents of the war felt at the time.

It may be that the punctilious gathering of evidence by Ukrainians will eventually see Russia and even Putin brought before an international tribunal of some kind. And – depending who is then in power in the Kremlin – such a move could arouse profound resentment in Russia. If that were to happen, however, the question to ask should be not why is Russia being called to account, but why has there been no international reckoning for Iraq.

George Bush’s telling gaffe this week should be a reminder that one country’s special military operation to avert an existential threat may be another country’s unprovoked and illegal invasion. And the west needs to understand that so long as one part of the world gets to dictate which is which, the rest of the world might detect something of a double standard.