Biden confuses Iraq and Iran in foreign policy speech

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Joe Biden mixed up Iraq and Iran during a major foreign policy speech he gave in New York meant to be a rebuke of President Trump ordering an airstrike on Iranian terrorist Qassem Soleimani.

“Iran’s parliament, Iran’s parliament voted to eject all Americans and coalition forces from the country,” Biden said Tuesday during the speech. The comment comes two days after the Iraqi parliament voted to expel U.S. troops, not Iran’s parliament.

There are 5,000 U.S. troops in Iraq, and the White House has not yet announced whether it plans to evacuate American troops. Many of the Sunni and Kurdish members of the Iraqi parliament boycotted the vote.

Biden’s foreign policy speech was the second time that Biden mixed up the two Middle Eastern countries on Tuesday. He appeared to make the mistake during a fundraiser in New York when expressing his worries that Trump would lead the country into a new war.

“We can, with a little bit of luck, we can make the four years of Donald Trump appear as a historical aberration somebody doesn’t get us in a full-blown shooting war with Iraq,” Biden said, according to a pool report.

U.S. troops have been stationed in Iraq, which borders Iran, since 2003. Biden voted in favor of military action in Iraq in 2002 but has since falsely claimed that he opposed the effort “from the moment” the March 2003 invasion started.

As vice president, he oversaw the withdrawal of nearly 150,000 troops from Iraq in 2011, a move that many argue fueled the rise of the Islamic State and resulted in a new deployment of troops to the country in 2014.

“I said not long ago that as the walls close in on this president, I worried that he was going to get us in war with Iraq, as the ultimate wag the dog,” Biden said at another point during the fundraiser.

Biden, 77, has struggled with misstatements and verbal blunders throughout the 2020 campaign since he launched his campaign in a slurred and stammered speech back in April. While he often mentions on the campaign trail that he suffered from a stutter when he was a child, Biden denies that it still affects him.

The former vice president has jokingly called himself a “gaffe machine,” but his verbal slip-ups have damaged voters’ and Democratic insiders’ opinions of him on the campaign trail.

During a July debate, Biden stumbled over numerous statistics, phrases, and titles. Following August shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, Biden offered sympathies for the “tragic events in Houston today and also in Michigan.”

Biden told supporters in August that “poor kids are just as bright and talented as white kids.” He later clarified that he meant “wealthy kids” and not “white kids.” That same day, he said that “we choose truth over facts,” and the week before, Biden invented the word “expodentially.”

If he wins the 2020 election, he would become the oldest president ever, taking office at 78 years and 61 days old. He is currently the front-runner for the Democratic nomination.

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