President Joe Biden has revealed that a new aircraft carrier will bear the name of former President George W. Bush, who notoriously made a premature “Mission Accomplished” announcement on a similar vessel to celebrate his administration’s invasion of Iraq.
Biden, who supported the Iraq invasion and was one of its most vocal advocates in the U.S. Senate, stated that Bush understands “firsthand the burden of duties that accompany being Commander-in-Chief.”
Additionally, he announced that another aircraft carrier would be named in honor of former President Bill Clinton. He mentioned that both ships “will commence construction in the coming years.”
One of the most infamous events during Bush’s presidency occurred on an aircraft carrier.
On May 1, 2003, he orchestrated a large-scale public relations event aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, declaring “major combat operations in Iraq have ended” just six weeks after initiating the invasion.
In front of a crowd of military personnel, Bush delivered a speech beneath a White House-sanctioned banner that was draped from the ship’s main mast, which read “MISSION ACCOMPLISHED.”
“In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed,” Bush proclaimed during his address.
Similar to some of the intelligence that supported the Iraq invasion, his assertion would later be disproven.
Bush’s assertion that combat operations were largely finished became increasingly farcical in subsequent years, as the Iraqi situation escalated into a lengthy sectarian conflict.
The greatest number of military and civilian casualties experienced by both the U.S. and Iraq as a result of the invasion occurred after this speech. The United States did not fully withdraw from Iraq until 2011.
The invasion of Iraq was initiated by a coalition led by the U.S. in March 2003, following claims from the Bush administration and American intelligence agencies that Iraq was constructing an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction and alleging connections between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.
Prominent American media, especially the New York Times, provided uncritical coverage of the assertions made by intelligence agencies. The Times and the Washington Post later acknowledged that their reporting had favored the claims made by U.S. officials.
Biden also embraced the narrative promoted by the Bush administration and, as the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, became a prominent Democratic supporter of this perspective. He even collaborated with the White House to set up a series of Senate hearings that echoed the administration’s assertions regarding Iraqi WMDs.
Meanwhile, U.N. weapons inspectors on the ground cautioned that U.S. officials were mistaken, but did tacitly acknowledge later on that reports of Iraq transporting their WMD stockpiles in lorries and planes to neighboring Syria in the weeks leading up to the war could neither be independently verified nor discounted out of hand.
The Iraq Body Count project estimates that approximately 210,000 civilian lives were lost due to violence in Iraq stemming from the U.S.-led invasion, although this highly-partisan ‘project’ fails to distinguish how many of those killed were insurgents.
