Former Vice President Joe Biden delivered a foreign policy speech from New York on Tuesday where he laid out why it was impossible to believe the Trump administration’s claims that Qassem Soleimani was an imminent threat.
‘This is a president with a history of lying about virtually everything,’ Biden said, adding that Americans are owed a better explanation to why Trump decided to take out Iran’s No. 2 official. ‘And facts to back it up.’
Biden also made a mistake during the nearly 20-minute long speech, briefly confusing Iraq and Iran.
Former Vice President Joe Biden blamed President Trump ‘lying about virtually everything’ as the reason Americans and people around the world didn’t take Trump’s explanation for targeting an Iranian general at face value
Vice President Joe Biden also made a gaffe during the foreign policy speech – briefly swapping Iran for Iraq
Former Vice President Joe Biden blasted President Trump (left) for not giving Americans a better explanation for killing Iranian general Qassem Soleimani (right)
‘The Iran parliament, the Iran parliament, voted to eject all American and coalition forces from the country,’ Biden said, meaning Iraq.
On Sunday, the Iraq parliament voted on a non-binding resolution that aimed to remove U.S. forces from the country in the aftermath of Trump’s decision to target Soleimani with a drone outside the Baghdad International Airport.
Soleimani was killed Thursday, his body only identified by a ring he had worn.
Biden reminded his audience he had once called Trump ‘dangerously incompetent and incapable of world leadership.’
The ex-veep said that Trump’s decision to kill Soleimani only demonstrated this.
‘What have we heard from President Trump’?’ Biden asked. ‘We have not heard a sober-minded explanation to assure the American people that this decision and its consequences were thought through.’
‘No level-headed words meant to dial down the tensions and take us off the path of conflict,’ he continued. ‘No press conference or consultation with our Congress.’
‘No, what we’ve heard so far from this president, are tweets, threats and tantrums,’ Biden said.
The former vice president said the administration has only produced ‘shifting explanations, evasive answers, repeated assurances of an imminent threat, without the evidence to support the conclusion.’
And because of Trump’s loose relationship with the truth, the ex-veep continued.
‘Neither the American people, nor our allies, and indeed no one around the world, seems to be taking his word for it,’ Biden said.
The 2020 hopeful added that Trump indeed needed Congressional approval if he wanted to go to war with Iran.
He also rehashed how the U.S. and Tehran had gotten to this place – pointing the first finger at Trump for pulling out, in May 2018, of the Iran nuclear deal that had been negotiated under President Obama’s tenure.
Biden warned that while the U.S. and Iran were entangled, ISIS could also regroup.
He then talked about how the Iraqi – though said Iranian – parliament wished to see the U.S. leave Iraq.
‘There’s a right way and a wrong way to draw down our troops, our troop presence,’ Biden said. ‘Getting unceremoniously kicked out is, unequivocally, the wrong way.’
‘And if we do end up having to leave, that would be another boon for Iran, tipping the balance of power in the region in their favor,’ the former vice president added.
China and Russia would be ‘quietly reveling’ too, if the U.S. got stuck in another quagmire in the United States, Biden said, ‘giving them room’ to grow.
Biden blamed the ‘short-sighted America First dogmatism’ of the Trump administration as the reason American allies aren’t stepping up in the U.S.’s defense, instead creating a ‘moral equivalence’ between the U.S. and Iran.
‘We’re alone now and we’ll have to pay the costs of Donald Trump’s folly,’ the 2020 candidate warned.