Drifter
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Harris Faulkner Tells Condoleezza Rice, ‘When You Invade a Sovereign Country, That Is a War Crime,’ as the Iraq War Advocate Nods Along
Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice joined Fox News Sunday and discussed Russia’s invasion of, and ongoing war in Ukraine.
Russia invaded last week after President Vladimir Putin recognized the Ukrainian breakaway regions of Donetsk and Luhansk as independent. He ordered the deployment of “peacekeeping” forces to those regions, and subsequently invaded other parts of Ukraine to “denazify” the government, which is led by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who is Jewish.
“I have argued that when you invade a sovereign nation, that is a war crime,” host Harris Faulkner told Rice, as she nodded along in apparent agreement. “I mean, I think we’re at just a real, basic, basic point there.”
Rice was quite notably one of the most vocal and visible advocates of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, which drew widespread international condemnation. The U.S. military went into the country based on the ultimately false pretext that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.
“Well, it is certainly against every principle of international law and international order, Rice replied. “And that’s why throwing the book at them now in terms of economic sanctions and punishments is also a part of it. And I think the world is there, certainly NATO is there. He’s managed to unite NATO in ways that I didn’t think I would ever see again after the end of the Cold War.”
Then the National Security Advisor to President George W. Bush, Rice was among numerous officials touting faulty intelligence about WMDs.
During one TV appearance in the run-up to the war, Rice warned against waiting for weapons inspectors to produce a “smoking gun.”
“The problem here is that there will always be some uncertainty about how quickly he can acquire nuclear weapons,” she said in 2002. “But we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”