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      Biden says gun violence ‘ripping our communities apart’ after Tennessee shooting

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      The White House led reactions in a shocked America with a call for tightening gun control in the US after a 28-year-old woman opened fire at a private Christian elementary school in Nashville, killing six, including three children.“While you’ve been in this room, I don’t know whether you’ve been on your phones, but we just learned about another shooting in Tennessee – a school shooting – and I am truly without words,” first lady Jill Biden said at an event in Washington as reports of the shooting at the Covenant School began circulating.“Our children deserve better. And we stand, all of us, we stand with Nashville in prayer,” she added.President Joe Biden addressed the mass school shooting soon after, and reiterated his calls to Congress to take legislative action.Biden called the shooting “heartbreaking, a family’s worst nightmare”. He said more needs to be done to stop gun violence.“It’s ripping our communities apart,” he said, and called on Congress to pass an assault weapons ban, saying we “need to do more to protect our schools”.“It’s about time we began to make some more progress,” he added.Earlier this month Biden announced a new slate of executive actions aimed at reducing gun violence and the proliferation of guns sold to prohibited people. The measures were aimed at stiffening background checks, promoting more secure firearms storage and ensuring law enforcement agencies get more out of a bipartisan gun control law enacted last summer. But his actions did not change government policy, but instead directed federal agencies to ensure compliance with existing laws and procedures.White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre called the Nashville school shooting “devastating”, “heartbreaking”, and “unacceptable”.“How many more children have to be murdered before Republicans in Congress will step up and act to pass the assault weapons ban, to close loopholes in our background check system or to require the safe storage of guns?” she added.“Our children should be able to go to school feeling safe, feeling protected. People should be able to go to the grocery stores feeling safe,” Jean-Pierre said.Nashville police said the shooter – who has not yet been publicly named – killed three kids and three adults before being shot dead by police.“At one point she was a student at that school, but unsure what year,” the Metro Nashville police department chief ,John Drake, said at a press conferences. He declined to give the ages of those who had been killed.“Right now I will refrain from saying the ages, other than to say I was literally moved to tears to see this and the kids as they were being ushered out of the building,” Drake said.According to reports, the woman entered the school through a side door at 10.13am. She began firing on the second floor using two assault-style rifles and a handgun. By 10.27am, she had been shot dead.The private school with 200 students opened in 2011. It is not believed to have armed guards.Tennessee’s governor, Bill Lee, said he was “closely monitoring the tragic situation at Covenant” and asked people to “please join us in praying for the school, congregation & Nashville community”.Nashville Mayor John Cooper said his “heart goes out to the families of the victims”.“In a tragic morning, Nashville joined the dreaded, long list of communities to experience a school shooting,” he added.As parents rushed to collect their children from a nearby church, a police officer offered condolences. “I know this is probably the worst day of everyone’s lives,” the officer was heard to tell parents. “I can’t tell you how sympathetic we are.” More

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      White House ‘very in favor’ of bill thought to target TikTok

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      One of the authors of a Senate bill that would enable the federal commerce department to ban technologies with links to foreign governments has said that the Joe Biden White House is “very in favor” of the measure, but he stopped short of saying whether the president’s administration has discussed possibly prohibiting the Chinese-owned social media platform TikTok in particular.Appearing on CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday morning, Senator Mark Warner of Virginia said that the proposed legislation has also picked up support in his congressional chamber from 11 Democrats – of which he is one – as well as 11 Republicans.“I think the White House is very in favor of this bill,” said Warner, chairperson of the Senate’s select committee on intelligence. Without saying whether Biden’s administration would push for these steps to be taken against TikTok, Warner added: “We [would] give the secretary of commerce the tools to ban, to force a sale.”TikTok has drawn close congressional scrutiny because the data of users on the popular video sharing platform could be available to the government of China, the US’s rival global superpower. The Chinese firm ByteDance owns TikTok, and Warner said laws in China require the owner company to make user data accessible to the country’s ruling Communist party.Some lawmakers have advocated for a blanket ban of TikTok, which is headquartered in San Jose. But one of the other responses from Capitol Hill has been for Warner and the Republican South Dakota senator John Thune to draft and rally support for what is known as the Restricting the Emergence of Security Threats that Risk Information and Communications Act.Also known as the Restrict Act, the measure would authorize the Oval Office – through the commerce department – to review technologies which arrive from abroad. The commerce department could then move to ban those technologies or seek to force their sale, depending on any review’s findings.As with all such bills, the proposal would need approval from both congressional chambers as well as the president’s signature to become law. Democrats and the independents who caucus with them have a 51-49 advantage in the Senate where the Restrict Act has drawn support from both sides of the political aisle. Republicans hold a slight numerical edge in the House of Representatives.Warner’s remarks on Sunday came three days after TikTok’s chief executive officer, Shou Zi Chew, spent five hours publicly answering questions from members of the US House. As he testified, Chew defended TikTok’s relationship with China, saying the country’s rulers had never asked for user information and that the platform wouldn’t comply with such a request.“Let me state this unequivocally: ByteDance is not an agent of China or any other country,” Chew said during the occasionally testy session, at which he also tried to assuage concerns about how the platform affects the mental health of its youngest users.Warner on Sunday said he was not impressed with Chew’s performance in front of lawmakers.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“While I appreciated Mr Chew’s testimony, he just couldn’t answer the basic questions,” Warner said. “At the end of the day, TikTok is owned by a Chinese company, … and by Chinese law, that company has to be willing to turn over data.”Appearing separately on CNN’s State of the Union, Washington congresswoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers – who is chairperson of the House’s energy and commerce committee – argued that TikTok could not be trusted despite Chew’s testimony. The Republican congresswoman called TikTok an “immediate threat” and said it deserved to get banned in the US.Though not directly related to TikTok, US fears about Chinese government surveillance reached a fever pitch after American fighter jets shot down a China-owned spy balloon off the coast of South Carolina on 4 February. The US was later reportedly investigating whether strong winds had blown the balloon off course after it took off from China’s Hainan Island and ultimately entered US airspace. More

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      Power move: Stacey Abrams’ next act is the electrification of the US

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      Stacey Abrams has been hailed as a masterly community organizer, after she helped turn out the voters that secured two Senate seats for Democrats in once solidly red Georgia. She has also run twice – unsuccessfully – for state governor. For her next move, she’s not focusing on electoral power so much as power itself.Recently she left the world of campaign politics and took a job as senior counsel for the non-profit Rewiring America. Her role will focus on helping thousands of people across America wean their homes and businesses off fossil fuels and on to electricity, at a moment when scientists have given a “final warning” about the need to curb greenhouse gas emissions and prevent global catastrophe.“We are at an inflection point where we can choose to electrify,” she said in an interview. “We don’t have to do it everywhere, all at once. If you want to see what the future looks like, we start building it here and now.”The impetus for her role comes from significant moves taken by the Biden administration. When he signed the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) last year, President Joe Biden hailed it as “the biggest step forward on climate ever”. It includes a sprawling array of tax credits, rebates and other incentives to help people electrify their lives.“The government has basically filled a bank account for you with thousands of dollars that will help you go electric,” Abrams said.Her mission is to help people access that so-called bank account.“You can improve your indoor air quality, make cooking quick and easy, make being cool in the summer and warm in the winter, and be more affordable,” Abrams said. “But we have to talk about it.”Abrams is perhaps best known for registering 800,000 voters in Georgia through her voting rights advocacy organization Fair Fight Action. She wants to use a similar playbook with electrification, and doing so could benefit many of the same people whose voices risked going unheard in elections.Low-income communities and communities of color have long had to contend with polluting, inefficient appliances. This has an impact on public health by increasing the risk of asthma and leads to higher utility bills that take a bigger bite out of households’ income. The IRA takes aim at some of those wrongs, with tax credits and rebates that can help those households swap in heat pumps, induction stoves and electric vehicles for their gas-powered counterparts.But figuring out what incentives you qualify for and how to access them can be involved, to say the least. While Rewiring America has a calculator that lets individuals suss out what IRA benefits they can snag, Abrams will be taking that and other tools to the community level. She highlighted how houses of worship could be prime places to talk about the IRA and a potential target for outreach.And she hopes to work with local leaders such as teachers, mayors and city council members to make the IRA a kitchen table issue. Enlisting them will, she hopes, eventually lead to neighbors talking to neighbors about how much money they saved on a new induction stove or how much more comfortable their home was during a heatwave thanks to a newly installed heat pump.“You meet people where they are, not where you want them to be,” she said. “That means understanding the lives they’re living and the questions they have and who they go to to talk about their questions.”While the IRA has the potential to be transformative, it’s also not enough to electrify every household in the country. The law has billions set aside for home upgrades, but more resources will be needed to achieve the Biden administration’s goal of reducing US emissions up to 52% below 2005 levels by the end of the decade.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAn analysis by the Rhodium Group found the law has the potential to cut emissions by up to 42%. And that it could reduce home energy bills by $717 to $1,146 by 2030.Abrams said that, based on her experience in the arena of voting rights, the prospect of such benefits could help foster an electrification movement. “As people get more, they expect more,” she said. “The most sustainable movement is when people expect more and are willing to work for more.”This isn’t Abrams’ first foray into climate. She was quick to point out her college senior thesis was on environmental justice and that she interned with the Environmental Protection Agency. During her tenure in the Georgia house of representatives, she also worked as minority leader to help pass a bill that included the state’s biggest influx of cash for public transportation.Ultimately, the Biden administration wants the US to reach net zero by mid-century. It might be hard to imagine that occurring – a distant future, when perhaps technologies that are only nascent today like carbon dioxide removal will be more widespread, almost every car and home will be electric, and the inequalities targeted by the IRA and Biden’s executive orders will have dwindled.That scenario can read a bit like science fiction – a genre of which Abrams is a well-known fan.“In almost every sci-fi story, it begins with what decisions people are making long before the story takes place,” she said. More

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      Six urgent questions TikTok’s CEO needs to answer for US lawmakers

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      TikTok’s chief executive, Shou Zi Chew, will be questioned by lawmakers in Washington on Thursday with the app’s US future in severe doubt. The Biden administration wants TikTok’s Chinese owners to sell their stakes in the business or face a complete ban in the US. TikTok is owned by Beijing-based ByteDance.TikTok says such a move would not “solve the problem”. Under a plan dubbed Project Texas, which the White House now appears to have rejected, TikTok is moving its US user data to third party servers and is allowing its source code to be scrutinised by Oracle, a US tech firm which will also vet its app updates.For the White House and many US lawmakers, this does not go far enough to answer concerns about whether TikTok’s data, from more than 1 billion users, can be accessed by the Chinese state and whether TikTok’s recommendation algorithm could be manipulated by the security services in order to influence what users see.Here are some the questions that Chew, a Singaporean former Goldman Sachs banker, could be asked at the House energy and commerce committee hearing, which starts at 10am ET Thursday.Has the Chinese government ever sought to access TikTok user data?The regular answer to this question by TikTok is no. “TikTok has never shared, or received a request to share, US user data with the Chinese government. Nor would TikTok honor such a request,” Chew will say on Thursday, according to written testimony released by the committee. Indeed, the energy and commerce committee’s press release states that as well as asking Chew about TikTok’s privacy and data security practices, it will ask him about TikTok’s “relationship with the Chinese Communist Party”.Suspicions about the use of TikTok data, which critics say could be used to create profiles of people of interest like government employees, centre on Chinese security laws. These include the National Intelligence Law of 2017, which states that all organisations and citizens shall “support, assist and cooperate” with national intelligence efforts. The shooting down of a Chinese spy balloon off the east coast of the US in February has not helped. Trust was also severely damaged last year by revelations that ByteDance employees had used TikTok to spy on reporters.Will TikTok shed its Chinese ownership?TikTok says the Biden administration has asked its Chinese owners to sell their stakes in the business. TikTok is owned by ByteDance, which is located in Beijing and its ownership is divided as such: 60% by external investors including KKR, the US private equity firm; 20% by employees and 20% by its founders, Zhang Yiming and Liang Rubo, who carry stronger voting rights than the other shareholders.TikTok points to the fact that its US user data is stored on Oracle servers but the only option now appears to be a sale, which could raise around $50bn. However, the Chinese government could object to a deal that would put a prized tech asset in foreign hands, including TikTok’s successful recommendation algorithm. When Donald Trump tried to ban TikTok, and sell control of its US operation, he was stymied by legal action brought by the app and we can expect any renewed attempt at a ban to end up in court.Can the Toutiao app interfere with TikTok data flows?A former TikTok risk manager turned whistleblower has told congressional investigators that the Project Texas plan is deeply flawed. The former employee has shown the Washington Post a piece of code that shows TikTok could connect with systems linked to Toutiao, a Chinese news app owned by ByteDance. The whistleblower claims this could allow for interference in the flow of data from US users. TikTok says the Toutiao code does not link back to China.The whistleblower claims he was fired after warning Chew in a letter that senior TikTok managers were “intentionally lying” to US government officials about how the Project Texas controls had been tested and verified.Are US data controls much weaker than the company says they are?Another TikTok whistleblower has told the office of Republican senator Josh Hawley that TikTok’s access controls on US user data are much weaker than the company says. According to a report by Axios, the whistleblower allegations suggest that TikTok overstates its separation from ByteDance and uses Chinese software that could have backdoors. In a letter to the US treasury secretary Janet Yellen, Hawley details the whistleblower allegations including a claim that TikTok and ByteDance employees can switch between Chinese and US data at the click of a button.TikTok says the whistleblower allegations describes tools that are “primarily analytic tools” that don’t independently grant direct access to data. It adds that neither TikTok nor ByteDance engineers have access to US user data stored by Oracle.Can Project Texas answer lawmakers’ concerns about TikTok?The committee on foreign investment in the US, a multiagency task force that scrutinises foreign investments in American companies, is so unconvinced by the Texas proposals that it has demanded TikTok shed its Chinese ownership. But aside from taking the Biden administration to court, it is the only option that TikTok has. Alongside Oracle storing US user data, the Texas proposals include Oracle looking at TikTok’s source code and vetting its app updates, Chew will argue that Project Texas, and not a sale process, is the answer to lawmakers’ concerns.“The idea behind Project Texas is it won’t matter what the Chinese law or any law says, because we’re taking US user data and we’re putting it out of their reach,” Chew told the Wall Street Journal last week.What is TikTok doing to protect children from harmful content?The committee chair, Cathy McMorris Rodgers, says tech companies like TikTok use “harmful algorithms to exploit children for profit and expose them to dangerous content online”. So although data security will feature strongly in the hearing, expect questions about the protection of children online. TikTok has over 1 billion users worldwide and more than 100 million in the US, many of them under 18. According to the Center for Countering Digital Hate, TikTok’s recommendation algorithm pushes self-harm and eating disorder content to teenagers within minutes of them expressing interest in the topics.TikTok announced a “comprehensive” update to its content guidelines this month, including placing age restrictions on “mature content” such as videos of cosmetic surgery. It will also make content that is inappropriate for a “broader audience” ineligible for recommendation in its main For You feed. Expect Chew to refer to these guideline updates. More

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      Biden urgeed an investigation into how guns are peddled to kids. Will it stop the ads?

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      Last year the Georgia-based gun manufacturer Daniel Defense tweeted an image of a young child with a rifle – about the same size as the child himself – in his lap. “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it,” the caption read.The post came just eight days before an 18-year-old shot and killed 19 students and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas – using a weapon made by Daniel Defense.The tweet was swiftly decried by Democratic lawmakers and gun violence prevention groups, who argued that the ads were incendiary and promote violence among the nation’s youngest residents, for whom gun violence is now the leading cause of death.The ways that children are exposed to firearms through television and video games has been studied for decades. Online advertisements became a central part of this discussion last year, around the same time as the Daniel Defense tweet, when WEE1, a Chicago-based gunmaker used images of two cartoon skulls with pacifiers in their mouths and targets in their eyes to market their JR-15, a .22 rifle that is “geared toward smaller enthusiasts”, according to the company’s website.Now, Joe Biden is calling on the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to examine the ways gun manufacturers market their weapons to Americans, especially children under 18.It’s one of the several executive actions the White House announced Tuesday aimed at expanding last year’s bipartisan Safer Communities act, a sweeping gun control law that strengthened background checks, helped states put in place red flag laws and boosted mental health programs. Here’s a look at what the order does – and doesn’t – do.How are gun companies advertising to kids?Advertisements for firearms are not as ubiquitous as ones for cars or snack foods, and those that do exist are mostly found in places such as gun magazines. Most of these ads are aimed at adults because people under 18 cannot legally buy a gun.Advertisements explicitly meant to appeal to children are rare, but invocations of militarism, patriotism and gender stereotypes that gun manufacturers have long leaned on are being aimed at younger audiences above the age of 18, according to a 2022 Senate joint economic committee report.Gun manufacturers and retailers are also relying on paid gun social media influencers to put their wares in front of new audiences, as a way to skirt tech conglomerates Meta and Google’s ban on ads by gun companies. In July, California became the first state in the US to ban gun manufacturers from marketing their weapons to minors.What’s in Biden’s executive order?Biden’s executive action will result in a report that analyzes the gun industry’s broader gun marketing practices. In his announcement of the order, Biden emphasized examining advertisements aimed at youth and marketing that incorporates military imagery and themes.Before the president tapped the FTC to look into gun ads, Democratic senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts introduced the protecting kids from gun marketing act, which would require the FTC to ban gun companies from advertising to kids. Under the bill, gun companies would be prohibited from using cartoon characters, memes, images of children holding guns, or firearms designed for children in advertising, and from offering branded merchandise to kids.“There are restrictions on cigarette and tobacco advertising, on alcohol advertising, and on cannabis advertising, yet the firearms industry is not subject to any specific restrictions or limitations on their marketing practices,” said a press release announcing the bill.Markey cited WEE1’s marketing for their JR-15 as an example of the type of ads the new policy would potentially prohibit.What comes next?Because Republicans currently control the House, and Democrats only have a slim majority in the Senate, any legislation restricting the way gunmakers advertise is unlikely to reach Biden’s desk. Markey’s proposed legislation does, however, put pressure on tech companies to keep gun ads off their platforms.It is unclear if a report resulting from Biden’s executive order, if published, will lead to new guidelines for the gun industry and their advertising practices. The FTC did not respond to requests for comments.Adhering to Biden’s request means the FTC would, for the first time, analyze and report the way gun manufacturers advertise. The agency currently has guidelines on marketing aimed at minors and closely monitors online ads for privacy violations. However, the agency does not have any explicit guardrails to inform the ways gunmakers and adjacent companies and organizations, including youth shooting sport programs, market to young audiences. More

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      Why did the $212bn tech-lender Silicon Valley bank abruptly collapse?

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      The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank continues to reverberate, hitting bank stocks, revealing hidden stresses, knocking on to Credit Suisse, and setting off a political blame-game.Why the $212bn tech-lender abruptly collapsed, triggering the most significant financial crisis since 2008, has no single answer. Was it, as some argue, the result of Trump-era regulation rollbacks, risk mismanagement at the bank, sharp interest rate rises after a decade of ultra-low borrowing costs, or perhaps a combination of all three?Federal investigations have begun and lawsuits have been filed and no doubt new issues at the bank will emerge. But for now, here are the main reasons experts believed SVB failed.Trump rollbacksThe Vermont senator Bernie Sanders argues that the culprit was an “absurd” 2018 law, supported by Congress and signed by Donald Trump, that undid some of the credit requirements imposed under the Dodd-Frank banking legislation brought in after the 2008 banking crisis.Dodd-Frank required that banks with at least $50bn in assets – banks considered “systemically important” – undergo an annual Federal Reserve “stress test” and maintain certain levels of capital as well as plans for a living will if they failed.SVB’s chief executive, Greg Becker, argued before Congress in 2015 that the $50bn threshold (SVB held $40bn at the time) was unnecessary and his bank, like other “mid-sized” or regional banks, “does not present systemic risks”.Trump said the new bill went a “long way toward fixing” Dodd-Frank, which he called a “job-killer”. But the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) warned before the bill passed that raising the threshold would “increase the likelihood that a large financial firm with assets of between $100bn and $250bn would fail.” Joe Biden says he wants Trump’s rollbacks reversed.SVB’s managementThe bank didn’t have a chief risk officer (CRO) for some of 2022, a situation that’s now being looked at by the Federal Reserve, according to reports. SVB’s previous CRO, Laura Izurieta, left the company in October but stopped performing the role in April. Another was appointed in December.Early SVB shareholder lawsuits are said to be looking at the key vacancy, especially as the board’s risk committee was meeting frequently before the bank collapsed.“It means perhaps management was hiding something or didn’t want to disclose something, or had disagreements over the risks it was taking,” said Reed Kathrein, a lawyer specializing in shareholder lawsuits, to Bloomberg.“This isn’t greed, necessarily, at the bank level,” said Danny Moses, an investor who predicted the 2008 financial crisis in the book and movie The Big Short. “It’s just bad risk management. It was complete and utter bad risk management on the part of SVB.”SVB and Signature, the second mid-size bank to fail last week, have also been accused of prioritizing social justice over financial management. The Republican House oversight committee chairman, James Comer, called SVB “one of the most woke banks”.The narrative fed into a larger conflict over ESG, or environmental, social and corporate governance-driven investing, that has become a target of conservatives.But the bank’s loans to community and environmental projects were not central to its collapse nor are its diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies dissimilar to other banks. The argument also fails to take into account all the banks that existed in 2008, before DEI or “woke” became a part of corporate or political discourse.Nevertheless the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, continued on that theme, telling Fox News, that SVB was “so concerned with DEI and politics and all kinds of stuff. I think that really diverted from them focusing on their core mission.”Inflation and interest ratesSVB had benefited from from more than a decade of “zero money” interest rates as billions poured into the bank via tech venture capital. Looking for some kind of a return, it put the money into long-term US treasury bonds. But when interest rates started sharply rising last year, and depositors demanded higher returns, the bank was forced to sell some of those bonds at a loss. When news of that hit social media, tech investors panicked, triggering a classic bank run. From there, it took 36 hours for the second-biggest bank failure in US history to materialize.Before the collapses, investors had been expecting the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates by a quarter or half a percentage point when the governors meet next week. Now central bankers are in a bind: continue raising rates to tame inflation still running at 6% and risk another break in the financial system, or continue tightening money supply.The treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, gave a hint on Thursday when she told the Senate finance committee that “more work needs to be done” on inflation.What happens next?Financial jitters eased on Thursday after Wall Street rode to the rescue and propped up First Republic, another mid-sized bank whose customers were fleeing. But the respite may be brief.Goldman Sachs has raised its prediction for a recession in the next year to 35%, partly as a result of lending drops by regional banks.In the meantime it seems clear that investigators are likely to uncover more problems at the banks as their inquiries continue. Those revelations may trigger more concerns from depositors and investors.On Thursday, the Republican house financial services chairman, Patrick McHenry, said people should hold off on assigning blame for the collapse of SVB and Signature while Congress and watchdogs investigate.“When people jump to these conclusions at this stage of the game – a week in on this really stressed moment for our banking system – it’s unhelpful and quite politically hackish,” McHenry told Bloomberg. More

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      Two decades later, it feels as if the US is trying to forget the Iraq war ever happened | Stephen Wertheim

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      Two decades ago, the United States invaded Iraq, sending 130,000 US troops into a sovereign country to overthrow its government. Joe Biden, then chairman of the Senate foreign relations committee, voted to authorize the war, a decision he came to regret.Today another large, world-shaking invasion is under way. Biden, now the US president, recently traveled to Warsaw to rally international support for Ukraine’s fight to repel Russian aggression. After delivering his remarks, Biden declared: “The idea that over 100,000 forces would invade another country – since world war II, nothing like that has happened.”The president spoke these words on 22 February, within a month of the 20th anniversary of the US military’s opening strike on Baghdad. The White House did not attempt to correct Biden’s statement. Reporters do not appear to have asked about it. The country’s leading newspapers, the New York Times and Washington Post, ran stories that quoted Biden’s line. Neither of them questioned its veracity or noted its hypocrisy.Did the Iraq war even happen?While Washington forgets, much more of the world remembers. The flagrant illegality of bypassing the United Nations: this happened. The attempt to legitimize “pre-emption” (really prevention, a warrant to invade countries that have no plans to attack anyone): this mattered, including by handing the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, a pretext he has used. Worst of all was the destruction of the Iraqi state, causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and nearly 4,600 US service members, and radiating instability and terrorism across the region.The Iraq war wasn’t the only law- or country-breaking military intervention launched by the US and its allies in recent decades. Kosovo, Afghanistan and Libya form a tragic pattern. But the Iraq war was the largest, loudest and proudest of America’s violent debacles, the most unwarranted, and the least possible to ignore. Or so it would seem. Biden’s statement is only the latest in a string of attempts by US leaders to forget the war and move on.Barack Obama, who came into the White House vowing to end the “mindset” that brought America into Iraq, decided that ending the war was good enough. “Now, it’s time to turn the page,” he said upon ordering the withdrawal of US forces from the country in 2011. Three years later, he sent troops back to Iraq to fight the Islamic State, which had risen out of the chaos of the invasion and civil war. It fell to Donald Trump to harness public outrage over not only the war but also the refusal of elites to hold themselves accountable and make policy changes commensurate with the scale of the disaster.Tempting though it is to look forward, not backward, the two are not mutually exclusive. And it might not be possible to reach a better future without understanding and appreciating why past attempts failed.Ukrainians are now paying part of the price for western misdeeds. Russia’s invasion was an act of blatant aggression. Moscow violated the UN charter and seeks to annex territory as part of an explicitly imperial project (in this respect unlike America’s war in Iraq). Few people outside Russia have genuine enthusiasm for Putin’s effort. Yet, much of the world sees the conflict as a proxy war between Russia and the west rather than a fight for sovereignty and freedom.According to the Economist Intelligence Unit, approximately 58% of the world’s population (excluding the two direct belligerents) lives in countries that are either neutral toward the war or lean toward Russia’s side. Over the past year, support for the west’s position has shrunk rather than grown: a handful of countries initially critical of Russia have shifted toward neutrality. Just last month, 39 countries did not support a UN resolution demanding that Russia withdraw its forces from Ukraine. Those that took a neutral stance, including China and India, represented an estimated 62% of the population of the global south.Russia has not become the international pariah that western leaders claim it to be. Its economy has mostly weathered international sanctions, in part because the only countries willing to impose them are wealthy strategic partners of the US.In this context, the White House should think about the message that Biden sent the world when he acted as though the war in Iraq never happened. When the US commits aggression, he implied, America’s misdeeds do not count. Or perhaps, in saying that “since world war II, nothing like that has happened”, Biden was thinking only of Europe but neglected to say so – in which case he treated the west’s history as synonymous with the world’s, effacing the experience of most of humanity. Either way, Biden conveyed that support for Ukraine is mere power politics, not a principled cause in which all countries have a stake.Hypocrisy alone is not the problem. Hypocrisy is all around us. What matters is whether we are working to build a better world.When Biden memory-holes the obvious, he is not doing so. He is perpetuating the hegemonic project that brought the US into Iraq in the first place. He sends a similar message when he routinely frames the Ukraine war as a struggle of democracy against autocracy – as though countries deserve support against an unprovoked invasion only if the nature of their government meets with Washington’s approval.Countries outside the west have an interest in defending the principle that sovereignty should be respected. They have no interest in defending the principle that sovereignty is conditional. If Washington still claims the right to judge who is sovereign, then has it really renounced the right invade Iraq after all?The US should admit past errors frankly and demonstrate, through words and deeds, that it has learned difficult lessons. No time is too late to build a better world. But even as the US takes the right side of the latest war, it is far from clear what lessons it has learned.
      Stephen Wertheim is a senior fellow in the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a visiting lecturer at Yale Law School and Catholic University. He is the author of Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of US Global Supremacy More