An angry John Kerry shut down a debate with a French TV presenter, saying he will not debate the Iraq war again. Darius Rochebin of French TV station LCI asked Kerry if parallels could be drawn between Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and America’s invasion of Iraq, and Kerry flat-out dismissed the idea. He said Congress gave President Bush the green light to enter Iraq because its members believed Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and posed a genuine threat.
“Sir, I’m not going to re-debate the Iraq war with you here right now. I was opposed to going in, I thought it was the wrong thing to do. But we gave the president the power, regrettably, in the Congress, based on the lie. And when we knew it was a lie, people stood up and did the right thing,” Kerry said.
The former Presidential candidate is now the US Special Presidential Envoy for Climate and is one of the world’s leading advocates for reducing carbon emissions. He has been criticized however for failing to keep track of his own. Republican Senators Tom Cotton and Shelley Moore Capito recently asked the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to calculate the carbon footprint of Kerry and his team as they travel the world urging others to decrease their carbon output. The Senators found out that Kerry’s office does not keep such a record.
Last November, Mr. Kerry was forced to take a commercial flight to the Cop27 event in Egypt following revelations that he prefers to travel by private jet, emitting around 40 times more carbon than the average commercial flyer. Furthermore, the Kerry family has owned and operated a private jet company, from which the climate envoy benefited financially.
When a reporter in Iceland questioned the environmental impact of private flying, Kerry replied, “If you offset your carbon – it’s the only choice for somebody like me who is traveling the world to win this battle.”
