Watch: Kirby Throws Own US Military Under The Bus While Trying To Defend Israel
An interesting and somewhat disturbing scene played out in the White House press briefing room last week when national security spokesman John Kirby was asked about alleged Israeli war crimes in Gaza. Criticisms of US policy from the press pool have grown more intense as Israel's Rafah operation presses forward.
Kirby essentially threw the US military under the bus by suggesting American troops have done worse things than what Israel's military is doing in Gaza. Kirby was initially asked by a reporter what the consequences would be "if there were an American strike on a legitimate terrorist target that ended resulting with 45 civilian deaths and some 200 others injured." Watch the exchange play out:
John Kirby on air strikes: “We did the same thing”#Afghanistan #Gaza pic.twitter.com/HOFqr1M42F
— Michele (@purely_Michele) May 29, 2024
Kirby then replied, "I can't answer a hypothetical like that."
"But we have conducted airstrikes in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, where tragically we caused civilian casualties," he continued.
"We did the same thing. We owned up to it. We investigated it. And we tried to make changes... We tried to learn from it to make changes so that those set of mistakes wouldn't happen again," Kirby continued, in what was at best a deeply awkward defense of Israel.
A lot of online observers highlighted that in trying to defend a foreign country and make it look good amid mounting international criticism, he took a swipe at his own American armed forces.
Kirby may have been referring to an August 2021 drone strike in Kabul that killed an aid worker along with nine members of his family. The Pentagon said it was targeting ISIS-K amid the chaotic US withdrawal from Afghanistan, but among the dead were seven children.
Throughout the prior more than two decade-long US occupation of Afghanistan, there also had been several instances where entire wedding parties were obliterated by American airstrikes, leaving scores of civilians dead.
Reporter: How does this not violate the red line the president laid out
— Assal Rad (@AssalRad) May 28, 2024
Kirby: We don’t want to see a major operation we haven’t seen one
Reporter: How many more charred corpses does he have to see before he considers a change in policy
Kirby: I take offense at the question pic.twitter.com/9LMKl1BuAr
"We atoned for it, we learned from it, and we put in place procedures to try and prevent that from happening again," Kirby said in last week's press briefing. "And that's what our expectations would be in this case."