Speaking at a conference hosted by The American Conservative and the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, Ohio’s Senator J.D. Vance addressed the decimation of the Iraqi Christian population caused by the U.S. intervention in that country.  

“Traditional neoconservative foreign policy keeps on leading to the genocide of Christians,” said Vance.

Vance argued that the conflict set back the interests of both Americans and Middle Eastern Christians: “Not only did we create a proxy for Iran in the Middle East at the cost of thousands of American lives, we also precipitated the genocide of one of the oldest Christian communities in the entire world.”

Vance observed that the Bush administration, using the false claims that Iraq had WMDs, had sold the Iraq War under the guise of realism; the problem wasn’t the framing so much as the fact that the Bush administration “was just wrong.”

Vance connected the issue back to the necessity of foreign policy restraint stating “one of the best arguments we can make against American involvement is we keep on leading to the death of Christian communities [through U.S. intervention].” The senator further elaborated that the disappearance of Iraq’s Christians was “a moral scandal.” 

“We should have a foreign policy that recognizes that the moral intuitions that should most matter are the moral intuitions of American citizens,” he said.