It was apparently a "gaffe" of the kind we had forgotten since George W Bush stepped down from the US presidency in early 2009. During a speech in Dallas last week, he momentarily confused Russian President Vladimir Putin's current war of aggression against Ukraine and his own war of aggression against Iraq in 2003.
Bush observed that a lack of checks and balances in Russia had allowed "one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq" I mean, Ukraine. Iraq too. Anyway" I'm 75."
It sounded like another "Bushism" - a verbal slip-up - for which the 43rd president was famous. Just like the time he boasted that people "misunderestimated" him, or when he warned that America's enemies "never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people - and neither do we".
Maybe that explains why his audience laughed. Or maybe not, given how uncomfortable the laughter sounded.
Bush certainly wanted his mistake to be seen as yet another slip-up, which is why he hurriedly blamed it on his age. The senility defence doubtless sounds a lot more plausible at a time when the incumbent president, Joe Biden, regularly loses track of what he is saying and even where he is.
The western media, in so far as it has bothered to report Bush's speech, has laughed along nervously too. It has milked the incident largely for comic effect: "Look, we can laugh at ourselves - unlike that narcissist Russian monster, Putin."
The BBC accorded Bush's comment status as a down-page brief news item. Those that gave it more attention preferred to term it a "gaffe" or an amusing "Freudian slip".
'Putin apologists'But the focus on the humour of the moment is actually part of the media's continuing war on our understanding of recent history. It is intended to deflect us, the audience, from thinking about the real significance of Bush's "gaffe".
The only reason the media is now so belatedly connecting - if very indirectly - "a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion" of Ukraine and what happened in Iraq is because of Bush's mistake.
Had it not happened, the establishment media would have continued to ignore any such comparison. And those trying to raise it would continue to be dismissed as conspiracy theorists or as apologists for Putin.
The implication of what Bush said - even for those mockingly characterising it in Freudian terms - is that he and his co-conspirator, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, are war criminals and that they should be on trial at the Hague for invading and occupying Iraq.
Everything the current US administration is saying against Putin, and every punishment meted out on Russia and ordinary Russians, can be turned around and directed at the United States and Britain.
Should the US not be under severe economic sanctions from the "civilised world" for what it did to Iraq? Should its sportspeople not be banned from international events? Should its billionaires not be hunted down and stripped of their assets? And should the works of its long-dead writers, artists and composers not be shunned by polite society?
And yet, the western establishment media are proposing none of the above. They are not calling for Blair and Bush to be tried for war crimes. Meanwhile, they echo western leaders in labelling what Russia is doing in Ukraine as genocide and labelling Putin as an evil madman.
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