Politics & Power Quote by Jacques Verges

Verges is doing what he did best: turning the courtroom’s demand for moral clarity into a hall of mirrors. The line reads like a legal brief written with a switchblade. By calling the U.S.-Iraq relationship “so close” that you can’t “judge one” without interrogating the other, he’s attacking the clean separation that makes prosecution feel righteous: us as adjudicators, them as the accused. It’s a refusal to let the audience enjoy the comfort of distance.

The phrasing is sly. “At least the other” sounds modest, procedural, almost boring - as if he’s merely asking for due diligence. But the subtext is accusatory: if you’re going to put Iraq on trial, you’re also putting American policy on trial, because alliance, support, and intervention create shared authorship. The weird slip into “what he has done” personifies governments as culpable individuals, a courtroom trick that collapses bureaucratic complexity into moral agency. Someone did things; someone benefited.

Context matters because Verges built a career on what he called the “rupture” defense: don’t plead for mercy inside the system, expose the system’s violence. In the shadow of U.S. involvement in Iraq - from backing regimes when convenient to later punishing them when politics shifts - his point is less about exonerating Baghdad than about indicting the selective memory of power. The intent is to poison the prosecution’s moral high ground, forcing a question that’s embarrassing precisely because it’s obvious: who gets to be a criminal, and who gets to be a partner until the partnership becomes inconvenient?