Former US president George Bush accidentally mistook Iraq for Ukraine in a recent speech at the George W. Bush Institute at Southern Methodist University.

Bush was in the process of condemning the act of one man to launch a “brutal” and “wholly unjustified” military invasion, and then proceeded to say “of Iraq,” before stopping short and correcting himself.

“I mean, of Ukraine,” he said.

The audience laughed after the former US president reminded them that he is 75 years of age.

The context implied a Freudian slip, as in the lead up to his gaffe, he had stated that “Russian elections are rigged, political opponents are imprisoned otherwise eliminated from participating in the electoral process, the result is the absence of checks and balances in Russia …” before attempting to condemn the Russian special military operation in Ukraine.

Several years after the US invasion of Iraq, the war on Iraq was revealed to have been based on false pretenses.

The war resulted in the deaths of over one million Iraqis, and plunged the country into instability and poverty.

Due to the use of depleted uranium shells and other chemical weapons by the US military, high rates of horrific birth defects were consistently reported in Iraq.

The rise of ISIS also comes as a result of US policy in the region.

Declassified Defense Intelligence Agency documents from 2012 show how the White House knew that the FSA, the main insurgents in Syria, consisted of “the Salafists, the Muslim Brotherhood and AQI [Al-Qaeda in Iraq].”

The documents also showed that the US accepted these militant groups and had hoped for a “Salafist principality” to emerge in eastern Syria.

Salafism is an ideology similar to Wahhabism, which believes in shedding the blood of those who do not agree with their version of Islam. Various militant groups, such as ISIS and Al-Qaeda, ascribe to the same ideology.

Salafism and Wahhabism are considered to be a deviation from true Islam by the majority of Muslims, whether Sunni or Shia.

Iraq has also been mired in political turmoil in the aftermath of the US invasion, with a stalemate currently blocking the formation of a new Iraqi government.

This comes seven months after elections that were beset by allegations of fraud and illegal interference by the US and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) member states.