Oops! Vice President Joe Biden did it again. Speaking at Harvard, Obama’s widely ridiculed vice president admitted what astute analysts have known all along: The Obama administration’s “coalition” partners in the supposed battle against the Islamic State (ISIS or ISIL) played a key role in building up the threat from the start. Inadvertently, perhaps, Biden also stumbled upon another truth long accepted as fact among credible analysts: Despite all of Obama’s rhetoric, there is no such thing as a “moderate” force in Syria that the White House claims to have been supporting against Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad.
Of course, in his recent remarks, Biden omitted the giant White House role in arming and funding various jihadist forces currently rampaging and butchering their way through Iraq and Syria. So, the vice president’s comments were not quite telling the whole story. Still, in an administration infamous for deception, secrecy, paranoia, and outright lies, the partial truths spoken by Biden clearly struck a nerve — so much so that the VP is now begging Obama’s Islamic dictator “allies” in the region for forgiveness after letting the proverbial cat out of the bag.
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Following a speech last week at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, Biden was asked a question by one of the student attendees, and Biden's answer has revealed once again that Biden, like Obama, provides boundless surprises without his teleprompter. Biden, perhaps without thinking through the consequences, spilled the beans on Obama’s “anti-ISIS” coalition and its crucial role in building up al-Qaeda, its affiliates, and ultimately, the same “Islamic State” now reportedly on the outskirts of Baghdad, waiting to overrun it.
“The fact is, the ability to identify a moderate middle in Syria, um, was, uh — there was no moderate middle,” Biden said, acknowledging that history was likely to record the facts. “What my constant cry was, that our biggest problem was our allies — our allies in the region were our largest problem.” Specifically identifying the Islamist rulers of Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia, along with unspecified others such as Qatar, Biden noted that “they were so determined to take down Assad and essentially have a proxy Sunni-Shia war.”
So, with that in mind, “what did they do?” the vice president asked before providing a partial answer. “They poured hundreds of millions of dollars and tens, thousands of tons of weapons into anyone who would fight against Assad; except that the people who were being supplied were Al Nusra and Al Qaeda and the extremist elements of jihadis coming from other parts of the world.” He did not mention the role of the CIA and the State Department in the process, of course, but that has been well documented by countless sources.
“Now you think I’m exaggerating — take a look,” Biden continued. “Where did all of this go? So now what’s happening? All of a sudden everybody’s awakened because this outfit called ISIL, which was Al Qaeda in Iraq, which when they were essentially thrown out of Iraq, found open space in territory in eastern Syria, work with Al Nusra who we declared a terrorist group early on, and we could not convince our colleagues to stop supplying them.” (Emphasis added.)
Whether the Obama administration ever actually sought to persuade its autocratic “colleagues” to stop supplying the terrorists they now purport to be fighting remains unclear. However, it certainly seems unlikely — especially when considering events in Libya, where Obama, citing a United Nations resolution, openly funded, trained, armed, and provided air support to self-declared al-Qaeda leaders in the fight against “apostate” strongman Moammar Gadhafi. The bizarre war for “regime change” against a former U.S. terror-war ally even led some analysts to conclude that Obama had “switched sides” in the terror war.
Even Biden’s own 2012 comments while on the campaign trail suggest that his more recent claims about trying to convince Obama’s “allies” to stop supporting terrorists bear little resemblance to the truth. “We are working hand and glove [sic] with the Turks, with the Jordanians, with the Saudis, and with all the people in the region attempting to identify the people who deserve the help so that when Assad goes — and he will go — there will be a legitimate government that follows on, not an al Qaeda-sponsored government that follows on,” said Biden, often ridiculed as Obama’s “impeachment insurance.”
After essentially admitting that Obama’s Sunni Islamist “allies” created, armed, funded, and built up ISIS under the guise of overthrowing their relatively secular Shia counterpart in Damascus, Biden claimed that those regimes had “found the Lord” and scaled back their support for the most extreme elements of the rebellion in Syria. However, even that remains in dispute. For instance, if there are no “moderate rebels” — this is well known among credible experts, and Biden just admitted it as well — to whom is that $500 million worth of additional U.S. taxpayer-funded weapons and training for “Syrian rebels” going to flow? Biden never said.
Of course, Obama, too, has been having a tough time keeping his narrative straight regarding what his administration is supposedly doing in Syria. “I recognize the contradiction in a contradictory land and a contradictory circumstance,” Obama claimed about his almost schizophrenic-seeming foreign policy machinations in the region. In that CBS interview, he was referring to the claim that his latest round of assistance would boost Assad in its own fight to the death against ISIS, al-Qaeda, and other Sunni jihadists.
However, speaking of contradictions, Obama’s statement actually contradicted comments made the week before by his own ambassador to the UN, anti-sovereignty extremist Samantha Power. “The training also will service these troops [Obama’s so-called ‘moderate rebels’] in the same struggle that they've been in since the beginning of this conflict against the Assad regime,” Power told NBC's Meet the Press.
In other words, the training and arms for jihadist rebels is being perpetrated under the guise of fighting ISIS — a threat Obama and his allies helped create. At the same time, though, top administration officials are saying the training will help depose Assad. Contradiction would seem to be well beyond an understatement. Instead, it sounds suspiciously like ham-handed deception, which, no thanks to the increasingly discredited establishment media, is becoming more difficult for the Obama administration to conceal.
After his comments at Harvard’s Institute of Politics, Biden scrambled to apologize to the regimes he exposed, as the White House tripped over itself to “clarify” his uncharacteristically honest remarks. Over the weekend, Biden even engaged in what analysts described as “groveling,” begging Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan for forgiveness, according to news reports. Both rulers demanded an apology.
Erdogan in particular, the Islamist leader of Turkey whom Biden described as a “friend,” was steaming, saying the U.S. vice president was “history to me” unless and until Biden fixed the PR nightmare created by his comments. The Turkish president, a controversial member of NATO, also denied making a comment Biden attributed to him about Erdogan supposedly admitting that his government made “mistakes” in allowing jihadists to cross the border to wage “Holy War” in Syria.
The question that prompted Biden’s rare truth-telling moment was asked by a student who identified himself as the vice president of the student body. “In retrospect do you believe the United States should have acted earlier in Syria, and if not, why is now the right moment?” the student asked. Biden said the answer was “no,” citing the incompetence and extremism of the “rebel” forces the White House would have been supporting — and, in fact, did support through secret orders, secret arms shipments, diplomatic pressure, funding, and more.
Biden, who regularly calls for a “New World Order,” has since “clarified” his honest comments, but they illustrate an important point nonetheless. The U.S. government’s long and sordid track record of supporting terrorists and dictators before waging war on them has been an absolute disaster for Americans, Christians, and the entire world. The solution is not to pick the right terror group or despot to back or wage war on. Instead, a far better option would be following the U.S. Constitution and heeding the advice of America’s non-interventionist Founding Fathers.
Alex Newman, a foreign correspondent for The New American, is normally based in Europe. Follow him on Twitter @ALEXNEWMAN_JOU.
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