Joe Biden Caught In A Debate Lie About Arming Islamic Jihadists In Syria

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Written By:
Rob Port

Oct 15, 2012
10:15am

Ouch:

In last week’s vice presidential debate, Joe Biden asserted that the United States was working to isolate al-Qaeda in Syria by ensuring that aid was directed to moderate elements of the Syrian opposition. “We are working hand and glove 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,” Biden declared. …

Well, according to a report in this morning’s New York Times, Biden’s statement was not true.

“Most of the arms shipped at the behest of Saudi Arabia and Qatar to supply Syrian rebel groups fighting the government of Bashar al-Assad are going to hard-line Islamic jihadists, and not the more secular opposition groups that the West wants to bolster, according to American officials and Middle Eastern diplomats,” the Times reports.

The paper quotes one U.S. official as saying, “The opposition groups that are receiving the most of the lethal aid are exactly the ones we don’t want to have it,” adding that “officials, voicing frustration, say there is no central clearinghouse for the shipments, and no effective way of vetting the groups that ultimately receive them.”

In other words, what Biden said was false. Worse yet, Biden knew his statement was untrue when he said it. According to the Times, “President Obama and other senior officials are aware [of this conclusion] from classified assessments of the Syrian conflict that has now claimed more than 25,000 lives,” adding the intelligence assessments “casts into doubt whether the White House’s strategy of minimal and indirect intervention in the Syrian conflict is accomplishing its intended purpose of helping a democratic-minded opposition topple an oppressive government, or is instead sowing the seeds of future insurgencies hostile to the United States.”

It would be better not to intervene at all in places like Syria than to intervene like this. The lesson we should have learned after we armed the Mujahideen in their fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan only to seem them use that training to plot attacks against US interests is that the enemy of our enemy is not always our friend.