Biden Should Not Have Apologized

Ted Galen Carpenter Vice President Joe Biden has reportedly apologized to the leaders of Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, and other Middle East countries for his previous comments that they had, perhaps inadvertently, supported Sunni extremists in the Syrian civil war.  The uproar occurred because Biden had stated that Turkey, Qatar, and the UAE had given “billions of dollars and tens of thousands of tons of weapons” to Syrian Sunni fighters seeking to overthrow Bashar al-Assad’s regime.  Those governments, he charged, had been willing to give aid to “anyone who would fight 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.”   It is unfortunate that Biden felt the need to retract those comments, because his criticism was quite accurate.  As I point out in a recent article on Aspenia Online,  the rise of ISIS is the latest phase of a regional struggle for power between Sunnis and Shiites.  The primary arena is Syria, where a fight rages between largely Sunni insurgents and Assad’s governing coalition of Alawites (a Shiite offshoot), Christians, and other religious minorities who are petrified about possible Sunni domination.  Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, and the UAE enthusiastically backed the insurgents, and although the Obama administration might prefer to forget its role in the rise of ISIS, the United States provid...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - Category: American Health Authors: Source Type: blogs