Thank you lord for giving me back my brain.
Posted on 10/08/2014 10:24:34 AM PDT by McGruff
Vice President Joe Biden has had to apologize, twice, to two key U.S. allies in the fight against the Islamic State. It wasn’t because he lobbed false accusations at them. It was because he accidentally told some inconvenient truths.
Speaking at the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum at Harvard University late last week, Biden departed from his prepared remarks to deliver a series of broadsides against Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), three powerful members of the emerging U.S.-led coalition battling the Islamic State in both Iraq and Syria. Saudi Arabia and the UAE took part in the initial U.S. airstrikes against the group, and Riyadh has offered to host a training facility for thousands of moderate Syrian rebels. The Turkish parliament recently voted to authorize military strikes into both Syria and Iraq.
But those weren’t the parts of the three countries’ records that Biden focused on. Turkey, the U.S. vice president said, had failed to close its long border with Syria, allowing militants with loyalties to the Islamic State to easily cross the frontier and join the fight there. He said that Saudi Arabia and the UAE, meanwhile, had transferred hundreds of millions of dollars and large amounts of weaponry to a variety of Islamist militias inside Syria, including at least one with ties to al Qaeda.
The leaders of the three countries were apoplectic, but there are elements of truth in everything Biden said, particularly when it comes to Turkey, which would be a pivotal player in any serious effort to defeat the Islamic State.
Take Turkey. U.S. officials have long believed that Ankara has done virtually nothing to seal its border with Syria and has avoided taking any direct military action against the Islamic State, in part because the militants had until recently held dozens of Turkish diplomats and other citizens as hostages. The New York Times reported in September that as many as 1,000 Turks have crossed the border into Syria to fight alongside the Islamic State, along with an unspecified number of foreign fighters.
In September, when he announced the start of the current campaign against the Islamic State, U.S. President Barack Obama alluded to the border issue -- though he didn’t specifically mention Turkey -- when he stressed the need to “stem the flow of foreign fighters.”
As many as 1,000 Turks have joined the Islamic State, according to Turkish news media reports and government officials there. Recruits cite the group’s ideological appeal to disaffected youths as well as the money it pays fighters from its flush coffers. The CIA estimated last week that the group had between 20,000 and 31,500 fighters in Iraq and Syria.
Some U.S. officials hope that Turkey will be willing to do more against the Islamic State, also known as ISIL, now that the hostages have been freed and the militants appear to be potentially only days away from conquering a strategically important city on the Syrian-Turkish border.
“We have identified the tightened security at some of these borders, including the border between Turkey and Syria, as a key priority in shutting off support to ISIL and other extremists who are operating inside Syria,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest said Monday, Oct. 6.
As many as 1,000 Turks have joined the Islamic State, according to Turkish news media reports and government officials there. Recruits cite the group’s ideological appeal to disaffected youths as well as the money it pays fighters from its flush coffers.
You mean that closing a border might have some strategic advantage?
Who knew?
Oh in Washington, I see.......because in DE he is reported to be a price-gouging landlord (renting to the tax-payer-supported secret service).
Thank you lord for giving me back my brain.
That said, Biden often unintentionally speaks with a candor lacking in most Washington pols
The author confuses candor with honesty.
He’s honestly clarifying the clarifications he clarified before he was clarifying something something something ....
Honest from the standpoint that he openly shows his ignorance.
Yea, read Clarence Thomas’s autobiography and decide what a lying piece of human debris Joe Biden is.
Before Biden was vp I used to watch his votes on C-Span. They were 100% of the time with the Democrats.
No one is right 100% of the time. That proves he is not honest. He’s a party man.
I remember when his middle name was “the plagiarist”.
Joe Biden is the only honest man in Washington? The writer has over-estimated the total number of honest men in Washington by at least 1
Agreed!...An honest idiot!
Oddly, and amusingly, that may be true. He spouts off such idiocy that surely the lies would have come out by now.
Diarrhea of the mouth does not a good liar make.
Joe Biden is a hoot! Recall the speech where he exclaims “stand up a Chuck, let’s have a big hand for Chuck”, and there sits Chuck in a wheel chair. Truth be known they ought to book Biden to host SNL.
Yeah, truth be told, almost every Biden “gaff” has been when he told the bald-faced truth.
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