For those of you who think Operation Fast and Furious is a conspiracy theory, you’ll be more inclined to believe it when you read that the President of the United States of America is supplying weapons to AL QAEDA IN SYRIA. Makes that whole giving-guns-to-Mexican-drug-cartels look like child’s play, huh?
Though the New York Times has not seen fit to report the scandal about the cover up of the assassination of our Ambassador in Libya on the front page, it has managed to conjure a bit of space to this gobsmacking report:
WASHINGTON — 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.
That conclusion, of which President Obama and other senior officials are aware from classified assessments of the Syrian conflict that has now claimed more than 25,000 lives, 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.“The opposition groups that are receiving the most of the lethal aid are exactly the ones we don’t want to have it,” said one American official familiar with the outlines of those findings, commenting on an operation that in American eyes has increasingly gone awry.
…[W]hat 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.”
If this is the assessment of our intelligence community, why did Biden say the exact opposite in the debate last week? When Biden was asked during the debate why requests for additional security in Libya were denied, he pleaded ignorance and blamed the State Department, declaring: “We weren’t told they wanted more security there.” But in the case of Syria, the Times reports, the President and his national security team were told that the aid was going to “hard-line Islamic jihadists.” Yet Biden plainly asserted aid was going to “people who deserve the help” and “free forces inside Syria” and not jihadists. It is simply implausible that, if President Obama and his top national security advisers were aware of the intelligence assessments, Biden was not.
The revelation that the Obama administration has presided over the development of an arms pipeline to al-Qaeda in Syria — and Biden’s apparently deliberate untruth about it in last week’s debate — is the latest Obama foreign policy coverup. With foreign policy on the agenda in tomorrow’s presidential debate, Mitt Romney has a golden opportunity to challenge the president on his administration’s latest national security scandal.
I know things are complicated in the Middle East and that the President doesn’t want to get involved any more than we already are. But we must shape events there. We must have a hand in getting the outcome we want. As Mitt Romney said in his speech at VMI last week, “Hope is not a strategy.”
Frankly, I can’t imagine why Romney would want to be President. What a mess to clean up. A depression and now batting clean up to get us out of another foreign policy disaster.
Barack Obama has been an utter disaster as President. January can’t come quickly enough.
