Obama Administration Arming Terrorists

In the Vice Presidential debate last week, Joe Biden said that we were working with our allies in the Middle East to make sure that the Syrian Rebels were armed to take down Assad.  When Paul Ryan responded that, had there been a plan, we could have made sure those groups who share our values in Syria were getting the weapons instead of Islamist and Terrorist groups like Al Qaeda, Biden responded:

“We are in the process now — and have been for months — in making sure that help, humanitarian aid, as well as other aid and training is getting to those forces that we believe, the Turks believe, the Jordanians believe, the Saudis believe are the free forces inside of Syria. That is underway.”

Like every other assertion Biden made during the debate, it was a complete lie.  According to the New York Times (link goes to Washington Post opinion piece), of all places, not only are "most of the weapons shipped at the behest of Saudi Arabia and Qatar... going to hard-line Islamic jihadists," but that Biden knew, or should have known, that his statement was completely false.  That is, he lied.

Barack Obama and his Administration, who lied about, and covered up the nature of, the Al Qaeda attack on our Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, is now supplying arms to terrorists.  The axiom, "The enemy of my enemy is my friend," is not actually true.  At most the enemy of my enemy is tactically useful.  It is true that my allies will be enemies of my enemy, but the relationship is reversed; they're my friend first.  In this case we are arming groups who, while they do hate Assad, hate us and want us all dead.

Worse, once they succeed in toppling Assad, if we don't then step in somehow to ensure that the secular groups take control of the country, the Islamists will hold another country making our ally Israel even less safe.

In the Cold War, America and our allies pursued a "containment" strategy.  That is, whenever the Soviets wanted to move into a country, even by proxy, we did everything we could to prevent it.  We knew the Soviets were a danger to us, and would not hesitate to attack if they ever thought they held a true advantage.  This is also what was behind SDI and MAD.

Unfortunately, Liberals are so wedded to their ideology that they cannot see how that applies here.  The Islamists, as with the Soviets, hate us and seek our destruction.  The Islamists, as with the Soviets, are seeking to expand their power until they are capable of opposing us.  Unlike the Soviets, the Islamists are much more likely to attack if they think our forces are merely equal, instead of waiting until they have a dependable advantage.

The same containment strategy we used against Soviet Russia would not work against the Middle East.  It could, however, be a template on which we based our opposition to the growth of the Islamist states.  Unfortunately, Barack Obama and Joe Biden are more concerned with apologizing for America's imagined faults than seeing to it that her citizens are safe.