Biden Doesn’t Know Foreign Policy Very Well
Most observers missed what could very well be the gaffe of the night Thursday: Senator Joe Biden contended that “[w]hen we kicked — along with France, we kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon, I said and Barack said, ‘Move NATO forces in there. Fill the vacuum, because if you don’t know — if you don’t, Hezbollah will control it.’ Now what’s happened? Hezbollah is a legitimate part of the government in the country immediately to the north of Israel.”
As anyone who knows a bit about the Middle East, and especially Lebanon, Hizbullah and Syria knows, the above is proof that Biden truly knows nothing about this subject.
Michael J. Totten, one of the American journalists who actually know what they’re talking about when it comes to the Middle East, quickly explained that Biden was lying, distorting and displaying a profound lack of knowledge about the region:
What on Earth is he talking about? The United States and France may have kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon in an alternate universe, but nothing even remotely like that ever happened in this one.
Nobody – nobody – has ever kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon. Not the United States. Not France. Not Israel. And not the Lebanese. Nobody.
Joe Biden has literally no idea what he’s talking about.
It’s too bad debate moderator Gwen Ifill didn’t catch him and ask a follow up question: When did the United States and France kick Hezbollah out of Lebanon?
The answer? Never. And did Biden and Senator Barack Obama really say NATO troops should be sent into Lebanon? When did they say that? Why would they say that? They certainly didn’t say it because NATO needed to prevent Hezbollah from returning–since Hezbollah never went anywhere.
I tried to chalk this one up as just the latest of Biden’s colorful gaffes. Did he mean to say “we kicked Syria out of Lebanon?” But that wouldn’t make any more sense. First of all, the Lebanese kicked Syria out of Lebanon. Not the United States, and not France. But he clearly meant to say Hezbollah, not Syria, because he correctly notes just a few sentences later that Hezbollah is part of Lebanon’s government. He wasn’t talking about Syria. He was talking about Hezbollah all the way through, at the beginning, in the middle, and at the end of his outlandish assertion.
Rick Moran added:
Joe Biden – or any rational human being on this planet anyway – never recommended that NATO be dispatched to “fill the vacuum.” It is a lie. If it had been proposed. Colin Powell would have been laughed out of the room – something we should do to Biden at this point because he compounded his gaffe by evidently believing that not having NATO as a buffer between Israel and Hezb’allah – an absolute impossibility mind you – led to the ascension of Hezb’allah in Lebanon as a political power.
Where has Biden been for the last 20 years – at least since the Taif Accords were signed in 1989 which gave Hezb’allah a free hand in the southern part of the country and then pressuring the Lebanese government to formally designate them as “the resistance” to Israel? Hezb’allah’s rise is directly related to Iran’s funding of their proxy to the tune of around $250 million a year.
Hizbullah has been in Lebanon for decades. It is more than a terrorist organization; it’s also an organization that simply helps people. Sourthern Lebanon is poor. Hizbullah helps the people who live there financially; they receive money, food, if they have a problem with their home Hizbullah steps in, and so forth. They have been running this ‘charity’ part of the organization for just as long as the terrorist arm. This part of the organization has played an important role in Southern Lebanon for decades and have truly literally never been kicked out by anyone.
Combine that with the other lies and idiotic remarks in those two sentences, and Biden has proven himself to be completely incompetent and uninformed when it comes to the Middle East. This should seriously disqualify him from ever speaking on the subject of the Middle East again. This man has played a prominent role in the U.S. Senate for years, and pretends to be one of the leading Democratic figures on foreign policy. That’s just pathetic.
This reminds me of the results a graduate student got when he questioned the Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs about notable world events and personalities. Out of 20 questions the most any of them got right was 3 and one of the "misses" was the fact that ALL of them believed Jonas Savimbi (of the UNITAS rebel group in Angola before his death and was somewhat supported by the U.S. Intelligence agencies) was the leader of the African National Congress (Nelson Mandela’s baby!) Geez, who DO you vote for? Or as Robert Duvall said in the movie "The Great Santini" while playing the character, "God, God why did you put me in this world with such idiots!"