Joe Biden by Evan Osnos

Author:Evan Osnos
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2020-10-06T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

In June 2014, I paid a call on Biden in his West Wing office. Less than three years after he’d hailed the end of that goddamn war, Sunni militants calling themselves ISIS—for the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham—took control of Mosul, the country’s second-largest city, and Obama prepared to send the first of thousands of troops back to Iraq. The border between Iraq and Syria was collapsing, and two wars, once distinct, were merging.

In shirtsleeves, Biden slumped onto a blue couch in front of his desk, and gave a theatrical sigh of weariness. For years, a mix of critics on both the left and the right had pressed the administration to take greater steps in Syria, to save human life or to blunt the strategic chaos now rippling across the region. I asked him if the U.S. could have done anything differently in Syria. For fifteen seconds, Biden said nothing. Finally, he said, “Yeah, maybe.” In 2012, the White House rejected a CIA-backed plan to arm moderate rebels, for fear that it would draw the United States into the conflict and put weapons into the wrong hands. After Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, was found to have used chemical weapons in June 2013, Obama authorized the effort. America’s goal, Biden said, was to remove Assad without unleashing a sectarian civil war. But, he said, “I did not think and did not believe our allies were on the same page.” Leaders of Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and other regional powers were arming Sunni jihadists whom the United States was unwilling to support. “I believed it was critically important that the Qataris, the Emiratis, the Saudis, the Turks all decide on who were the little guys,” he said. “Who were we going to support? Were we committed to leaving in place a government intact you could rebuild, and not end up with a divided country?”

Biden recalled telling the Emir of Qatar, over breakfast in April 2013, “You guys can’t continue to just fund the most radical Islamists there.” The vice president believed that foreign powers were turning the conflict into “more of a proxy war for Sunni and Shia.” Biden said, “You can’t be sending in tens of millions of dollars to al-Nusra”—an Islamist terrorist group—“and say that ‘we’re on the same page.’ Because it’s not gonna end well.” He sat back. “To the extent that there was the possibility of having this end well, sooner, it was the failure of the ability to generate a unanimity of consensus.”

Before I could ask Biden about what had led to this moment, he offered a defense of his record of arguing against the use of force. “Look, one thing I feel certain about is that this has nothing to do with if we had thirty thousand troops there, or if we had sixty or ten.” He drew a comparison to Afghanistan. “Both of these countries, coming out of really difficult circumstances, we gave them an opportunity. A chance. Offered them space and time.”

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