Biden not wrong on Middle East, Coats says
Sen. Dan Coats, R-Ind., stuck up Tuesday for Vice President Joe Biden, who has apologized in recent days for saying U.S. allies in the Middle East had provided support to radical groups – including the Islamic State – that are fighting against the Syrian government.
“I think he’s trying to be honest,” Coats said in an interview about Biden’s original comments.
Asked whether he thought Biden’s remarks were accurate, Coats said, “Yes, I do.”
Biden said last week at the Harvard Kennedy School that the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and other Mideast nations had supplied money and weapons to Syrian rebels that ultimately reached extremists, including the Islamic State – which has beheaded two American journalists and is threatening to do the same to an Indianapolis man it has detained.
Biden also said Turkey had allowed foreign fighters to cross its border into Syria.
Coats, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said Biden’s remarks are “what, frankly, our military commanders in uniform would like to say.”
He made it sound as if Biden had little choice but to apologize to Turkey and the UAE.
“If you’re a vice president and you take a position different than the president, then the president is going to ask you to step down,” he said at Fortezza Coffee in downtown Fort Wayne.
Coats was critical of President Barack Obama for not insisting that Middle Eastern allies take the lead role, including the deployment of ground troops, in ongoing U.S. coalition airstrikes against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.
“This is their family,” he said about largely Muslim nations in the region. “There’s a dysfunction in this family. The family has to deal with it.
“And so far, I’ve seen rhetoric” by those nations instead of action, Coats said.
Biden’s comments came up Monday during an IPFW panel discussion on the Islamic State, according to panelist James Toole, an associate professor of political science at IPFW.
“It is true that a lot of our allies in this air campaign had been abetting the rise of ISIS and are now paying the price for it,” Toole said Tuesday in a telephone interview, using an acronym for the group also known as Islamic State.
That aid to rebels has ranged from “robust support” to “just looking the other way,” Toole said.
He said he traveled this summer to Turkey, where residents described airline flights from Istanbul to the Syrian and Iraqi borders as half-full “of young men with very little luggage and a one-way ticket.
“So it was obvious to a lot of people where a lot of these guys were going, and there was no concerted effort to stop them,” Toole said. “There may not have been any concerted effort to arm and equip them, but Turkey clearly knew that this kind of thing was going on, as did other countries who are now aligned with us.”
Toole said Biden’s remarks might benefit the White House by sending a message to Middle East allies that they need to step up.