Obama’s Syrian ‘Fast and Furious’

Marc Thiessen

Imagine if the Obama administration participated in the creation of an arms pipeline to al Qaeda in Syria – a “Fast and Furious” program running Saudi and Qatari weapons to our terrorist enemies in the Middle East. Then imagine that Vice President Joe Biden looked the American people in the eye during the vice presidential debate last week, and lied about it.

It would make Susan Rice’s blaming the Benghazi attack on a YouTube video pale by comparison.

Yet that is precisely what has happened. The New York Times reported on its front page Monday:

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. (Emphasis added).

It is scandal enough that a gun-running program, in which American officials are helping to vet the recipients, is sending weapons to al Qaeda-linked terrorists. But the Times story completely ignores the deeper scandal here: In last week’s vice presidential debate, Joe Biden lied about it — twice!

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