Biden’s third apology to an Islamic country since last week, and all three times he was correct.
Via The Hill:
Vice President Biden is now reaching out to leaders from Saudi Arabia to apologize for and clarify comments he made during a foreign policy town hall last week, a senior official told The New York Times.
The outreach follows similar efforts to smooth the waters with leaders in Turkey and the United Arab Emirates over the weekend, as the notoriously outspoken vice president sought to stem the fallout from his blunt assessment of the Middle East.
In his remarks, Biden insinuated that the Saudis had supplied jihadi groups fighting Syrian president Bashar Assad, including al Qaeda.
“They were so determined to take down Assad and have a proxy Sunni-Shia war, they poured hundreds of millions of dollars and thousands of tons of weapons into anyone who would fight against Assad,” Biden said during a forum at Harvard University. “Except that the people who were being supplied were (Jabhat) al Nusra and al Qaeda, and the extremist elements of jihadis coming from other parts of the world.”
He also slammed the country’s human rights record, drawing comparisons to Soviet leader Joseph Stalin.
“We knew Stalin was no-good S.O.B. from the beginning,“ Biden said. “But there is a thing called self-interest.”