Vice President Joe Biden took issue with President Obama’s decision to declare a red-line in Syria, although he said he’s glad Obama never enforced the threat because there was no way to dramatically change the course of the civil war there without committing ground troops.
“Look, I am not a big fan of red lines,” Biden told a crowd at a Council on Foreign Relations forum Wednesday night. “I am not a proponent of laying down markers unless you’ve thought through the second and third and fourth step that you’re going to have to take, and almost assuredly will have to take in order to accomplish your initial goal.”
Biden appeared to know he was wading into controversial waters for criticizing one of what critics consider Obama’s greatest foreign policy blunders during his time in office.
Before he went down that road, he prefaced the remarks with a self-effacing joke about his tendency toward gaffes.
“Let me explain what I mean … I choose my words carefully here because I still have a ‘v’ in front of my name … and I’m not good at choosing my words sometimes,” he said with a laugh.
“No one ever doubts that I mean what I say. The problem is that sometimes I say all that I mean,” he added with a chuckle.
After remarking that he didn’t agree with Obama laying down the red-line gauntlet with Syrian leader Bashar Assad, Biden quickly said he agreed with Obama’s decision not to launch airstrikes or go in with ground troops.
“We can easily say we should have bombed and gone in and taken out their air defense systems … well, y’know, big nations can’t bluff,” he said.
“If you do that, then what’s the next step … because you know what’s going to happen,” he said. “What’s going to happen is exactly what was happening any way.”
“The idea that anyone in this room thinks that we can put humpty dumpty back together again” in Syria “or ever thought we could in the outset in any near term, I would challenge your judgment.”
He then insisted he isn’t just “defending my president.”
“I don’t think there was any clear path for a significant use of military force,” he said.
Another reason he cited is that the American people weren’t behind the idea of a major military push in Syria or sending in ground troops.
“No foreign policy can be sustained without the informed consent of the American people,” he said. “There wasn’t a single solitary member of Congress, including John McCain, my friend, who would support any American troops on the ground.”
“Let’s not have self-imposed amnesia here,” he concluded.
President Obama, earlier this year in an interview with the Atlantic, said he is “very proud” of his decision not to follow through with this red-line threat in Syria, a moment in which he says he broke with the “Washington playbook.”
At that moment, all the forces of Washington and international pressure were bearing down on him to launch airstrikes, he said. Instead of giving in, he said he hit the “pause button,” a decision he knew would cost him politically but one he believed was in the country’s best interest.
