Global Research

On Sunday Vice President Joe Biden called Prince Mohamed bin Zayed, crown prince of Abu Dhabi, and apologized for telling the truth.

The previous day he called Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and did the same.

Last week during a speech delivered at the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum at the Institute of Politics at Harvard University Biden told the audience the Persian Gulf Wahhabist regimes and Turkey are responsible for supporting ISIS and al-Nusra.

Biden said in response to a question that the

“Saudis, the Emiratis, etc… were so determined to take down Assad and essentially have a proxy Sunni-Shia war, what did they do? They poured hundreds of millions of dollars and tens, thousands of tons of weapons into anyone who would fight against Assad except that the people who were being supplied were Al Nusra and Al Qaeda and the extremist elements of jihadis coming from other parts of the world. Now you think I’m exaggerating – take a look. Where did all of this go? So now what’s happening? All of a sudden everybody’s awakened because this outfit called ISIL which was Al Qaeda in Iraq, which when they were essentially thrown out of Iraq, found open space in territory in eastern Syria, work with Al Nusra who we declared a terrorist group early on and we could not convince our colleagues to stop supplying them.”

This is only part of the story. In fact, the United States, Britain and Israel have played a key role in arming and training ISIS, now the Islamic State. Direct evidence of this support emerged during congressional hearings on Benghazi when the CIA’s “rat line” arms shipment to “moderate rebels” in Syria was exposed.

As Infowars.com noted last year, ambassador Stevens, who was killed in Benghazi, was instrumental not only in facilitating weapon transfers to Syria from Libya, but also served as a key contact with the Saudis to coordinate the recruitment by Saudi Arabia of Islamic fighters from North Africa and Libya.

Moreover, the effort by the U.S., Turkey and the Gulf Emirates to support and arm radical Wahhabist factions in Syria – who are the only effective fighters in the proxy war to unseat al-Assad – has been widely documented in the European press while generally ignored in the United States.

Back in 2007, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalistSeymour Hersh sketched out the rationale for the collaboration between the U.S., Britain, Israel, Turkey, and the Gulf Emirates:

To undermine Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, the Bush Administration has decided, in effect, to reconfigure its priorities in the Middle East. In Lebanon, the Administration has coöperated with Saudi Arabia’s government, which is Sunni, in clandestine operations that are intended to weaken Hezbollah, the Shiite organization that is backed by Iran. The U.S. has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda.

This plan began in the 1980s with a policy paper written by Israeli scholar Oded Yinon – A Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties – and was updated in 1996 by the establishment’s neocon faction in A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm.

“Israel can shape its strategic environment, in cooperation with Turkey and Jordan, by weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria. This effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq — an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right — as a means of foiling Syria’s regional ambitions,” the document states.

Joe Biden, notorious for his foot-in-the-mouth commentary, inflicted minor albeit temporary damage on the effort to portray ISIS as an arch enemy instead of what it really is – a key component in the effort to take down al-Assad and confront Iran.

Despite Biden’s embarrassing admission the larger agenda – removing Bashar al-Assad and his Shia government – remains paramount. This will be accomplished by supposedly attacking the Islamic State mercenary army, said to number around 30,000 fighters. This relatively small army allegedly controls 25 percent of Syrian territory and a third of Iraq.

Despite air strikes and hyperbolic speeches by Obama and British PM David Cameron, ISIS recently took control of Abu Ghraib and key cities in the Anbar province. It is now reportedly a mile outside Baghdad.

The U.S., Israel, Britain, the Gulf Emirates, Jordan and Turkey share an overriding agenda – to exacerbate the Sunni-Shia conflict and balkanize the region along ethnic and religious lines. This will continue and criticism of the effort will be deflected on the Saudis and Qataris who are impervious and in a position to force an American vice president to grovel at their feet.