Remember how former Defense Secretary Robert Gates once said that Biden has “been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades” some years ago? It was a brutal yet entirely fair criticism. Joe Biden’s history of making bad foreign policy decisions is a matter of public record, including his kowtowing to China over the spy balloon scandal (and subsequently using multi-million-dollar missiles to shoot down harmless weather balloons to compensate), the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, and his infamous opposition to the raid that resulted in the death of Osama bin Laden.
Joe Biden’s track record in foreign policy is marked by incompetence — a record that continues to this day. Recently, the Biden administration initially claimed to have successfully eliminated a high-ranking al-Qaeda figure in Syria, only to retract that statement upon discovering they had targeted the wrong person — an innocent father of ten.
“U.S. military officials are walking back claims that a recent strike in Syria killed an influential al-Qaeda figure, following assertions by the dead man’s family that he had no ties to terrorists but was a father of 10 tending to his sheep when he was slain by an American missile,” the Washington Post reported. “Lotfi Hassan Misto, 56, whose family identified him as the victim of a Hellfire missile attack on May 3, was a former bricklayer who lived quietly in this town in northwest Syria, according to interviews with his brother, son, and six others who knew him. They described a kind, hard-working man whose ‘whole life was spent poor.’”
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According to two U.S. defense officials who spoke to the Washington Post, doubts have emerged within the Pentagon regarding the identity of the individual killed in the operation overseen by U.S. Central Command. Hours after the strike, without providing evidence or identifying a specific suspect, it was claimed the strike had targeted a “senior Al Qaeda leader.”
“We are no longer confident we killed a senior AQ official,” one official said. The other, offering a slightly different view, said that “though we believe the strike did not kill the original target, we believe the person to be al-Qaeda.” Both spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss preliminary determinations of an ongoing investigation into the incident.
The use of drones in military operations has increased in recent years, in part due to the benefit of reducing the exposure of U.S. troops on the ground. But when intelligence is limited, the risk of collateral damage can be very high. In 2014, Barack Obama ordered a drone strike in Yemen that killed 14 civilians in a wedding convoy and injured 22 more.
The botched Syria strike wasn’t Biden’s first drone strike to result in collateral damage. In September 2021, after the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, Biden authorized a drone strike that tragically resulted in the deaths of a humanitarian aid worker and numerous civilians, including children. As has become the standard in Democrat administrations, no one was held accountable for the ill-fated airstrike.
