Biden doesn’t know we have troops stationed in Syria

Does President Joe Biden know what’s going on?

Well, one thing he doesn’t know is that there are U.S. servicemen currently stationed in Syria.

The president spoke this week with ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos, who pressed the chief executive about the White House-created crisis in Afghanistan , in which thousands of U.S. nationals and Afghan allies are scrambling to escape as the Taliban consolidate total control over the country.

During their discussion, the president made an obviously false claim about America’s presence in Syria.

“Most intelligence analysis has predicted that al Qaeda would come back 18 to 24 months after a withdrawal of American troops,” Stephanopoulos said. “Is that analysis now being revised? Could it be sooner?”

“It could be,” said Biden. “But George, look, here’s the deal. Al Qaeda, ISIS, they metastasize. There’s a significantly greater threat to the United States from Syria. There’s a significantly greater threat from East Africa. There’s significant greater threat to other places in the world than it is from the mountains of Afghanistan. And we have maintained the ability to have an over-the-horizon capability to take them out. We don’t have military in Syria to make sure that we’re going be protected.”

Um, yes we do, Mr. President! There are currently about 900 U.S. service members stationed in Syria.

In fact, it’s a major scandal that there are U.S. troops over there at all. Former President Donald Trump ordered their withdrawal in 2018, declaring, “We have won against ISIS.” The then-commander of the military repeated the order again in 2019, only to have nameless bureaucrats lie to their superiors and simply undermine his order. That’s according to outgoing Ambassador Jim Jeffrey, the U.S. special envoy for Syria.

“What Syria withdrawal?” Jeffery told  Defense One. “There was never a Syria withdrawal.”

Defense One reported at the time that Jeffrey “acknowledges that his team routinely misled senior leaders about troop levels in Syria.”

“We were always playing shell games to not make clear to our leadership how many troops we had there,” Jeffrey said, adding Trump’s announced withdrawal from Syria remains the “the most controversial thing in my 50 years in government.”

This was a major scandal, but that the current resident of the Oval Office appears to be unaware of any of this is arguably a greater one.