Biden was the only one to speak truth

Sir — I read with interest Patrick Cockburn’s article

(Sunday Independent, May 19) in which he traces the unintended consequences of the failure of the “experts in world affairs” at the CIA to recognise that the wars which the West became embroiled in since the Iranian revolution were proxy wars between Sunni and Shia Muslims — in which the US and its allies “fatally underestimated the religious motivation of their adversaries”.

In Cockburn’s 2015 book

The Rise of the Islamic State, he mentions the one US politician who got it right when, with undiplomatic frankness, VP Joe Biden gave Washington’s real view of its regional allies when speaking at Harvard’s Institute of Politics on October 2, 2014.

He said that Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the UAE “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 of thousands of tonnes of explosives into anyone who would fight against Assad except that the people supplied were unintentionally Isil”. Hugh Duffy, Cleggan, Co Galway