From aiding Pol Pot and Idi Amin to assisting Houthis and Yunus, the dubious legacies of Democrats and Biden

The history of the Democratic Party in the US, including those of the party’s current leaders, has been one of propping up dictators, Islamist groups, Muslim theocratic regimes, violent Marxist-Leninist and Maoist insurgents, and Communist governments around the world. Joe Biden, in his 52 years in Washington, DC, first as a Senator who was an important member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, then as the Vice President, and finally as the President, has played an active role in shaping the foreign policy of the US.

Just a couple of years after becoming a Senator in 1973, one of Biden’s first acts, along with other members of the US foreign policy establishment, was to help Pol Pot, who was backed by the Chinese dictator Mao Zedong, come to power in Cambodia.

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During the hearings on the ‘Supplemental Assistance to Cambodia’ as part of Senate Bill 663 that occurred between February 24 and March 6, 1975, before the Subcommittee on Foreign Assistance and Economic Policy of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Donald Fraser, who was a Democrat Congress member from Minnesota, described the plan to replace Lon Nol’s government by the Khmer Rouge: “What is needed here is to provide for the orderly transfer of power from the Lon Nol government to the insurgents… Let me say, finally, that what I think our Department ought to do is call upon someone like Secretary General Waldheim, or perhaps the French government, to find a seasoned diplomat experienced in Southeast Asia to contact the Khmer Rouge and find out under what terms they are prepared to have this transfer of power take place, and we should then work with that representative to actually make this happen.”

Joe Biden then argued, “Everybody admits that there cannot be any transition as long as Lon Nol is there. Yet nobody said they would make an absolute requirement that aid, military or economic, would only go, if, in fact, it were written into the law that, in fact, Lon Nol is out of power. It will not go unless his government is gone. Are we willing to do that and make an absolute requirement?”

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Millicent Fenwick, a Republican Congress member from New Jersey, responded, “[W]e cannot just say that we will give in if Lon Nol is not there… We have got to organise with somebody; we have got to talk with the Khmer Rouge in Paris and say, ‘Will you fly out and we will put you in?’”

Biden also callously dismissed the consequences of his proposals despite being told that it could lead to a “ bloodbath”. He said, “We talk about, you know, the fact that there is going to be a bloodbath. Well, has there ever been a civil war in the history of the world where there has not been a ‘bloodbath’ including our own?” He then went on to propose, “It seems to me that in the arguments we have made, it would be in the best interest, if we were ever going to use military force, for us to just go in and nail Lon Nol.” Biden also continued to insist that “if we continue to give military aid, we are continuing to prop up Lon Nol” and “as long as Lon Nol is in power, there is no chance for a negotiated settlement”.

Bella Abzug, a Democrat member of the Congress from New York, then assured Biden, “I mean, the fact is, do not think for one moment that Lon Nol is there except because of us, and our State Department and our policy of support for Lon Nol… And we put him there, we took Sihanouk out, and we accelerated the whole situation there.”

The resulting rise of Pol Pot led to a bloodbath in which Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge murdered nearly 3 million people, including Vietnamese and other ethnic minorities, Buddhists, Muslims, doctors, lawyers, teachers, and anyone deemed an intellectual, which meant anyone who was literate or wore glasses. The brutal manner in which many of them were tortured and killed is memorialised at Choeung Ek, commonly known as the Killing Fields in Phnom Penh. Those who were lucky were just shot to death; many others had their throats cut using the sharp serrated leaves of the sugar palm tree; still others had these leaves stuffed down their throats, after which they were pulled out, ripping apart their insides. Despite these horrors, the Jimmy Carter administration, which worked in tandem with the Democrat majority Senate Foreign Relations Committee, continued to support Pol Pot and recognised the Khmer Rouge as the legitimate representative of Cambodia in the United Nations even after they had been ousted from power.

Pol Pot wasn’t the only dictator who found support from Joe Biden. On October 1, 1976, Biden voted ‘Yea’ on PL 94-441 that funded the United States Agency for International Development ( USAID), which in turn funnelled money into the dictator Idi Amin’s Uganda by camouflaging it as aid to East Africa. USAID had also directly funded Uganda the previous two years. Idi Amin’s cruelty against non-Muslims was widely known around the world, but the Jimmy Carter administration continued doing business with Idi Amin until 1978.

According to a New York Times report, “While there has been an occasional exaggeration in the press, the evidence of countless witnesses, the mutilated bodies in the Victoria Nile, the crushed skulls in prison yards, and the unexplained disappearances in the night add up to an overwhelming indictment… The most that the Carter Administration appears to be prepared to do is to maintain the level of its condemnatory rhetoric, to monitor more strictly the ‘gray areas’ of indirect assistance to the Ugandan Government, and to work behind the scenes as the international community gropes to find some generally acceptable way of dealing with gross violators of human rights.”

Congolese dictator Mobutu and Zimbabwe’s strongman Robert Mugabe too found a friend in Biden. As a member of the subcommittee on African Affairs, Biden voted ‘Yea’ on sending money to the Congolese dictator Mobutu. When Zimbabwe conducted an election in 1979 and elected its first Black-led government, the Senate voted 75-19 to lift sanctions on the country, but Biden voted against it. Biden’s vote was effectively a vote for Robert Mugabe, who had rejected the election and continued to wage a war with the support of the Nigerian dictator Olusegun Obasanjo. “I think it is a bunch of malarky,” Biden said while opposing the arguments in favour of lifting the sanctions. The war eventually resulted in the elected government of Zimbabwe being replaced by the dictatorship of Mugabe.

That wasn’t the only time Biden opposed the interests of blacks. He went on to support the apartheid regime in South Africa and voted ‘Nay’ on a bill in 1985 that sought to impose economic sanctions against South Africa. He reiterated his stance in 1986 when he again voted ‘Nay’ on a comprehensive anti-apartheid act against South Africa that sought to bar the import of South African agricultural products, food, iron, and steel while prohibiting the export of petroleum products into South Africa. That vote received 41 Republican votes in its support but only three Democrat votes.

Around the time Biden supported Mugabe, the Democrats also aided the rise of Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran. A BBC report in 2016 revealed that it was the Jimmy Carter administration that facilitated the return of Ayatollah Khomeini to Iran and his subsequent rise to power that resulted in Iran becoming a theocracy.

According to the report, “Persuaded by Carter, Iran’s autocratic ruler, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, known as the Shah, had finally departed on a “vacation” abroad, leaving behind an unpopular prime minister and a military in disarray—a force of 400,000 men with heavy dependence on American arms and advice.” On January 20, 1979, the Washington Post reported that the US government saw Ayatollah Khomeini as the key to forming the Iranian government by using the excuse that he would form an anti-communist government.

This was despite New York Congressman Stephen Solarz warning during a Congressional hearing that Khomeini was “a kind of religious fanatic whose determination to establish an Islamic Republic in Iran is fundamentally incompatible with our own interests” and whose book “appeared to reveal some substantially anti-Semitic sentiments on his part with respect to the role of Jewish people in Iran”.

Directly as a result of the support for Ayatollah Khomeini, many Jews, Bahais, and other non-Muslims were slaughtered in cold blood by the forces of Ayatollah Khomeini. The support for the ayatollahs in Iran continued into the years of the Obama-Biden administration, which negotiated a deal with Iran that included sunset clauses allowing the theocratic regime to enrich uranium and make nuclear weapons after 2025. More recently, when the women of Iran protested against the Islamic regime, the Biden administration supported the mullahs instead of helping the women, resulting in the women being arrested and executed.

Joe Biden also has a lengthy record of supporting Marxists. Biden was among the team of people who flew to China in 1979 and met with Deng Xiaoping to cement a relationship with Red China. Subsequently, during the hearings to confirm Alexander Haig as the Secretary of State in the Ronald Reagan administration, Biden railroaded Haig and demanded that he support Red China. “We do, in fact, aid Marxist governments now, and I assume it will be the continued policy of the administration,” he stated. When Haig answered that they would take a hard look at the policies, Biden demanded, “But you are not going to stop relations with China, the People’s Republic, are you?” After pressuring Haig to say that he would not stop the relations with China, Biden asked, “So you are anxious to have more relationships with those Marxists in China because it is in the US interest to do that. Right?”

In 1989, Biden’s Communist allies in the Chinese government brought out tanks and massacred thousands of students who were peacefully protesting at Tiananmen Square in Beijing. The Chinese Communist Party has also been exceptionally cruel and has used many Chinese citizens as slaves in labour camps that operate under the system of ‘laogai’ or ‘reform through labor’. Additionally, practitioners of Falun Gong have been persecuted, arrested, and have disappeared. China is also known to harvest organs from its prisoners.

Yet another dictator who got money thanks to Joe Biden was Haiti’s Jean Claude Duvalier, who had been nicknamed “Baby Doc”. In May 1985, Biden voted ‘Yea’ on Senate Bill 960, which authorised spending $12.8 billion on foreign aid programs. That bill became PL 99-83 and explicitly provided for assistance to Haiti, which, at that time, was terrorised by Baby Doc and his much-feared ‘Tonton Macoutes’ who had carried out murders, rapes, and other forms of violence on the people of Haiti. That same year, Biden also co-sponsored Senate Bill 1917, which was designed to send more money to Haiti under Baby Doc.

Among others that Biden supported were the Islamic despots Muammar Qadhafi of Libya and Saddam Hussein of Iraq. In 1981, Biden supported Muammar Qadhafi by voting ‘Nay’ on an amendment on international terrorism that attempted to ban the import of Libyan oil. This occurred a few months after the presidency of Jimmy Carter, whose brother Billy Carter had received a large sum of money as a registered foreign agent of Qadhafi’s regime, a fact that turned into the infamous “Billygate” scandal. In January 1987, Biden admitted to a relationship with Iraq’s Saddam Hussein when he expressed his concern that the relationship had become strained. He stated, “The news of our limited arms shipments to Iran was a shock to Baghdad, and it has put some strain in our relationship.” Apart from killing his political opponents in cold blood, Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons against Kurds and Iranians.

Biden also supported the sale of weapons to the Islamist military dictator Mohammed Zia-ul-Haq of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. When a bill in the Senate opposed the sale of weapons to Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Pakistan, Biden offered an alternative proposal that quietly removed Pakistan from the list and replaced it with Kuwait.

Biden also voted ‘Yea’ on military assistance to Pakistan in 1996, during the peak of the country’s support for Al-Qaeda and the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. The perpetrators of the World Trade Centre bombing of 1993 and some of the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks too were from Pakistan. In 2003, Pakistan, then under another Islamist military dictator Pervez Musharraf, airlifted members of the Taliban and Al Qaida from Kunduz in Afghanistan to prevent them from being captured. In 2007, Biden, as the Chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, once again supported sending 1.5 billion dollars to Musharraf’s Pakistan. More recently, Biden’s actions of leaving behind weapons while pulling out of Afghanistan in 2021 resulted in the Taliban gaining possession of these weapons.

Another Islamic group that received support from Biden was the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), which waged a religious war against Serbia and had soldiers of the international terrorist Osama bin Laden in its ranks. Biden has described KLA’s founder, Hashim Thaci, who is now facing a trial for war crimes, as “Kosovo’s George Washington”. In August 1995, the Washington Post reported that Serbian civilians fleeing Krajina were killed in cold blood by either “Croatian troops or their Bosnian Muslim allies”. According to the report, elderly people, including some who were mentally retarded, were forced out of a school serving as a refugee shelter and shot by the troops. Danish troops from the peacekeeping unit also witnessed Croatian planes drop bombs on a column of Serb refugees. Joe Biden was then one of the strongest voices in the Senate in favour of bombing the Serbs and had demanded the use of air strikes against them.

Apart from the Chinese Communists, there were other Marxists who received Joe Biden’s support. In 2005, when the King of Nepal declared a state of emergency while fighting a war against Maoist terror groups funded by China, Biden demanded in the Senate why Section 508 of the Foreign Appropriations Act, which prohibits aid to a country where the government had been deposed by a coup, had not been imposed on Nepal.

Biden has continued his support for Marxist, Islamic, and other terrorists after becoming president. In late 2021, the Biden administration revoked the terrorist designation of Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), a Marxist terrorist group in Colombia. This action was consistent with the long record of Democrats in Congress supporting violent South American Communist groups. In the past, Democrats have labelled the late Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori’s war against the Communist terrorist group Shining Path as a violation of human rights.

Another act of Joe Biden upon becoming president was to lift the terrorist designation of the Houthis in Yemen. The Donald Trump administration had labelled the Houthis a global terrorist organisation and attempted to cut off the flow of weapons and funds to them. More recently, Fox News reported that Biden had invited a Muslim leader who had publicly supported the terror groups Hamas and Hezbollah to meet with his top aides. Earlier in his tenure, Biden had appointed a Muslim Brotherhood supporter to a key post in the State Department. The Muslim Brotherhood, which wants to Islamise society by imposing the Shariah law, is connected to both Al Qaeda and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and was responsible for the so-called “Arab Spring”. (The Obama-Biden administration’s use of the positive term ‘Arab Spring’ to describe the actions of terrorist groups is itself problematic.)

Biden, who has supported Ukraine’s dictator Volodymyr Zelensky in the war against the Russian Orthodox Christians, has gone on to lift a ban on the neo-Nazi Azovs in Ukraine. That ban had prevented the Azovs from using American weapons. Biden’s latest act and a parting kick to the honest and peace-loving people of the world has been to support the military junta-backed Mohammed Yunus of Bangladesh, where the systematic killings and rapes of Hindus started after a military coup supported by Islamic mobs forced the democratically elected woman Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina to flee the country and replaced her with Yunus, who has a history of working with the Clinton Foundation.

As Biden’s political career comes to an end, his acts of lighting many fires around the world with the help of his fellow Democrats leave behind a grim legacy.

The author advises several political and civil rights organisations in the US. He can be reached at  arvindk@uchicago.edu. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.