On the campaign trail in 2012, Vice President Joe Biden suggested that supporting President Obama's opponent, GOP candidate Mitt Romney, would result in what he implied would be an unwise war in Syria:
[Romney] said it was a mistake to end the war in Iraq and bring all of our warriors home. He said it was a mistake to set an end date for our warriors in Afghanistan and bring them home. He implies by the speech that he's ready to go to war in Syria and Iran.[AP]
In a vice presidential debate with Paul Ryan about a month after the above comments, Biden attempted to differentiate between intervention in Libya, which he supported, and intervention in Syria, which he then opposed:
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Different country. It's a different country. It is five times as large geographically, it has one-fifth the population, that is Libya, one-fifth the population, five times as large geographically.
It's in a part of the world where they're not going to see whatever would come from that war. It seeps into a regional war.
You're in a country that is heavily populated in the midst of the most dangerous area in the world. And, in fact, if in fact it blows up and the wrong people gain control, it's going to have impact on the entire region causing potentially regional wars. [Commission on Presidential Debates]
Biden used the same debate time to praise Obama's foreign policy as a guarantor of regional stability:
We are doing it exactly like we need to do to identify those forces who, in fact, will provide for a stable government and not cause a regional Sunni-Shia war when Bassad [sic] — when Bashar Assad falls. [CPD]
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