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Joe Biden advised Barack Obama to wait to order the raid that killed Osama Bin Laden, writes the former president in his new memoir.
“Joe weighed in against the raid,” Obama wrote in A Promised Land of the discussion of the Navy Seals mission, which he ordered to be carried out as planned in Abbottabad, Pakistan, on the night of May 1-2. 2011.
Obama’s book will be released on Tuesday. Guardian US has seen a copy. Obama writes that his vice president, who will follow him to the White House in January, immediately backed his decision to raid bin Laden.
Whether Biden advised against the raid has been a controversial issue in US politics. During this year’s election, Republican attack ads claimed Biden was opposed to bin Laden’s total elimination.
Biden said during the panel discussion on whether to order the raid, he advised Obama to take more time, saying, “Don’t go.” He also said he later told Obama to “follow his gut.”
In his memoir, Obama echoes accounts from other high-level aides in the White House situation room nine years ago who said Biden advised caution.
As Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Obama writes, Biden was concerned about “the enormous consequences of failure” and advised the President “to postpone any decision until the intelligence community is more certain than Ben. Laden was in the compound ”.
In the event, a Navy Seal team flew from Afghanistan to Pakistan and shot down the leader of Al-Qaida, the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks.
“As had been the case with all of the important decisions I had made as President,” wrote Obama, “I appreciated Joe’s willingness to turn the prevailing mood and ask tough questions, often in the goal of giving me the space I needed for my own internal activities. deliberations. “
Obama also writes that he “knew that Joe, like Gates, had been in Washington during Desert One”.
Desert One in April 1980 was a failed attempt to free US hostages held in Iran, resulting in the deaths of eight US servicemen in a helicopter crash and seriously undermining Jimmy Carter’s re-election hopes.
Gates, Obama writes, reminded him that “however rigorous the planning, operations like this could go wrong. Beyond the risk to the team, he feared that a failed mission could have a negative impact on the war in Afghanistan.
Obama calls this “a sober and well-reasoned assessment.”
Biden was US Senator from Delaware from 1973-2009, then Obama’s Vice President until 2017. Although Donald Trump refuses to concede defeat in this year’s election, Biden has won a clear Electoral College victory as well as popular vote and will be inaugurated as the 46th president on January 20.
Obama’s views on his vice president will be carefully considered.
He also writes that amid intense discussions in the situation room, with the Seal team waiting in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, he himself called the raid a “50-50 call”.
CIA chief Leon Panetta, Homeland Security Advisor John Brennan and Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm Mike Mullen preferred to mount the raid, Obama writes. Hillary Clinton, then Secretary of State, thought it was a “51-49 call” – and “came out on the Seals side.”
Brennan called Obama’s decision to go after Bin Laden as one of the “bravest appeals of any president in memory.”
Obama does not write any subsequent conversations with Biden. But in his account of the immediate aftermath of the mission, he writes: “As the helicopters took off, Joe placed a hand on my shoulder and squeezed me.
“Congratulations, boss,” he said.
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