Joe Biden's 'no'

Joe Biden's 'no' on bin Laden raid could haunt him as a 2016 candidate

The vice president has taken more dovish positions on foreign policy than his potential rival, Hillary Clinton.

By Michael Crowley

In May 2011, Vice President Joe Biden was in the White House Situation Room, joining President Barack Obama and his top national security officials for a crucial meeting. The question on the table: whether to order a dangerous Special Forces raid to take out Osama bin Laden.

Intelligence experts believed they had located bin Laden in a Pakistan compound, but they weren’t certain, and the risks of failure were high. After most officials present urged Obama to go for it, the president turned to Biden: “Joe, what do you think?” he asked, according to an account Biden gave months later.

“Mr. President, my suggestion is don’t go,” Biden said.

Obama, of course, ignored his deputy’s advice and dispatched Navy SEAL Team 6 to kill the Al Qaeda leader. It was a historic triumph for America — not to mention a political bonanza for a president facing reelection, perhaps the most consequential decision of Obama’s presidency.

And Joe Biden was on the wrong side of it.

Biden’s bin Laden call may haunt him as he considers taking on Hillary Clinton for the 2016 Democratic nomination, in a fight that will hinge in part on who’s better equipped to be commander in chief. As Clinton likes to remind audiences, she advised Obama to take the gamble. “I respected [Biden’s] concerns about the risk of a raid,” she wrote in her 2014 memoir, “Hard Choices,” “but I came to the conclusion that the intelligence was convincing and that the risks were outweighed by the benefits of success.”

“She can very easily point to the bin Laden operation,” says a former Obama White House official. “The value in it is that it’s so simple and so easy to understand: I was for it, and you were against it.”

A student of foreign policy since the 1970s, Biden prides himself on his judgment about world affairs. That makes him particularly sensitive to criticism that he’s flubbed several big calls on world affairs over the years. Biden has been “wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades,” Obama’s first defense secretary, Robert Gates, declared last year.

While stung by such talk, Biden also considers it unfair — particularly after recent events in places like Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan have arguably matched his predictions.

“He took a lot of heat,” says a former Biden aide. “But I think the last two years have certainly left him feeling vindicated.”

Biden may see an edge over Clinton among liberal Democratic primary voters. During their tenure in the Obama administration, he frequently took a more dovish line than his ex-colleague. The two split over the 2011 U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, troop levels in Afghanistan, arming Syria’s rebels, and bombing Libya. In each case, Clinton backed the stronger military option while Biden counseled caution and a lighter U.S. footprint abroad.

Libya could be particularly awkward for Clinton. As secretary of state she threw her weight behind the 2011 U.S. and European air campaign to depose Muammar Qadhafi. Biden opposed that intervention, which even Obama has suggested was ill-advised now that the north African country has fallen to anarchy and terrorism.

Biden also feels that he was right to warn early in Obama’s presidency that the U.S. should trim its ambitions in Afghanistan. In the fall of 2009, Clinton sided with the military’s call for another 30,000 troops, while Biden argued for a much lighter presence. Special Forces and armed drones could keep Al Qaeda at bay, he said, arguing that grander ambitions of rebuilding the country were unrealistic. Obama sided with Clinton’s view, but experts are mixed at best on whether doubling down on the country — at a high cost in lives and money — had much impact.

Biden might also point to his proposal, floated when he was a senator in 2007, for a “soft partition” of Iraq into three semi-autonomous regions — each one majority Shiite, Sunni or Kurdish — under the control of a weak central government. Many foreign policy experts scoffed at the idea back then.

Today, Baghdad’s inability to unite and control the country has bred new talk in Washington that a unified Iraq may be unsalvageable after all. That has led Biden to say, as one aide put it: “You all mocked me, and look who’s laughing now.”

Iraq is far from a neat issue for Biden, however. Obama assigned him the Iraq account at the start of his presidency, and Biden managed the country’s internal politics as the U.S. withdrew its troops — a withdrawal that Biden supported. (Clinton pushed for keeping a modest military presence in the country.)

The rise of the Islamic State and the return of more than 3,000 U.S. troops to the country over the past year will make it hard for Biden to boast on that front.

“He went along with our departure too easily,” says Michael O’Hanlon, an Iraq expert at the Brookings Institution, who also faulted Biden for strongly backing Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who turned out to be a sectarian strongman.

Fortunately for Biden, Clinton has her own vulnerabilities on Iraq. She supported the Iraq War, as did Biden. (Clinton and Biden both opposed George W. Bush’s troop surge.) And Clinton played little role as the country’s politics frayed — visiting Baghdad only once in her four-year tenure as secretary of state.

While no one has a spotless track record on complex foreign issues, some Biden backers argued, the vice president’s experience is unrivaled.

“The in-depth knowledge of international relations, and his personal acquaintance with leading world figures is just of a different magnitude of anybody else,” says Michael Haltzel, a senior foreign policy adviser to Biden when he chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “Nobody bats a thousand.”

Biden himself cited the depth of his experience when he ran against Clinton and Obama in the 2008 primaries, pointing back as far as a 1979 delegation of senators he led to Russia to help negotiate the START nuclear arms control agreement.

While Clinton “was meeting socially with the prime minister of a country,” Biden said at the time, “I was sitting down and negotiating with them. I know my experience is considerably deeper and more relevant.”

That will be a tougher argument to sustain now that Clinton has logged four years as America’s top diplomat. And several sources questioned whether foreign policy really would be central to a Biden-Clinton battle.

“I think his argument is more likely to be that all his life he’s been fighting for the middle class, and here’s what he wants to do now,” said Robert Shrum, a former top consultant to several Democratic presidential candidates.

Both Biden and Clinton might also be wary of rehashing administration foreign policy debates in a way that could pit them against Obama’s policies.

Obama “will absolutely be collateral damage if they start attacking each other,” says the former White House official. “It won’t be a huge problem for him, but it will certainly be annoying.”

Also unclear is how much Democratic voters might hold Biden’s bin Laden decision against him. Backing the raid was hardly a no-brainer: Most Obama officials were equivocal about the decision, which they considered a calculated risk. Gates, for one, initially advised against it.

By various accounts, Biden was worried about the political fallout to Obama if the raid failed, as well as blowback from Pakistan, a nominal U.S. ally infuriated by the unannounced incursion of U.S. troops across its border.

“He was not against killing bin Laden in principle,” added Shrum. “He wasn’t sure the raid would work. Nor was the president when he ordered it.”