Biden's 'no' on bin Laden raid could haunt him

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....

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