According to Bowden, there were two options on the table for killing bin Laden: a drone strike and the special operations raid. Gates, National Counterterrorism Center director Michael Leiter, and Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff James Cartwright argued for a drone strike. Everyone else favored the special operations raid (including Biden’s own national security adviser, Tony Blinken). But when it was Biden’s chance to speak, he turned to Obama and said: “Mr. President, my suggestion is: don’t go.”
Biden’s reasons were based not on national security, but on electoral politics. “The vice president was never shy about political calculations,” Bowden writes, citing exclusive interviews with Obama and other top officials. “Biden believed that if the president decided to choose either the air or the ground option, and if the effort failed, Obama could say goodbye to a second term.”
After the Situation Room meeting, Gates called the White House to tell the president he had changed his mind and supported the raid. “So in the end,” Bowden writes, “every one of the president’s top advisors except Biden was in favor of immediate action.”
Yet today it is Biden — the lone opponent of immediate action to kill bin Laden — who is painting Romney as unfit for office because he allegedly would have opposed it.
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