White House Defends Biden in Gates Book Criticism

(from azcentral.com
AP)

WASHINGTON — The White House is responding sharply to former Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ new memoir accusing President Barack Obama of showing too little enthusiasm for the U.S. war mission in Afghanistan and sharply criticizing Vice President Joe Biden’s foreign policy instincts.

In a new book set for release next week, Gates writes that Biden is “a man of integrity” but also a political figure who has been “wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”

Key passages of Gates’ book, “Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary of War,” were published in The Washington Post, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.

Gates, a Republican, also slammed the National Security Council under Obama’s watch. He cited what he called the “controlling nature” of the White House, writing that Obama’s national security team “took micromanagement and operational meddling to a new level.”

Such tell-all books are not new to Washington. But in this case, the White House chose to speak out quickly.

The National Security Council issued a statement late Tuesday asserting that Obama relies on Biden’s “good counsel” every day and considers him “one of the leading statesmen of his time.”

The White House issued a highly unusual invitation for news organization representatives to photograph Obama and Biden sitting together Wednesday at their weekly private luncheon.

Gates served 4½ years as defense secretary, the last years of the George W. Bush administration and the first years of Obama’s.

In his memoir, Gates asserted that Obama showed a growing frustration with U.S. policy in Afghanistan.

“I never doubted Obama’s support for the troops, only his support for their mission,” Gates writes.

Obama approved the strategy of putting 30,000 additional troops into Afghanistan and placing Gen. David Petraeus in charge, even though some top advisers opposed the so-called surge he announced in December 2009.

In recalling a meeting in the situation room in March 2011, Gates writes: “As I sat there, I thought: The president doesn’t trust his commander, can’t stand (Afghan President Hamid) Karzai, doesn’t believe in his own strategy and doesn’t consider the war to be his. For him, it’s all about getting out.”

According to the published accounts of the book:

—Gates recalls Obama and his secretary of state at the time, Hillary Rodham Clinton, discussing their opposition to Bush’s 2007 surge of troops in Iraq. “Hillary told the president that her opposition to the surge in Iraq had been political because she was facing him in the Iowa primary. … The president conceded vaguely that opposition to the Iraq surge had been political. To hear the two of them making these admissions, and in front of me, was as surprising as it was dismaying.”

—Gates at times criticizes the Bush administration as well. He holds the Bush administration, in which he also served as defense secretary, responsible for what he considered misguided policy that squandered the early victories in Afghanistan and Iraq, according to the Times.

—In praise of Obama, Gates calls the president’s decision to order Navy SEALs to raid a house in Pakistan believed to be the hiding place of Osama bin Laden “one of the most courageous decisions I had ever witnessed in the White House.”