Hayden also hit back at Gates’s assertion that Vice President Joe Biden had been “wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”
“The president disagrees with secretary Gates’s assessment… Joe Biden has been one of the leading statesmen of his time and has helped advance America’s leadership in the world,” she said.
A White House official separately defended Obama’s record on both Afghanistan and Iraq.
“It’s well known that as a matter of principle and sound policy, President Obama opposed going to war in the first place, opposed the surge of forces and then ended the war in Iraq as president. Any suggestion to the contrary is simply wrong,” the official said.
On Afghanistan, the official said Obama “has always been firmly committed to the strategy that secretary Gates helped designed and that our troops have so ably carried out in Afghanistan, while also insisting that we have a clear plan to wind down the war.”
Gates, however, gives credit to Obama for approving the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan, which he himself initially opposed.
It was “one of the most courageous decisions I had ever witnessed in the White House,” the former Pentagon chief writes.
Although Gates heaps praise on former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, he is stunned by an exchange between Obama and Clinton in which the two openly admitted they opposed a troop surge in Iraq in 2007 for purely political reasons.
“To hear the two of them making these admissions, and in front of me, was as surprising as it was dismaying,” he says.
Gates helped oversee the deployment of additional troops to Iraq during the Bush administration.
A Republican, Gates served under ex-president George W. Bush and was asked to stay on at the Pentagon for two years after Obama entered office.
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