2011
Egyptian Revolution

Murtaza Hussain

April 27 2021, 7:13 p.m.

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak meets with U.S. Vice President Joe Biden in Sharm el-Sheik, Egypt, on June 7, 2010.

Photo: Amr Nabil/AP

Joe Biden vocally supported Egyptian ruler Hosni Mubarak after the outbreak of a protest movement against him in early 2011. In an interview given while protests in Cairo were building to a crescendo, Biden said Mubarak “has been an ally of ours in a number of things, and he’s been very responsible on, relative to geopolitical interests in the region: Middle East peace efforts, the actions Egypt has taken relative to normalizing the relationship with Israel.” Pressed further, he said that the Egyptian government should seek to compromise with the protesters but defended Mubarak personally. “I would not refer to him as a dictator,” Biden said. When the protesters later succeeded in toppling Mubarak despite U.S. reservations, Biden referred to it as a “pivotal moment” in history.

The
Intercept_

2011
Libya Intervention

Murtaza Hussain

April 27 2021, 7:14 p.m.

Rebel fighters are seen in downtown Misurata, Libya, on April 20, 2011.

Photo: Chris Hondros/Getty Images

Joe Biden has said that he always internally opposed the Obama administration’s decision to intervene in Libya. In a 2016 interview on PBS, Biden told host Charlie Rose that from the outset, he had expressed concerns that the war would create a vacuum in Libya that would be filled by extremists. He also said there had been insufficient planning for what the country would look like after Muammar Gaddafi had been deposed.

At the beginning of the NATO-led intervention in 2011, several months after the uprising in Libya had begun, Biden publicly indicated that the U.S. should step back from involvement and that NATO should handle the war on its own. “If the Lord Almighty extricated the U.S. out of NATO and dropped it on the planet of Mars so we were no longer participating, it is bizarre to suggest that NATO and the rest of the world lacks the capacity to deal with Libya — it does not,” Biden said. “This is about our strategic interest, and it is not based upon a situation of what can the traffic bear politically at home.”

Despite this reticence, once Gaddafi was killed in the fall of 2011, Biden said that NATO had “got it right” in Libya, even describing the war as a model. “In this case, America spent $2 billion and didn’t lose a single life,” Biden said. “This is more the prescription for how to deal with the world as we go forward than it has in the past.” In a CNN interview, Biden spoke about Gaddafi, saying, “This is one bad guy, one really tough guy. He for 40 years had his folks under his thumb. And he’s dead, and it’s going to give the people of Libya the first chance in four decades to actually put together their own government, have a little bit of freedom. Little bit of opportunity.”

The
Intercept_

1998-2011
Global Targeted Killing Programs

Murtaza Hussain,

Jeremy Scahill

April 27 2021, 7:38 p.m.

President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden receive an update on the mission to kill Osama bin Laden in Washington, D.C., on May 1, 2011.

Photo: Pete Souza/The White House/AP

At various points in his career, Joe Biden expressed hesitance about U.S. global assassination programs. In 1998, during a Senate debate about the possibility of greenlighting assassinations of terrorist leaders, Biden was reticent, telling FBI Director Louis Freeh that he “would very much like a legal memorandum from the FBI, stating whether or not the prohibition against assassination of heads of state applies to organized crime units, and/or terrorist units.”

During a 1998 TV appearance, he was asked why, instead of launching cruise missiles at Afghanistan, the U.S. did not conduct a surgical mission to kill Osama bin Laden. “It’s against American law to assassinate,” Biden shot back. Biden was not technically correct. While every president since Gerald Ford has maintained an executive order prohibiting assassination, Congress has intentionally never legislated such a ban.

While every president since Gerald Ford has maintained an executive order prohibiting assassination, Congress has intentionally never legislated such a ban.

Congress’s failure to take a stance has allowed several presidents to conduct assassinations while framing them as justifiable and lawful, most prominently President Barack Obama through his targeted killing drone strike campaigns.

In 2009, as Obama’s vice president, Biden reportedly authorized a short paper that promoted a “counterterrorism plus” strategy for fighting Al Qaeda militants in Afghanistan and Pakistan, supporting drones and special forces raids as a primary means of carrying out war in the region. Biden was a noted skeptic of proposals from U.S. generals to ramp up large-footprint deployments of U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

Biden opposed the 2011 raid authorized by Obama to kill Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, expressing reservations at the time about the odds of success. He later praised the raid, saying, “You can go back 500 years. You cannot find a more audacious plan.” He also opposed President Donald Trump’s assassination of Iranian Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani. Biden did not cite the illegality of the strike but rather labeled it a “self-defeating” action that he said would make the region more dangerous in the long term.