Oh, what might have been. Our country could have been spared a lot of pain over the last few years if only Joe Biden had followed his instinct and retreated to Delaware in 2009 to tend to his garden.
You see, according to the Hur classified docs report, he came this close to renouncing his then-position as vice president in the Obama administration. If he had, he would have likely faded into obscurity and we’d remember him now as a mediocre senator and goofy VP.
Alas, even though he had been unexpectedly thrown back in the limelight when candidate Obama picked him as his running mate—after Biden had failed badly at two presidential campaigns of his own—he nevertheless thought of jumping ship because he objected to Obama’s Afghanistan policies. As Robert Gates famously said in his 2014 memoir, Joe Biden has “been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades,” and he didn’t disappoint on this issue.
Hur’s report continues to deliver damning information about our mentally declining president:
President Biden considered resigning as vice president “in protest” over former President Barack Obama’s Afghanistan policies in 2009 over fear the war would become “another Vietnam,” according to Special Counsel Robert Hur’s report on Biden’s mishandling of classified documents released Thursday.
Hur has been investigating Biden’s improper retention of classified records since last year. The papers included classified documents about military and foreign policy in Afghanistan, among other national security and foreign policy records, which Hur said implicated “sensitive intelligence sources and methods.”
Biden documented his interior struggles in a notebook, a diary almost as interesting as Ashley Biden’s:
“Tomorrow the President is going to make a fateful decision regarding Afghanistan – as I sat looking out the window at the sea – thinking I should resign in protest over what will bring his administration down,” Biden wrote in what the report noted was an “Af/Pak” notebook he used to take notes during a number of National Security Council meetings on Afghanistan in 2009.
“Although I obviously wasn’t there I feel like this is what it must have felt like for Kennedy then Johnson in the early days of VTN [Vietnam]. I feel guilty and boxed in myself. Guilty for not having been more successful w/ the President – and staying. Boxed in by knowing or at least feeling that my resignation would only harden his position and leave him with one less voice,” he added.
Biden was specifically against Obama’s plans to send thousands more troops to Afghanistan throughout 2009, according to the writings FBI agents found in his home.
According to the Hur report, Biden called Army leaders’ request for a “surge” of another 40,000 troops in Afghanistan “f—ing outrageous” and thought such a move would be “disastrous.”
While Obama’s own Afghanistan policies had plenty of problems, they came nowhere near to approaching Biden’s disastrous withdrawal from the war-torn nation in 2021—a chaotic, ill-managed decision that cost 13 Americans their lives.
If only Biden had shown some backbone and listened to his gut feeling back in 2009, perhaps someone less destructive would be president right now, and the country would be in a much better place.
