Chuck Hagel, Strategic Thinker (National Journal)

[Inuca]

http://www.nationaljournal.com/politics/chuck-hagel-strategic-thinker-20130219

It looks awfully likely that Chuck Hagel will squeak through confirmation as President Obama's Defense secretary. But it is also likely that he'll enter the Pentagon a damaged figure, a nominee tainted by the lingering impression that he is not ready to handle the vast complexities of a defense budget slated for slashing. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., in telling Fox News Sunday that he would no longer block a Hagel vote, still indicated he was shifting his position reluctantly. He called Hagel "one of the most unqualified, radical choices for secretary of Defense in a long time."

Unqualified? Radical? Hagel did himself no favors, of course, with his unsteady performance at his confirmation hearing two and a half weeks ago. But what has gone largely unnoted by the punditocracy is that, over the past decade or so, the former Republican senator from Nebraska has distinguished himself with subtle, well-thought-out, and accurate analyses of some of America's greatest strategic challenges of the 21st century--especially the response to 9/11--while many of his harshest critics got these issues quite wrong.

Yet as much as Hagel raised concerns about backsliding in the actual theater of the war against al-Qaida, he also worried presciently about U.S. overreach, as well as alienating allies around the world that were critical to fighting a global struggle against transnational terrorists. Hagel foresaw that unless Washington was more careful about the exercise of hard power, we would find ourselves in the very crisis we are in today, with a $600 billion-plus defense budget that the president and Congress have now mandated be cut by $500 billion over the next decade. Hagel saw that, in Iraq, America was taking on an already weakened leader who the senator said probably didn't have weapons of mass destruction, and at the same time empowering another regime (Iran) that badly wanted WMDs--a dire development further documented on Monday by The Washington Post, which reported that the Iranian-backed Shiite group Asaib Ahl al-Haq, the "League of the Righteous," is exerting new political power in Iraq.

Hagel also delivered some of the earliest warnings about the potentially disastrous effects of George W. Bush's ill-grounded "Axis of Evil" speech, in which the president needlessly alienated Tehran only days after the Iranians had actually delivered up aid and support to stabilize post-Taliban Afghanistan. Ironically, Bush's own officials on the ground in Afghanistan, such as Dobbins, had testified to Iran's measured policies at the time. They noted that at a 2002 donor's conference in Tokyo that occurred only a week before the Axis of Evil speech, Iran pledged $500 million--at the time, more than double the Americans' contribution-- to help rebuild Afghanistan. "Iran actually has been quite helpful in Afghanistan," Hagel, then a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told Congressional Quarterly on Feb. 1, 2002. "And we're giving them the back of our hand." Hagel added: "We're not isolating [the Iranians]. We're isolating ourselves.... We ought to be a little more thoughtful. That [axis] comment only helps the mullahs."

And that's why Hagel is the right man to have at the Pentagon, and would also have been great as SoS (though I LOVE having Kerry there). And that's also why (among other things) all this venom and nastiness have been poured over his head lately. And finally it's why it's infuriating to see various idiots and know-nothing call him dumb, not to mention unqualified.

[TwilightGardener]

1. Good article, thanks.

Edit to add: Hagel might not get much credit, but the President knows what he's all about, and that's what matters.

[Inuca]

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