Chuck Hagel Inspects The Troops
The marvelous World War I novel, “All Quiet On The Western
Front” contains a scene where Baumer, a young infantryman in the Kaiser’s army,
is sent home on leave. Baumer is out of
place; he’s not a schoolboy anymore, he’s outgrown his clothes, his proud but
worried family hovers over him. One day,
looking for escape, he wanders the streets.
But there is no private place; he is scooped up by one of his former
teachers and dragged to a café table, to be pecked at by a group of middle-aged
academics. As middle-aged men are wont
to do they monopolize the conversation; their self-esteem leaves them without a
sense of irony. Too young to have served
in the Franco-Prussian War, and too old for World War I, they have all become
military experts. Assuming victory, they argue over what sections of Europe
Germany should annex. A Headmaster
insists that only all of Belgium, the coal-areas of France, and a part of
Russia will do. Then he turns to Baumer
to lecture him on how to prosecute the war.
Enough trench warfare he says, smash through the Jonnies, and on to Paris. When Baumer demurs, saying that the Army
thinks that breakout might not be possible; the Headmaster “dismisses the idea
loftily and informs me I know nothing about it. "The details, yes,"
says he, "but this relates to the whole. And of that you are not able to
judge. You see only your little sector and so cannot have any general survey.
You do your duty, you risk your lives, that deserves the highest honour--every
man of you ought to have the Iron Cross--but first of all the enemy line must
be broken through in Flanders and then rolled up from the top."
I thought of this while reading about the Right’s vociferous
reaction to President Obama’s nominee for Secretary of Defense, Chuck Hagel, former
Republican Senator from Nebraska. Leading the charge, as usual, is the
dyspeptic John McCain. Hagel and McCain
were once very close friends; Hagel served as national Co-Chair of McCain’s
2000 Presidential Campaign. That, of
course, was “BB” (Before Barack), so naturally Hagel is no longer
qualified.
McCain has been getting headlines, but he’s really a
sideshow. There are two critical aspects
to the Hagel nomination: The first is McCain’s--anything associated with Mr.
Obama must be opposed and slimed. The
second is far more strategic. The
Neocons are desperate to defend and promote the “legacy” of George W. Bush; the
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are the unmitigated successes of a visionary, we
must invade Iran as soon as possible, and, more generally, American military
power should be expressed at all times possible, particularly in the Middle
East.
Hagel, in particular, is a challenge to that world-view; he
is closer to Mr. Obama in looking for defense spending cuts that are anathema to
the Right (notwithstanding the Sequester agreement), he supports the draw-down
in forces from Afghanistan, Mr. Obama’s more gradualist approach to Iran, and
the use of drones to attack high-value targets.
The problem for the Republicans is that many of those Obama
policies are generally supported by the public and were litigated during the
last Presidential election cycle, so they are unable to attack them directly. Defending
the neo-con position, past any muscular generalities, now requires doing everything
but actually talking about it.
This is a rather subtle dance. If you can’t go after the policy, you have to
go after the person. So Hagel’s old
friends from his side of the aisle are torching him in an unusually pointed and
personal way. He’s been called
incompetent to manage a complex organization, an anti-Semite, and someone with
“temperament issues.” Kansas Senator Pat
Roberts may have worked closely with Hagel to ease embargo restrictions to
benefit Midwest grain exporters, but Roberts is already on record as opposing
the nomination. Lindsay Graham went on
Fox to tear into his former colleague, and Kelly Ayotte, the newly minted
“third Amiga” (following the un-mourned departure of Joe Lieberman) pronounced
herself “troubled.”
But, the most intriguing criticism (and the best pivot from
the real issues) is fleshed out in an op-ed
piece by Eliot Cohen, now a Professor at Johns Hopkins’s SAIS, but formerly
Counselor to Condoleezza Rice, and an early advocate of the use of force in
Iraq and Iran to cause regime change.
Cohen doesn’t spend much time advancing neo-con arguments. Instead, he
relentlessly belittles Hagel’s service in Viet Nam, that “long-ago war” where
Hagel was twice wounded in combat, and won a Silver Star.
Cohen has set up a straw man; he knows full well that Mr.
Obama isn’t nominating Hagel because he served in Viet Nam. But, by implying that Hagel’s only real
qualification is that he served, he puts Hagel in the same Swift boat as, say, my
late father, who was also a Sergeant (albeit in World War II.) Dad would be amused.
Cohen’s critique is important, because it touches on a
vulnerability that the GOP in general and neo-cons in particular seem to
have. Most of them, like the “experts”
in “All Quiet On The Western Front” are basically armchair warriors, or what my
Dad would have called “patriots with the mouth.” Cohen is my age--just young enough to have
escaped the draft, and too old for the first or second Iraq wars. Others of his mind-set, but older, such as George
Will, Newt Gingrich, Dick Cheney, and Mitt Romney, were able to engage in
perfectly legal “draft avoidance” which is much like perfectly legal “tax
avoidance.”
The problem, of course, is that all the back fires that the
Right has lit are obscuring three central questions: The first is whether the
President’s approach to the use of military power is the correct one, the
second is whether he has the right to select someone who sufficiently attuned
to his views, and the third is whether Hagel is truly qualified to carry them
out.
As to the first question, it appears that the American
public seems to agree with Mr. Obama; they are pleased with the wind-down of
the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, leery of military involvement in Iran, and
not too troubled by the use of drones to kill Al Qaeda operatives. As to the second, we have the Senate to
“advise and consent” but the general principle (pre-Obama) was that on most
nominees, if they were qualified, they would be confirmed. The unloved Rummy himself was confirmed on a
voice vote. It is the third, Hagel’s
qualifications, that really counts.
Is Chuck Hagel qualified?
I don’t know. Bush trusted him
enough to send him on a secret mission to Israel in December of 2000, to
reassure then-Prime Minister Barak Ehud that, if Ehud’s government supported a
Clinton-brokered peace deal, the incoming Bush Administration would support
it. I would like to hear more about that
meeting, and more about Hagel’s background and views. Presumably, that is what we have confirmation
hearings for.
That, and an opportunity for the GOP’s armchair warriors to
further explore the “troubling” aspects of this non-commissioned old soldier’s
service.
Of course, they might agree with the Senator who called
Hagel "one of the premier foreign policy voices" and "one of the
giants in the United States Senate."
That would be Mitch McConnell. In 2007, which is, after all, so Before
Barack.
MM
