Again, you don't have to like the nominee or be happy about the nomination, but elections, as they say, have consequences. Congress should not be dictating executive policy - especially war policy - to a duly elected president, which I remember any number of Republicans telling me about a decade ago.
That's particularly true of a nominee who comes from the Senate. Sitting and former senators are afforded extraordinary deference during confirmation hearings. The only former senator denied confirmation that I'm aware of was John Tower, who the first President Bush had nominated to be Secretary of Defence. Tower had a drinking problem, which reasonable people can see as a disqualification for someone in the military chain of command.
It would be unprecedented for Republican senators to vote against the confirmation of President Obama's nominee for Defense, former Republican Senator Chuck Hagel.
If you're a modern Republican, you see Hagel as a contrarian pain in the ass, especially if you're of the neoconservative foreign policy school. Senator Hagel was an early opponent of the Iraq War (although he voted for the Authorization of the Use of Military Force in October 2002), he's for cutting the Pentagon's budget, and he has interesting views on America's relationship with Israel.
All three of these things are not only perfectly defensible, they're admirable.
LIke Hagel, I initially supported the Iraq War. This was mostly because Saddam was going to have to be taken out sooner or later, and better to do it when he was weak than after the sanctions disintegrated and he strengthened his military capability. But I thought that the Bush Administration was lying about all of that democracy nonsense. I also assumed that enough force would be deployed to secure the peace after the war. Had I had known otherwise, I would have opposed the war.
Iraq is more like Yugoslavia than any other country. It was thrown together against the will of the ethnically diverse population and held together by tyrannical force. Just as happened in Yugoslavia, when Iraq's people were given a measure of freedom, they immediately began slaughtering one another.
Traditionally, when the United States overthrows a foreign government, they install a military junta that governs the country to the satisfaction of the White House. Sure, there are exceptions to that rule, such as Germany and Japan, but there aren't many, and none in countries as confounding as Iraq.
Instead, Bush's Coalition Provisional Authority called for elections, disbanded Iraq's police and military, and implemented a flat tax before there was even the most basic security in Baghdad, let alone the rest of the country. In attempting to turn an unnatural country into a laboratory for the Heritage Foundation's ideas, Bush created the ideal conditions for the civil war that would soon engulf Iraq, cost 4,500 American lives and create upwards of 4 million refugees. Moreover, it turned Iraq into a magnet for foreign jihad insurgents who are now set to overrun neighbouring Syria.
The single biggest reason that the Democrats have the upper hand on the issue of national security (which they haven't enjoyed since at least the Kennedy Administration) is the GOP's reflexive and wrongheaded support of George W. Bush's disaster in Mesopotamia. Had Republicans not had such a herd mentality over the war, they wouldn't have all gone over the cliff together. Hagel was almost alone among Republicans for calling it exactly as he saw it early on.
As I've said repeatedly in this space, because military budgets are wholly dependent on a given nation's foreign policy, they are the very definition of discretionary spending. A country that will soon be unable to pay its own bills has no business "remaking the world in its image."
For all of the talk about Hagel's ideas being "out of the mainstream," it is the Republican Party itself that has moved out of the mainstream. In the last dozen years, the GOP has shunned the foreign policy conservatism of Eisenhower and Reagan, to say nothing of the Weinberger and Powell doctrines, and adopted an almost evangelical Wilsonian foreign policy. The Republican answer to any foreign challenge seems to be "bomb first and ask questions later." And we've seen how well that worked in Iraq.
An interventionist American foreign policy was excusable during the Cold War, when the economies of the former great powers were shattered by the Second World War. That is no longer true. There is no threatening global hegemon that requires an American military presence in each of the world's time zones. Even at the height of their power, al-Qaeda did not pose the threat that the Soviet Union did, and anyone who suggests otherwise is not to be taken seriously.
Republicans, as enamoured as they are with "the Founder's intent," should be the first people to recognize this. The Founders didn't agree on much, but they were in universal agreement on what President Washington later called "foreign entanglements." The Constitution gives Congress the power "To raise and support Armies" (note the plural) specifically because the Founders unanimously opposed a permanent standing army and repeatedly warned against the establishment of one.
The idea that entitlement spending can be slashed while defense is increased as a proportion of GDP is ridiculous and politically suicidal. That supposedly conservative politicians make assertions to the contrary is further evidence of how delusional they've become.
To avoid a wholesale meltdown of the U.S economy, deep and immediate cuts are going to have to be made, but the Pentagon cannot be spared. This is obviously going to require a fundamental reassessment of American foreign policy and what constitutes a "vital national interest."
For most of America's history, its vital national interests were limited to Mexico, Canada and keeping sea lanes open for international trade. The Middle East only became a factor during the Second World War, and only because denying Nazi Germany the region's oil was a military necessity. Afterward, the Soviet threat to the region necessitated U.S engagement. However, the blowback of American support for despotic Arab and Persian regimes was the jihadi threat the United States faces today.
Then there's Israel, which seems to be the epicentre of Republican opposition to Senator Hagel.
Since the establishment of the State of Israel, the U.S foreign policy establishment understood that American support for Israel had to be balanced against its interests in the Arab world.
There is a difference between a moral interest and a strategic interest. Support for Israel couldn't be more of a moral interest, which very few sane people would dispute. However, there are 100 million Arabs, who have oil and would very much like nuclear weapons. There are another 80 million Persians of whom the same thing could be said. That is the the definition of a strategic interest.
As a supporter of the Jewish state, I question the the morality of backing Israel regardless of the wisdom of its policies and how damaging they might be to U.S interests in the Arab world.
First, it's ahistorical. The presidents that took the hardest line on Israel were Eisenhower, Reagan and the first Bush. All of them, to one degree or another, threatened the continuing relationship to protect America's Arab interests and none of them were labelled as anti-Semites, as Chuck Hagel recently has.
For all the rhetoric regarding the Obama-Netanyahu relationship, Obama hasn't threatened the diplomatic abandonment of Jerusalem (which Eisenhower did over Suez,) describe their military actions as a "Holocaust" (which Reagan did regarding Lebanon,) or cut off loan guarantees (which Bush 41 did when Israel expanded settlements.) Obama has been more tolerant of Israel's conduct than any Republican president except Nixon and the second Bush.
Second, unquestioning American support for Israel; military, diplomatic and financial is only significant if there's a reasonable chance that that support will always be there, and that can hardly be guaranteed at this point. We're are not long from the day when serious people will begin to question whether the United States can afford to provide $3 billion in foreign aid every year. Without that aid, Israelis will be forced to choose between their defense and their economy because they won't be able to afford both.
Washington has to persuade Jerusalem that it is in its long term interest to make a deal with both the Palestinians and the hold-out nations of the Middle East, if only because they can't and won't be subsidized forever. Europe is less accommodating of Israeli intractability every day, and the Chinese and Russians are fully allied with the Arabs and Iranians. Who does that leave in Israel's corner?
It's hard to imagine many Americans tolerating cuts to their Medicare and Social Security benefits while their government provides billion in military aid to an ally that thinks that it doesn't have to make a serious bargain with its neighbours. I believe that's more than the domestic political traffic will bear once America's economic decline becomes a recognizable reality.
Israel can make a tolerable deal now, or a considerably worse one later, when they've been financially and diplomatically abandoned. It is deeply immoral for a nation rapidly facing bankruptcy to provide assurances to the contrary to Israel.
Senator Hagel's views on a possible conflict with Iran are not unlike my own. Military will not destroy the Iranian program, only delay it and paradoxically prove to Tehran that it's necessary. Even if the current theorcacy were replaced tomorrow, Iran's security situation would still be such that it would feel it needed a nuclear deterrent because any country in Iran's position would feel that way.
Given the geography and demographic facts, war with Iran would be much more challenging than the conflicts in Iraq or Afghanistan are by several degrees of magnitude. The American people might support armed action in theory, but the reality is almost certainly going to be quite different. Sending troops in there when public support will evaporate almost immediately isn't just unfair to the military, it's immoral.
Bob Woodward wrote an interesting article about Hagel in yesterday's Washington Post;
This worldview is part hawk and part dove. It amounts, in part, to a challenge to the wars of President George W. Bush. It holds that the Afghanistan war has been mismanaged and the Iraq war unnecessary. War is an option, but very much a last resort.
So, this thinking goes, the U.S. role in the world must be carefully scaled back — this is not a matter of choice but of facing reality; the military needs to be treated with deep skepticism; lots of strategic military and foreign policy thinking is out of date; and quagmires like Afghanistan should be avoided.
The bottom line: The United States must get out of these massive land wars — Iraq and Afghanistan — and, if possible, avoid future large-scale war.
Although much discussion of the Hagel nomination has centered on his attitudes about Iran, Israel and the defense budget, Hagel’s broader agreement with Obama on overall philosophy is probably more consequential.
Hagel has also said he believes it is important that a defense secretary should not dictate foreign policy and that policy should be made in the White House.
He privately voiced reservations about Obama’s decision in late 2009 to add 51,000 troops to Afghanistan. “The president has not had commander-in-chief control of the Pentagon since Bush senior was president,” Hagel said privately in 2011.
The Republican party line on Hagel is that "his views are out of the mainstream." But if there's one thing that's proven indisputably true over the last fifteen years, it's that the "mainstream" isn't just wrong, it's increasingly dangerous and unaffordable.
How well has "the mainstream" served American strategic interests in Iraq and Afghanistan? Both countries are almost certainly going to worse than the United States found them a decade ago, and the potential for both destabilizing their neighbours in unpredictable ways is enormous. "Mainstream thinking," particularly in the GOP, is precisely what put America where it is today: broke and militarily broken.
Hagel describes himself as an Eisenhower Republican. President Eisenhower also stood outside of the mainstream and in direct conflict with the military he commanded and the prevailing political attitudes of both his party and the country. Ike understood that the greatest threat America faced was the unintended consequences of poorly considered action. Had Eisenhower remained in office, it's impossible to imagine the Cuban Missile Crisis occurring because the series of events that led to it never would have been set in motion. It's entirely possible that the Soviets would have reacted militarily to the British, French and Israeli hostilities in the Suez Canal if Eisenhower hadn't stopped it first.
If the United States is to survive as anything resembling the country we recognize today, it had better start adopting views "outside the mainstream" immediately.
For that reason, the Senate should confirm Chuck Hagel as Secretary of Defense.
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