Scott J. Ferrell / Congressional Quarterly / Getty ImagesAs a Republican senator from Nebraska, Chuck Hagel said the surge of 30,000 U.S. troops into Iraq in 2007 was a "blunder."
For the third time in 15 years, a Democratic president will turn to a member of the Republican Party to run his Pentagon. Monday afternoon, President Obama is expected to nominate former Republican senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska to serve as secretary of defense. Senate approval – where Hagel served for 12 years before retiring in 2008 – is likely, but not guaranteed, given his pedigree. He follows in the footsteps of Bill Cohen, Clinton, 1997-2001 and Robert Gates, Obama, 2009-2011.
Cohen, a one-time GOP senator from Maine, embraces the idea of a Republican defense secretary in a Democratic president’s cabinet, especially when military spending cuts are looming. “You’re picking the best person to handle the job who can build a consensus on Capitol Hill, basically,” he says of the key challenge Hagel faces. “Having a Republican when you’re downsizing sends the message that we’re going to do this on a non-partisan basis, with this man who has a military background, a war hero, Purple Hearts, et cetera.”
Yet unlike Cohen and Gates – who could fairly be described as centrists — Hagel is decidedly more contrarian. He’ll bring his own baggage to the Pentagon on everything ranging from the U.S. role in the world, the size and purpose of the U.S. military, and striking the proper relationship with Israel.
The nomination comes a month after Administration officials floated Hagel’s name, only to see it batted around like a piñata by those opposed to the pick. It’s apparent that the White House, already smarting over the pre-emptive derailment of UN Ambassador Susan Rice for secretary of state, wasn’t about to let that happen a second time. Ash Carter, the deputy defense secretary, and Michèle Flournoy – who stepped down as the Pentagon’s No. 3 civilian last year and would be the first woman to hold the post – were also-rans.
Hagel has already run into a buzzsaw of opposition, even from the members of his own party. “I like Chuck Hagel,” Senator Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., told CNN on Sunday. “He served with distinguish in Vietnam as an enlisted man, two Purple Hearts, but, quite frankly, Chuck Hagel is out of the mainstream of thinking I believe on most issues regarding foreign policy.” If confirmed, Hagel “would be the most antagonistic secretary of defense towards the state of Israel in our nation’s history,” Graham said.
Foreign-policy heavyweights are lining up on both sides of the nomination. Supporting Hagel are heavyweights including Bush 41 national security adviser Brent Scowcroft, Reagan defense secretary Frank Carlucci, and Ryan Crocker, the highly-regarded former U.S. ambassador to both Afghanistan and Iraq.
Opponents include at least three GOP senators – Dan Coats of Indiana, Tom Coburn of Oklahoma and John Cornyn of Texas – as well as vocal critics including Josh Block, who heads the Israel Project, a Washington-based, pro-Israel group, and William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard, a conservative opinion magazine. “The next secretary of defense should be a well-respected mainstream national security leader,” Kristol wrote last week, “not an out-of-the-mainstream mediocrity.”
On the deployment side of the ledger, Hagel is likely to push back against U.S. military commanders who want to pull the remaining 66,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan out as slowly as possible before all U.S. combat forces are due home by 2015. There’s one Hagel quote already ricocheting around the Pentagon, concerning President George W. Bush’s plan to dispatch 30,000 additional U.S. troops to Iraq in 2007 to try to quell a nascent civil war there. Hagel called it
The most dangerous foreign-policy blunder in this country since Vietnam, if it’s carried out.
Well, it was carried out, and by most accounts the so-called “surge” calmed things down in Iraq. “I’ll have a hard time voting for anybody to be secretary of defense who believes that the surge was a foreign-policy blunder,” Graham said Sunday.
How much such comments will dent Hagel’s time as an decorated infantryman in Vietnam remains an open question. But more important than his service in Vietnam more than 40 years ago is the time he and Obama shared in the Senate from 2004 to 2008, when they served together on the foreign relations committee and traveled to overseas hotspots.
Hagel would be the first defense secretary since the late Caspar Weinberger, defense chief in the Reagan Administration, to have worn a U.S. military uniform in combat – and the first enlisted man. That’ll instantly give him credibility. Hagel “led an infantry squad in Vietnam during the bloody fighting following the Tet Offensive,” Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said of his likely successor at a Memorial Day service last May. “Like millions of our generation, he demonstrated bravery, patriotism, and heroism on the battlefield.”
With his Hagel pick following Panetta’s Democratic interregnum, Obama gets Republican cover to try to retool the Pentagon. That will include its missions as well as its business dealings. If he wants to, with Hagel in charge of the Defense Department, Obama will be able to press for more substantial changes than he could with a Democrat sitting in that huge E-ring office (Atlantic contributing editor Yochi Dreazen recently wrote about this strange state of affairs.)
But Hagel has never seemed to harbor a sense that is the mission of America – nor its military – to spread democracy around the world. “Militaries are built to fight and win wars, not bind together failing nations,” he wrote in 2006. “We are once again learning a very hard lesson in foreign affairs: America cannot impose a democracy on any nation — regardless of our noble purpose.” That echoes Obama’s own thinking on the topic.
Former Maine GOP senator William Cohen applauds Obama’s pick, and dismisses concerns that he’ll make bad policy. “You want a secretary of defense to be strong-minded,” Cohen says. “But he has to understand that this is not about Chuck Hagel because he is not going to determine policy in the Middle East or with Iran – that’s the call of the President.”
Cohen says that while the Democratic Party is unfairly portrayed as being weak on defense, the Hagel nomination gives Obama some political cover. “Having a Republican there when you’re downsizing really takes away the issue of `There go the Democrats again,’” he says.
The nod could generate some opposition from Jewish groups, who don’t see him as fervent enough when it comes to supporting Israel. Hagel has criticized loose U.S. talk about military strikes against Iran for its nuclear program. Iran, for its part, has been paying close attention to Hagel and his new assignment.
Hagel’s lack of traditional GOP ideology might give him an edge when it comes to weaning the U.S. military off the hundreds of billions of dollars in added funding Congress gave it following 9/11. The libertarian Cato Institute suggests he would preside over a slimmed-down, stay-at-home military.
But there are elements in the GOP who deem Hagel untrustworthy, based largely on the sense that his advocacy of U.S. non-interventionism represents an abdication of U.S. power from the world stage. “Hagel IS a Dem,” tweeted ardent GOP hawk Danielle Pletka of the American Enterprise Institute, relaying a tweet bemoaning the lack of Democrats in charge at the Pentagon recently.
The disdain is mutual. Hagel summed up the view of his party in a May interview with Josh Rogin at Foreign Affairs’ Cable blog. “I don’t think you can lead by ideology. Ideology gets a nation into a lot of trouble,” Hagel said. “There’s a streak of intolerance in the Republican Party today, and that scares people.”
