Chuck Hagel testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee
yesterday, and the posturing quickly began.
Sen. John McCain, who was oddly subdued during his friend John
Kerry’s confirmation hearing, and uselessly submissive during his
friend Hillary Clinton’s Benghazi testimony, grilled his
non-friend Chuck Hagel on his opposition to the Iraq surge.
Sen. Jim Inhofe accused Hagel of “political expediency.” Sen. Ted
Cruz came armed with clips from an Al Jazeera interview.
Hagel’s test was to explain away a checklist of objectionable
things he’d said or supported. How’d he do? Not terribly, but worse
than I’d expected. It was the performance of someone who was
accustomed to speaking off-the-cuff and was forced to restrain
himself. Thus he bumbled on Iran, sounded mealy-mouthed on his
opposition to the surge, and wilted under several pointed lines of
questioning.
A revealing moment came when he was asked about his comment that
“the Jewish lobby intimidates a lot of people up here” into doing
some “dumb things.” Hagel quickly apologized. “I should have said
pro-Israel lobby,” he admitted. And replaced “intimidated” with
“influenced.” And omitted the word “dumb.” It was a lot of hemming
for one remark.
Thanks to gaffes like that, critics have spent the past month
hurling overcooked accusations that Hagel is anti-Semitic. He’s
not. But he is guilty of letting his mouth get ahead of his head. I
was there in 2008 when Hagel made one of his
more unfortunate gaffes. Asked about Alan Greenspan’s recent
comment that the war in Iraq was being fought over oil, Hagel
exclaimed, “Of course we are! They talk about America’s national
interest. What the hell do you think they’re talking about? We’re
not there for figs.” My memory of the incident isn’t perfect, but I
remember him reacting like a snapping turtle, jumping on the
question with little thought or consideration.
That’s Hagel’s default mode, tough and reactionary, angry about
war. That anger occasionally leads him to say things that are
extreme. But it’s also backed up by a pugnacity that President
Obama wants. Since taking office, the president has been locked in
a passive-aggressive dogfight with his generals. “The struggle
between the White House and the Pentagon,” noted Rolling
Stone in
a revealing 2009 profile, “is an important test of whether the
president can take command in a political storm that could tear his
administration apart.” The public brouhaha over General Stanley
McChrystal, fired by the White House after joking about members of
the administration, was just one battle in this bureaucratic
war.
Obama wants a more restrained military. In Hagel, he’ll have
someone who’s been in combat, shares his views, and, above all,
will aggressively enforce his agenda. The president intends to
stick it to the Pentagon brass, and Hagel’s his man for the
job.
In this sense, Hagel’s symbolic importance is enormous. He
represents a turning point, away from the interventionism of the
Bush years, and towards a new era of austerity, where the military
isn’t sacrosanct and cuts to its budget are real.
Hagel also symbolizes questions haunting conservatives. Should
they cling to the foreign policy idealism of the Iraq war? Or
should they set all that behind them, accept that the Bush years
were a wrong turn, and start treating the Pentagon like just
another government agency to be downsized? Or is the solution
somewhere in the middle, perhaps supporting targeted Pentagon cuts
while getting hellishly tough on Iran?
Those questions are roiling the right. Rarely has the old
question of paleoconservative vs. neoconservative been so embodied
in one person as in Chuck Hagel. It’s produced some strange
ideological fault lines; neoconservatives, some of whom have been
encouraging the right to capitulate on domestic policy, are
suddenly going nuclear, while many paleoconservatives are
encouraging moderation and support.
Ultimately though, none of this symbolism really matters.
Senators can harrumph all they want, but barring some sudden
Democrat revolt, Hagel is going to be confirmed. And Hagel can
harrumph all he wants, but deep military cuts are going to take
place. Republicans, most notably Rep. Paul Ryan, are coming to
accept the sequester, which would slash $500 billion from defense
over the next decade. And even if we dodge the sequester, we have
$16.5 trillion in national debt. Eventually the Pentagon will have
to be trimmed.
Conservatives should focus on lopping off the right branches.
Sen. Tom Coburn recently released an excellent report
detailing $68 billion in defense cuts, including money wasted
on wind turbines and other renewable energy nonsense. The right
should demand that those green projects go first, followed by
duplicate programs and other consequences of Pentagon bureaucracy.
This is the fight to be had.
Hagel reveals the president’s foreign policy intentions. He
confronts conservatives with questions about our ideology. But
ultimately, he’s an ephemeral symbol of a change that can’t be
stopped.
Cuts are coming to the Pentagon. Now the question is: Where do
they begin?
Photo: UPI
