Hagel’s gutsy and prescient stand against his own party and President George W. Bush in the run-up to the Iraq invasion—and his criticism of the war’s management afterwards—all but cost him his political career, turning him from a possible GOP presidential contender into a pariah within his party.
As early as the spring of 2002, as stories began to circulate that Bush was intent on going to war with Iraq, Hagel, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, began warning against the overextension of U.S. power. "We can't just say, 'Let's go take Saddam Hussein out,'" he said at a luncheon in June 2002. "I suppose that militarily we could. But you'd better understand what's coming, if we do. We could inflame the Arab-Muslim world like nothing we've ever seen."
So this is why we should want Hagel as our Secretary of Defense? Let's examine his purported guts and prescience.
1. He opposed the war to overthrow Saddam in the spring of 2002.
2. He criticized the conduct of the war after it began.
3. He also said the war to overthrow Saddam, while we could do it militarily, would inflame the Arab-Muslim world "like nothing we've seen." That would overextend our power to cope, apparently.
That record qualifies Hagel to be Secretary of Defense?
On the first demonstration of guts, Hagel then went on to vote for the authorization to use force against Saddam's Iraq.
Politically Expedient: 1; Guts: 0.
On the second example, who in Washington wasn't criticising the war after about February 2004? It was a parlor game. Even Thomas Friedman switched sides. And part of Hagel's "prescience" was to oppose letting the surge unfold and urge a halt to the war before the surge could pay off.
Politically Expedient: 2; Guts: 0.
And in the other game: Conventional Wisdom: 1; Prescience: 0.
Finally, Hagel said that militarily we'd have an easy job but that the often-cited "Arab street" would explode in anti-American rage and that we'd be so busy putting out fires in the Arab-Muslim world that Iraq would be small potatoes.
But militarily, we actually did have a problem in that it took us 5 years to break Baathist resistance and hold off the al Qaeda and Iranian terror offensives.
And the Arab street did not rise up in anti-American outrage against our invasion. In time, our fight in Iraq showed al Qaeda to be bloodthirsty brutes who lost the trust of much of the Arab-Muslim world. Our military was able to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan, emerging as effective and experienced forces. The cost was relatively trivial--with the Iraq War direct costs about equal to what we spent in the 2009 stimulus at the stroke of a pen. If our power to cope is overextended, you might want to look at non-defense spending for that smoking gun.
Our running score? Conventional Wisdom: 3; Politically Expedient: 3; Guts: 0; and Prescience: 0.
Oh, and he switched parties in the depths of Bush 41's unpopularity and recently apologized for some old anti-gay slurs. So let's add two to the Politically Expedient category.
Or do his defenders want to argue that the anti-gay slur was gutsy? Let's just star that one.
Our final score? Conventional Wisdom: 3; Politically Expedient: 5; Guts: 0*; and Prescience: 0.
And maybe not final. After all, Hagel hasn't even been formally nominated yet. But I sense an approaching Pennsylvania Avenue express bus gathering speed.
