The Hagel hearing!
We have never paid that much attention to Chuck Hagel! And, we would suppose that if we relied exclusively on these hearings that were held in the nation’s capital Thursday that we would not be very impressed by him at all. However, what certain members of the Republican party pulled off this week should attract the attention of all of us, and particularly those who elected them to the supposedly high offices that they purport to hold. It is sad when a state like Arizona sends the nation something like what it has with John McCain and his so many visible scars and hates!
Chuck Hagel seemed ill prepared for the avalanche of questions and the accompanying criticism that was implied in each and every one of them. We have watched senate confirmation hearings before and, although Hillary Clinton’s affair with the senate last week was not a confirmation hearing, it showed a far different contrast from what Hagel put on yesterday. Where Clinton was cool and in control of the entire proceeding, Hagel seemed to be at the mercy of it all. Of course, Hillary Clinton did not have to answer questions about prior statements about the “Jewish lobby” and other demeaning things that Hagel has said during his tenure as a two term Republican senator with a very brash reputation as a politician with sharp elbows. There are a lot of people around who have their opinions about the Jewish influence in this nation and its recent political history but most of them keep their opinions to themselves. Hagel has left the implication that he has even more derogatory feelings but he at least left those off of the political table. It is the Republicans who are trying to fill in the gaps. There is good reason to question Hagel about his feelings about Israel because Israel is at the forefront of so much of our diplomatic and military history as well as our current events.
It might be best remembered that Chuck Hagel will not be making the decisions that affect Israel and the middle east by himself, if he is involved in making those decisions at all. Barack Obama runs a tight White House where he takes in a great deal of information and impute but reaches decisions among a close circle of advisors. The best that Hagel can expect is to provide the president and his men with impute on what the military can and cannot do, and, of course the joint chiefs will also have their say in that informational flow. In addition to that, President Obama is known to have relationships with individual military men such as generals and admirals which he draws on when he makes decisions in which the military is involved. If we know anything about Barack Obama it is that he draws on many resources before he makes any decision and the Secretary of Defense is merely one among many in that regard.
One of the really disturbing things that went on in the Hagel hearings was the lack of any meaningful discussion on how former senator Hagel might run the Department of Defense from his office in the building--the Pentagon--that is as massive as the huge organization that is headquartered there. The defense department and the United States military is an enormous operation that one observer has stated might require the Secretary of Defense to make as many as one hundred meaningful decisions on a busy day. It is disturbing to note that Chuck Hagel did not know that the containment of Iran is not official American policy and, in fact, that the stoppage of Iran from developing nuclear weapons is of the highest priority, with containment, as in the old Soviet Union, coming about only after Iran has developed nuclear weapons and we can do little else but contain them then. Once a nation crosses the nuclear threshold it becomes a whole different ball game as we look at nations like Pakistan and most particularly North Korea!
Chuck Hagel’s general demeanor throughout most of the hearings was of a man who did not seem to have any great grasp of the issues that were put before him and did not even seem to have benefited from the amount of practice that he supposedly went through in preparation for the grilling that he knew that he was going to be taking. President Obama knows Hagel as well as anyone and, after Hagel’s performance yesterday, we must rely on the president’s judgment that this is the man that he can rely on to carry out the objectives set forth for him emanating from the White House. In point of fact, and as we stated earlier in this piece, Hagel is going to have a great deal of latitude and independence in the daily affairs of our military as he makes those many decisions on which lives, morale, and future affairs are so dependant. What Chuck Hagel would do at this critical juncture of the defense departments existence will certainly affect American decision making ten to fifteen years down the road! Hagel will be going into the defense job with some good background. Chief among that back grounding is the fact that he was a ground pounding infantry sergeant during the war in Vietnam who saw combat, was wounded, and took with him into public office, a suspicion of those who would send our soldiers off to fight. Perhaps only on a neoconservative whim such as George W. Bush did in 2003! That Hagel learned and grew from that experience stands in stark contrast to neoconservatives such as John McCain who appear to have gained nothing from the experience except to thirst for more conflict and the combat that goes with it.
The fact that Chuck Hagel stood against the Iraq war gives him credentials that many in our military establishment have never had! Perhaps Barack Obama feels a deeply held kinship with Hagel partially because he stood against that war just as Obama did even before he entered the United States Senate! Judgment stands for a lot but, as we have stated before, the ability to manage an organization, in our very humble opinion, may stand for a whole lot more. We just saw this week how defense spending can affect the entire national Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as forty year declines in defense spending took the GDP down to a negative number in the final quarter of last year. That reminds us that there is inevitably going to have to be reduced federal spending on defense and whomever takes over at the defense department will have to oversee all of that. We do not recall many serious questions being put to Chuck Hagel on that or any of the other serious matters that will confront the nation and its military over the next few years.
Many of the Republicans who took part in these hearings did themselves any good in the eyes of a watching nation. John McCain and Lindsey Graham, two of our more experienced senators, seemed to have bones to pick with Hagel that had little to do with how he would run the defense department. Whether Hagel was right about the Iraqi surge has little to do with whether he will be right on so many issues that the defense department will face over the next few years. And, the newly elected Tea Party senator from Texas, Ted Cruz, continues to show what an almost complete slave to the Tea Party’s very questionable ideology that he really is! Cruz was one of only three to vote against the nomination of John Kerry to the post of Secretary of State! If the republicans are serious about an obstructionist approach to government, they proved it in these hearings!
Bad as the Republican attacks were, we were greatly disturbed that Chuck Hagel was not able to blunt them more than he did and redirect them toward the directions that he would have liked for them to go. Hagel’s handling of the surge question put to him by John McCain was a fine example of how Hagel let the questioner control him instead of the other way around. McCain is a former military man from a military family and Hagel will have to deal with many of these types during his tenure at the Pentagon. When dealing with the fast paced military world, an inability to be prepared will not stand a man like Hagel in very good stead. And, if either Hagel or president Obama and his men think that those over at the Pentagon were not watching these hearings, they are sadly mistaken. The last thing that the Obama administration needs right now is a Defense secretary that they have to watch over and that they might have to work around. This is especially true after the really good people who have held this position before such as Bob Gates and Leon Panetta. We realize that the Pentagon must change directions with the looming fiscal restraints but a direction under Hagel’s supervision needs to be as effective, in its way, as those who have preceded him and not just an exercise in frustration for all concerned. And, Thursdays hearings were a frustrating exercise indeed!
All in all, these hearings have been a major disappointment both from the senate side and from the nominees side as well. A better conducted hearing might have exposed strengths that we did not know that Chuck Hagel had or, conversely, more weaknesses that might have really doomed his nomination for all of the right reasons. Instead, what we got was something in between where the Republicans went on a witch hunt over past supposed transgressions which caused the Democrats to have to respond to them instead of getting to the issues at hand. Issues such as women in combat and don’t ask, don’t tell went begging as well as the use of drones over the next few years and the general way that Chuck Hagel might have to make choices on a daily basis that might result in a far different and more lean military as the nation faces a future that is going to feature all of them in equal importance. One organization that watches word counts in things like these hearings stated that the word Iraq came up twice as often as the word Afghanistan. Everyone knows that we’ve been out of Iraq for over a year now while we still have over sixty thousand troops in Afghanistan! There are times when senate hearings are mere formalities as with John Kerry and there are other times when they can really make a difference!
The nation was poorly served in the senate this week!
IOVHO,
Regards,
Joe
To say that "God exists" is the greatest understatement ever made across space and time.
| 