Chuck Hagel was a huge mistake
He was the wrong man to lead the Pentagon in a new direction
"He wasn't up to the job."
That one sentence from an anonymous White House official is the final verdict on Chuck Hagel, who by all appearances is being shoved out of his post as secretary of Defense. It was perhaps his sad destiny all along to leave the administration in the most humiliating way possible, since he joined it in similar fashion, winning confirmation only after he was bludgeoned to near-death by his former Republican colleagues in the Senate.
From beginning to end, it was clear that Hagel was the wrong man at the wrong time to lead the Pentagon, though not for reasons that his critics claim, namely that he is too dovish to lead the world's largest military at a time of enormous instability in the Middle East. Rather, it's that while he served as an embodiment of the Obama administration's foreign policy goals, he was a terrible advocate for them.
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
In a superficial sense, Hagel ticked a lot of boxes for the administration. He won two Purple Hearts in Vietnam. As the senator from Nebraska, he made his name in debates over foreign policy. He is technically a Republican. But he opposed the Iraq War and generally advocated for a liberal foreign policy. He encouraged engagement with Iran. He was a forceful critic of Israel. He advocated for nuclear disarmament.
He was, in other words, a dove with a national security pedigree, which made him seem like the right choice to lead the Pentagon as the administration drew down from Iraq and Afghanistan and tried to rein in the military's insanely bloated budget.
But the White House miscalculated badly. An outright liberal would have been more palatable to Senate Republicans than Hagel, who had long been written off as an attention-seeking turncoat. Look no further than the treatment he received at the hands of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who once reportedly considered Hagel a "BFF." At the confirmation hearing, McCain repeatedly savaged Hagel over his opposition to the 2007 Iraq troop surge, which Hagel had previously described as "the most dangerous foreign policy blunder since Vietnam."
That wasn't the only questionable statement or position from Hagel's past that got him into trouble. He had called the powerful Israeli lobby the "Jewish lobby," a phrase that carries the whiff of bigotry. He had opposed sanctions on Iran that Obama strongly supported. He had said the Iranian government was "legitimate." He had endorsed a "unilateral" disarmament of nuclear weapons.
Sign up for Today's Best Articles in your inbox
A free daily email with the biggest news stories of the day – and the best features from TheWeek.com
However you feel about any of those positions, the fact is that they were to the left of the White House, which forced Hagel to renounce nearly all of them during his confirmation. He went so far as to say that he wished he could "go back and edit that, like many of the things I've said, I would like to change the words and the meaning."
This gap between Hagel and the White House was crystallized by Hagel's statement during the hearing that the administration's goal was to "contain" Iran, which it wasn't. Hagel backtracked once again, only this time it didn't just seem like he would say anything to get the job, but that he was clueless.
Hagel never recovered from the hearings. His credibility was shot. He has been largely invisible these past two years, his sad plight captured in this one anecdote from a New York Times article in October:
So the guy who was brought in to reform the Defense Department, who was expected to lead America in a new direction after a decade of fruitless war, who was supposed to stand up to the hawks in the military, let the head of the armed forces dictate the terms of the debate within the White House because he was scared of a few leaks?
President Obama, and those who want a saner foreign policy, can do better.
Create an account with the same email registered to your subscription to unlock access.
Ryu Spaeth is deputy editor at TheWeek.com. Follow him on Twitter.
-
What are the main security threats facing the UK?
Today's Big Question State plots by Russia and Iran are joined by renewed efforts from Islamic State and al-Qaeda, and younger far-right extremists
By Harriet Marsden, The Week UK Published
-
'New poll gives Harris an edge'
Today's Newspapers A roundup of the headlines from the US front pages
By The Week Staff Published
-
Threads: how apocalyptic pseudo-documentary shocked a nation
In the Spotlight The rarely shown nuclear annihilation film will reappear on TV screens this week
By Rebekah Evans, The Week UK Published