The showdown over Hagel

What happened

President Obama set up a bruising confrontation with Senate Republicans this week by nominating maverick former GOP Sen. Chuck Hagel as his secretary of defense. The nomination provoked strongly worded criticism from conservatives and the GOP, who accuse Hagel, a decorated Vietnam veteran, of being hostile to Israel, soft on Iran, and too much of a dove to oversee the Pentagon. The president also finalized his second-term national security team by nominating his chief counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan, to replace Gen. David Petraeus as director of the CIA. At a White House ceremony, Obama praised Hagel’s military record and described how he once dragged his brother to safety after his brother was wounded by a landmine. “Chuck knows that war is not an abstraction,” said Obama. “He understands that sending young Americans to fight and bleed in the dirt and mud, that’s something we do only when it’s absolutely necessary.”

Republican senators vowed that Hagel—who would replace the retiring Leon Panetta—would face tough questioning during his confirmation hearing. In 2002, he angered Republicans by warning that invading Iraq could lead to chaos and a violent struggle between Sunnis and Shiites. He also opposed the 2007 troop surge. Conservative and Jewish groups noted that Hagel had objected to tough sanctions against Iran and once referred to pro-Israel groups in Washington as “the Jewish lobby.” Hagel said that his critics had “completely distorted” his record, and that he had shown “total support for Israel” throughout his Senate career.

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What the editorials said

Both parties should sign off on Hagel’s nomination, said the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. His life story reads like a Republican fantasy. He “grew up in poverty, got drafted, earned two Purple Hearts, worked his way through college, made a fortune in the cellphone business, and then entered public service.” Wisely, he has called for the “bloated” defense budget to be “pared down,” and thinks “military intervention should be the last resort, not the first.”

Hagel’s appointment would only serve Obama’s “desire to withdraw the U.S. from its traditional role of world leadership,” said The Wall Street Journal. His eagerness to slash the defense budget would “diminish the U.S. ability to intervene abroad.” Hagel’s retrograde views on Jews are also a disqualifier, said theOrange County, Calif., Register. His 2006 “Jewish lobby” comment could have been pulled from the anti-Semitic tract The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. In fact, there is no Jewish lobby on Capitol Hill, just a group of concerned people who support Israel’s security—which Hagel evidently does not.

What the columnists said

The accusation of anti-Semitism is baseless “character assassination,” said Richard Cohen in The Washington Post. If disagreeing with the current Israeli government’s hawkish policies is anti-Semitic, then much of Israel and many American Jews are anti-Semitic. The intensity of the Republican attack on Hagel shows how extreme the party’s foreign policy has become, said Peter Beinart in TheDailyBeast.com. The neoconservative hawks and Bush holdovers who still dominate the GOP are banging the drums for war with Iran, and fear Hagel because he has the credibility to remind colleagues that “war, once unleashed, cannot be easily controlled.”

Obama picked Hagel primarily for another reason, said David Brooks in The New York Times. Hagel will let the White House make deep cuts in the Pentagon’s budget, in order to free up more cash for our increasingly expensive welfare state. “If a Democratic president is going to slash defense, he probably wants a Republican at the Pentagon to give him political cover, and he probably wants a decorated war hero to boot.”

Despite these cries of protest, it’s “doubtful that the votes to defeat Hagel will materialize in the Senate,” said Ryan Lizza in NewYorker.com. In its history, the upper chamber has confirmed more than 500 Cabinet nominations and denied just nine—the last rejection coming 24 years ago. But “even if Obama prevails, the Hagel fight will have a cost to the rest of his agenda.” After embittered Republicans swallow another Obama victory and see Hagel installed at the Pentagon, they will be even less willing to compromise.