The Meaning of the Hagel Fight

February 26, 2013 Topic: Congress Region: IsraelIranUnited States

The Meaning of the Hagel Fight

His nomination was a series of proxy battles over the past and future of American foreign policy.

As Chuck Hagel finally appears set to win Senate confirmation and take his place as secretary of defense, bringing the heated public debate over his nomination to an end, we’re left with one question: What was this all about, anyway?

Almost no one looks good coming out of the months-long fight since Hagel’s name was first floated for the position. Hagel will go into his new job appearing bruised and weakened. Senate Democrats provided the votes he needed for confirmation but were otherwise mostly absent from the debate. Senate Republicans and their outside allies launched a relentless campaign against Hagel, which raised a number of legitimate concerns but also frequently veered into outlandish, false accusations and smears. And while the episode will likely have little political impact on President Obama, even some of his own allies have publicly wondered why he nominated Hagel to begin with.

The debate over Hagel was far removed from the actual responsibilities that he will now take on in running the Pentagon. As others have pointed out, Hagel’s confirmation hearing focused overwhelmingly on Israel and Iran, with those two countries mentioned 178 and 169 times, respectively. In contrast, Afghanistan, where the United States is currently engaged in a war and has sixty-eight thousand troops serving, got thirty-eight mentions. China—America’s most significant strategic challenger and the principal reason for the “pivot” to Asia that Hagel will be charged with executing—got a mere five.

Meanwhile, as the process moved on the accusations made against Hagel grew more and more shrill, culminating in the false claim that Hagel had once been paid to give a speech to a nonexistent group with the ridiculous name “Friends of Hamas.” A New York Daily News reporter later revealed that he had been the original source of this rumor—in a joke he made to an unnamed Republican Senate aide.

But when you strip away the hysteria, what was this all really about? Part of the answer lies in the way that Hagel became a proxy for a series of broader arguments about the direction of U.S. foreign and defense policy. Writing at Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall suggests that what is most important about Hagel’s nomination “is that it signals a real closing of the door on the Bush era.” According to Marshall, where the “Bush/neoconservative approach” supports a “belligerent unilateralism” based on the vision of “an abundantly powerful and yet deeply endangered America,” Obama’s foreign policy has been centered on “unwinding” the “commitments, practices and open wars” of the Bush years. Hagel, he says, is part of this “running critique of Bush era foreign policy” from Democrats and old-guard Republican realists. Marshall sums up why this matters:

President Obama was elected 4 years ago. He has whatever policies he has. And he’ll be there for the next four years. But who he chooses is important. Not because Chuck Hagel is going to be guiding policy — this White House is notorious for keeping cabinet secretaries on a very short leash. But nominating Hagel and getting him confirmed says that this is ‘mainstream’, that this is the President’s direction.

Marshall exaggerates the differences between the two presidents, but he’s right that these differences are real and meaningful—especially to certain opponents of Hagel. The best example is John McCain, who used his questioning in Hagel’s confirmation hearing to relitigate the Iraq War and the subsequent surge. Hagel, of course, was probably the most prominent elected Republican official to break with George W. Bush over the Iraq War and speak out against the neoconservative vision of reshaping the Middle East. It’s no surprise that his nomination would elicit strong opposition from those like McCain who still believe that there was nothing fundamentally wrong with the Bush administration’s big-picture grand strategy and the initial decision to invade Iraq.

The Hagel nomination also served as a proxy debate over the range of acceptable opinion when it comes to Israel and Iran. From the moment Bloomberg reported that Hagel was the leading candidate for the position last December 13, the public conversation around Hagel largely revolved around those two countries. That same day, an unnamed “top Republican Senate aide” said ominously to the Weekly Standard, “Send us Hagel and we will make sure every American knows he is an anti-Semite.” Over the following months, as Hagel was repeatedly accused of being anti-Israel and soft on Iran, the nominee walked back several of his more controversial previous statements about the Israel lobby, Iran, sanctions and nuclear weapons. Democrats hawkish on Israel, such as Charles Schumer, insisted that Hagel qualify his past remarks before they could support him. At the same time, organizations like Bill Kristol’s Emergency Committee for Israel argued that these statements ought to disqualify him from the position.

The primary goal of these groups was to defeat Hagel outright, but their secondary goal was to circumscribe the range of positions acceptable for someone under consideration for a principal-level national-security post. Indeed, as Hagel’s confirmation appeared imminent, one such critic, Jonathan Tobin, argued in Commentary that Hagel’s opponents were the real “winners” of the whole fight precisely because they had succeeded in this secondary aim.

Finally, even Hagel’s supporters had to admit that the incoming secretary of defense did not do himself any favors with his performance in the committee hearing. To be sure, some of the questions and guilt-by-association attacks that he faced in his hearing were nothing but grandstanding or worse. But there were a number of eminently reasonable questions, based on parts of his previous record that were bound to come up, for which he was poorly prepared and did not answer well. Chief among them was his apparent inability to clearly articulate the substance of current U.S. policy toward Iran.

This poor hearing performance was not enough to sink Hagel, but it did grant some plausibility to the claim that he was unqualified for the position, which thereafter became a regular part of the messaging against him. As the Washington Examiner’s Philip Klein observed on Twitter as Hagel’s nomination was first brought up for a cloture vote, which it lost narrowly, “Given [the] closeness of the vote, [it] seems Hagel would have been ok were it not for [his] disastrous hearing performance.”

Even if the passionate opposition to Hagel now makes sense, it’s worth asking why his name was sent up in the first place. Why did Obama nominate him and not, say, Michèle Flournoy, the other person most frequently mentioned as the leading contender for the job? One of the major decisions Obama faced in his first term—over Afghanistan in 2009—provides a clue. During the administration’s Afghan review, Flournoy was a strong supporter of the surge and the move to a limited counterinsurgency strategy pushed by the military command. Meanwhile, Hagel was a critic of this plan, seeing it as likely to only result in the expenditure of additional lives and money without providing any lasting gains. His position was close to those of skeptics within the administration such as Joe Biden.

Since then, as the administration has debated its standards for using military force, it has continued to be split between liberal interventionists and what could be roughly called pragmatists or realists. This internal tension will persist into the second term—and the president’s choice of Hagel is an important marker in this divide.

Robert Golan-Vilella is an assistant editor at The National Interest.