Pat Buchanan: Why the War Party Fears Hagel

In the fortnight since Chuck Hagel's name was floated for secretary of defense, we have witnessed Washington at its worst. Who is Chuck Hagel?

Born in North Platte, Neb., he was a squad leader in Vietnam, twice wounded, who came home to work in Ronald Reagan's 1980 campaign, was twice elected U.S. senator, and is chairman of the Atlantic Council and co-chair of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board.

To The Weekly Standard's Bill Kristol, however, Hagel is a man "out on the fringes," who has a decade-long record of "hostility to Israel" and is "pro-appeasement-of-Iran."

Lest we miss Kristol's point, Standard blogger Daniel Halper helpfully adds that a "top Republican Senate aide" said, "Send us Hagel, and we will make sure every American knows he is an anti-Semite."

"Prejudice ... has an olfactory element," he writes, and with Hagel, "the odor is especially ripe." Stephens is saying that Chuck Hagel reeks of anti-Semitism.

First, he told author Aaron David Miller that the "Jewish lobby intimidates a lot of people up there" on the Hill. Second, he urged us to talk to Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran. Third, Hagel said several years ago, "A military strike against Iran ... is not a viable, feasible, responsible option."

Hagel has conceded he misspoke in using the phrase "Jewish lobby." But as for a pro-Israel lobby, its existence is the subject of books and countless articles. When AIPAC sends up to the Hill one of its scripted pro-Israel resolutions, it is whistled through. Hagel's problem: He did not treat these sacred texts with sufficient reverence.

"I am a United States senator, not an Israeli senator," he told Miller. "I support Israel. But my first interest is I take an oath ... to the Constitution of the United States. Not to a president. Not to a party. Not to Israel. If I go run for Senate in Israel, I'll do that."

Hagel puts U.S. national interests first. And sometimes those interests clash with the policies of the Israeli government.

In 1957, President Eisenhower told Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion to get his army out of Sinai. Would that disqualify Ike from being secretary of defense because, to quote Kristol, this would show Ike was not "serious about having Israel's back"?

If a senator or defense secretary believes an Israeli action -- like bisecting the West Bank with new settlements that will kill any chance for a Palestinian state and guarantee another intifada -- what should he do?

Defend the U.S. position, or make sure there is "no daylight" between him and the Israeli prime minister?

Harry Truman talked to Josef Stalin and read Vyacheslav Molotov the riot act in the Oval Office. Ike invited Nikita Khrushchev to tour the United States three years after he sent tanks into Budapest.

Richard Nixon went to China and toasted Mao Zedong, 20 years after the Chinese were killing U.S. solders in Korea and brainwashing our POWs, and at the same time they were conducting their maniacal cultural revolution and shipping weapons to Hanoi.

Israel negotiated with Hezbollah to retrieve the remains of airman Ron Arad and traded 1,000 Palestinian prisoners in a deal with Hamas for the return of Pvt. Gilad Shalit. And we can't talk to them?

If Hagel's view that a war with Iran is not a "responsible option" is a disqualification for defense secretary, what are we to make of this statement from Robert Gates, defense secretary for Bush II and Obama:

"Any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should 'have his head examined,' as Gen. (Douglas) MacArthur so delicately put it."

If Hagel were an anti-Semite, would he have the support of so many Jewish columnists and writers? If he were really "out on the fringes," would national security advisers for presidents Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush I and Obama be in his camp?

Neocon hostility to Hagel is rooted in a fear that in Obama's inner councils his voice would be raised in favor of negotiating with Iran and against a preventive war or pre-emptive strike. But if Obama permits these assaults to persuade him not to nominate Hagel, he will only be postponing a defining battle of his presidency, not avoiding it.

For Bibi Netanyahu is going to be re-elected this January. And the government he forms looks to be more bellicose than the last. And Bibi's highest priority, shared by his neocon allies, is a U.S. war on Iran in 2013.

If Obama does not want that war, he is going to have to defeat the war party. Throwing an old warrior like Chuck Hagel over the side to appease these wolves is not the way to begin this fight.

-- Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of "Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?"

LOL------good stuff there. Love the Krystol/Cristal parody. Taxpayers even got the "Bill" for the stuff. ROTFLOL.

(Cackle---and here I thought dinoparty was the one that sounded unintelligent).

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This past spring Kristol acknowledged that the NeoCons had successfully purged the isolationists such as Paul and PB from the GOP and were moving to purge the Realists, especially the older realists such as Hagel, Scowcroft, Baker, Kissinger, Schultz, Lugar etc.

And let's not forget the pukeneos' very fave sport---kicking social conservatives to the curb----as they squat in the Repub party.

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FYI---EXCERPT How did the neocons – a small group at odds with most of the US foreign policy elite – manage to capture the Bush administration---and be given the WH Office of Special OPs?

Few neos supported Bush during the presidential primaries. They feared Bush II would be like the first – a wimp who had failed to occupy Baghdad in the first Gulf War and who had pressured Israel into the Oslo peace process – and that his administration, again like his father's, would be dominated by moderate Republican realists such as Powell, James Baker and Brent Scowcroft. Neos supported the maverick senator John McCain until it became clear that Bush would get the nomination.

Then neos had a stroke of luck – VP Cheney was put in charge of the presidential transition (the period between the Nov election and the accession to office in January). Cheney used this opportunity to stack the administration with his hard-line allies. Instead of becoming the de facto president in foreign policy, as many had expected, Secretary of State Powell found himself boxed in by Cheney's right-wing network of neos, including Wolfowitz, Perle, Feith, Bolton and Libby.

The neocons took advantage of GW Bush's ignorance and inexperience. Unlike his father---a Second World War vet, onetime ambassador to China, director of the CIA, and VP---GWB was a thinly-educated playboy who had failed repeatedly in business before becoming the governor of Texas, a largely ceremonial position (the state's lieutenant governor has more power).

The younger Bush was tilting away from Powell and toward Wolfowitz ("Wolfie," as he calls him) even before 9/11 gave GWB something he had lacked: a life's mission other than following in dad's footsteps. There were signs of estrangement between the cautious father and the crusading son: in 2002, veterans of the first Bush admin--including Baker, Scowcroft and Lawrence Eagleburger, warned publicly against an invasion of Iraq without authorization from Congress and the UN.

It is not clear that George W fully understood the grand strategy that neo Wolfowitz and other aides were unfolding. GWB seemed genuinely to believe that there was an imminent threat to the US from Saddam Hussein's "weapons of mass destruction," something the leading neocons said in public but were far too intelligent to believe themselves.

The Neo's "Project for the New American Century" urged an invasion of Iraq throughout the Clinton years, for reasons that had nothing to do with possible links between Saddam and Osama bin Laden. Public letters signed by Wolfowitz and others called on the USto invade and occupy Iraq, to bomb Hezbollah bases in Lebanon, and to threaten states such as Syria and Iran with US attacks if they continued to sponsor terrorism.

Claims that the invasion was not to protect the American people but to make the Middle East safe for Israel are dismissed by the neocons as vicious anti-Semitism.

Yet (in 2003) Syria, Iran and Iraq were bitter enemies, with their weapons pointed at each other, and the terrorists they sponsor targeted Israel rather than the US. The neocons urged all-out war with Iran next, though by any rational measurement North Korea's new nuclear arsenal is, for the US, a far greater problem. (Michael Lind circa 2003)

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