“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.” Robert Gates, defense secretary for Bush II and Obama
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.”
The Wall Street Journal’s Bret Stephens continued in this vein.
“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.
Hagel’s enemies contend that his own words disqualify him.
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.”
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