The Myth Of Hagel

I wish I could hire whoever was responsible for managing Hagel’s P.R., because he continues to get credit for things he never did:

Obama may believe that Gates will give him the cover and continuity he needs to carry out his planned withdrawal from Iraq. But so could many others, including Republicans like Chuck Hagel who, at least, opposed the Iraq war.

I would be fascinated to know when Vanden Heuvel thinks Hagel actually opposed the war. If we define opposition broadly, every Democrat in the Senate save Lieberman “opposed the war” at some point because they came around to opposing it openly even though many of them voted for it. By contrast, Hagel voted for it and never really went into opposition in the same way that, say, Clinton eventually did. His critiques of the administration were the sort of thing we come to expect from most Republican realists–carping about tactical mistakes while having no fundamental disagreement with the strategy. What Hagel opposed, and what earned him all of that glowing press coverage starting in late ’06 and early ’07, was the “surge,” which is different from opposing the war. Republicans treated him as if he were a war opponent, which he never was, and antiwar activists desperate for a “credible” mainstream Republican to rally around liked to make the most out of his criticisms of the administration, but it simply has not been the case. Indeed, had Hagel been selected to Obama’s Cabinet we would have seen people rediscover all of this to drive home the point that there are no original war opponents among the principals in his national security team.