The credibility of Chuck Hagel

By Michael J.W. Stickings

A front-page article in the The Washington Post today on the prospects of a presidential run by Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska gets right to the point:

• "His Republican colleagues regard him warily."
• "The White House barely speaks to him."
• "He is reviled by his party's conservative base."

Those are, in my view, three unassailable reasons to like him. If they don't like him, he must be doing something right. And that something, of course, is opposing the Iraq War with as much conviction and passion, if not more, than anyone else in Washington, with the possible exception of Jack Murtha. Even John Edwards, the Democratic contender to whom I am most partial and now an admirably eloquent opponent of the war in his own right, doesn't quite match Hagel's intensity, and nor do the two other Democratic frontrunners, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, nor even the more dovish opponents of the war throughout the party.

This has a lot to do with Hagel's credibility on military matters generally. As a decorated Vietnam vet, he knows whereof he speaks, and this puts him well ahead of the Democratic frontrunners. One needn't be a vet to have credibility on military matters, nor to oppose the Iraq War, but it helps. Isn't that why many of us turned to John Kerry in '04? Isn't that why many of us supported Murtha when he came out in favor of redeployment long before others did? In a time of war, there's something to be said for being led by someone who's actually been to war, who understands how the military works, who knows intimately, painfully what it means for men and women to be sent into combat. Bush, Cheney, and most of the rest of the civilian architects of the war lack that experience and understanding and hence lack the credibility to guide the country through the inevitably challenging vicissitudes of war, and particularly of this war.

And, too, Hagel strikes a balance between excessive hawkishness and excessive dovishness. Which is to say, he is neither for all war nor against all war, neither always for military action nor always against military action. This is a key component of his credibility. Those who are always against war are against the Iraq War because it is a war, not because it is a bad war. For them, there are no good wars and bad wars, there are just wars. And wars, by definition, are bad. But this is a reductionism that cannot admit of variation, of degrees of goodness and badness. It is, in short, relativism. And so when those who are always against war come out against the Iraq War, they cannot be taken seriously, or at least not with the seriousness that a Hagel can be taken -- or a Gore, or an Edwards, or a Kerry, or a Murtha. (This is one of the reasons why John McCain had so much credibility until he began to look and sound more and more like a partisan ideologue.) To put it another way, if Hagel is opposed to the Iraq War and wants it ended, there's must be something seriously wrong with it.

So what if Hagel runs? Given that Iraq is likely to be the major issue in '08, would Democrats support him over one of their own? Would independents? Would Republicans? Those are moot questions, given that Hagel stands little chance of winning the Republican nomination, but this is one case where my partisanship -- and those of you know me know well which of the two main U.S. political parties I support -- wavers. I understand, as Steve Benen reminded us the other day, that "Hagel is conservative on just about everything except the war," but, given the primacy of the war, what this means is that, like Churchill, he is right about what matters most.

No, no, Hagel is no Churchill beyond this comparison and he is far too conservative for my liking, but, in the present context, there is no denying his credibility. He is as sane a voice as there is on the insanity of the Iraq War.

[Creature's Note: Michael's words, my cut-and-paste. Ignore all references to me below.]