Hagel's rebellion

By Michael J.W. Stickings

We knew it was coming, and now it's official:

Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) officially announced Monday that he will not run for a third term and does not plan to run for president in 2008, setting in motion a battle for his Senate seat and leaving anti-war Republicans and independents without one of their candidates of choice in the presidential contest.

Speaking at the Omaha Press Club about six months after balking at a decision on his political future, Hagel was definitive about his Senate plans and all but closed the book on a presidential bid.

“I will not seek a third term in the United States Senate, nor do I intend to be a candidate for any office in 2008,” Hagel said. “It has been my greatest honor and privilege to serve my country and represent my fellow Nebraskans in the U.S. Senate. My family and I will be forever grateful for this opportunity and the trust placed in me by the people of Nebraska. It has enriched all of us.”

Of course, Hagel no doubt saw the writing on the wall. There is simply no future for him in Republican presidential politics -- not now, perhaps not in his lifetime. He could have held on to his safe Senate seat -- an alluring proposition, one imagines -- but for what, to what end? Just to be there, just to be a senator? And as a Republican, for a party that seems to have no room for someone like him in its increasingly narrow and fundamentalist tent? To be sure, Hagel is a solid conservative Republican on many issues that matter to Republicans -- on taxes, for example, but also on social conservative "values" issues that mean so much to the Republican base. But on Iraq, on the issue that has so divided Republicans, and the country, he want his own way, a realist, refusing to follow the president and the warmongers and the madmen in his party, so much of his party, further into what he knew, like so many others, to be a quagmire, a worsening one, one from which there would be no easy remove, one that was proving to be ever more catastrophic, both in and of itself and for his party and his country.

On Iraq, he proved to be a maverick, a critic, an independent-minded Republican -- and Republicans dislike such rebels, not to mention independent thought, particularly so now, in a time of war, of trumped-up war, endless war. You're either with them or against them, to rephrase Bush, and he was against them, forcefully so, and with integrity, credibility. True believers of the full-blown madness still listened to the president, to the warmongers, and followed them, thoughtlessly, but much of the country, most of it, shifted the other way, against the war, seeing it for what it had become, what it is, a disaster, and they, and I, and so many others, of differing persuasions, listened to Hagel, to the case he made, a forceful case, a case not of partisanship or delusion but of principle, and of the truth, grateful that a Republican, one of prominence, came out against the madness that had taken hold in his party, both in the White House and on Capitol Hill, and throughout the country.

And where did that get him? Effectively excommunicated from his party, a prospective presidential candidate who didn't have a chance in hell, not with the Giulianis and the Romneys and the McCains and the rest campaigning, successfully, on everything Hagel opposed, with respect to Iraq at least, supporting the war, and the surge, and calling for more war, and more and more, a continuation of the madness.

Yes, I admire Hagel, and will miss him, not for his staunchly conservative views, certainly not, but for his independence on this key issue of our time, Bush's War in Iraq, for his integrity and credibility, for being a thorn in Bush's side, in his party's side, for speaking the truth during the reign of delusion -- and I've written extensively about him here, here, here, here, here, and here -- and elsewhere, too.

Yes, Chuck Hagel will be missed, but we can thank him nonetheless for what he has done, and we can be thankful that he will still be around for some time to come. He will not seek re-election, but he will, one hopes, continue to speak the truth.

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Yesterday there was more nonsense, from Petraeus and Crocker, and today there will be more, and tomorrow yet more, and it will go on and on until the people who are waging this war are no longer in a position to wage it -- and that means especially the civilian, not the military, leadership.

Here's what Hagel said back in January: "There is no strategy. This is a ping-pong game with American lives." And with Iraqi lives, I might add, and in an especially volatile part of the world. It is being claimed that the surge is the strategy, or what flows from the surge is the strategy, which is the campaign in Anbar and elsewhere, and maybe there is a strategy there, but what of it? There has been success here and there, or the perception of success, or temporary success, but the war has been lost, and the game, a hopeless one, is still being played. For now. Troops will likely be withdrawn next year, not because of success but because there is no other way, and no other troops, and because the madness must begin to end, sometime.

And, through it all, or at least through much of it, once it turned, Hagel was right.