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Fiel a Verdad
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The Heartland Dissident
By JOSEPH LELYVELD
Published: February 12, 2006
New York Times Magazine
With a bluntness that seems habitual — and more than occasionally strikes fellow Republicans as disloyal — Senator Chuck Hagel started voicing skepticism about the Bush administration's fixation on Iraq as a place to fight the Global War on Terror more than half a year before the president gave the go-ahead for the assault. What the senator said in public was milder than what he said in private conversations with foreign-policy gurus like Brent Scowcroft, the national security adviser in another Bush administration, or his friend Colin Powell, the secretary of state, who thought he still had a chance to steer the administration on a diplomatic course. The Nebraskan wanted to believe Powell but, deep down, felt the White House wasn't going to be diverted from its drive to topple Saddam Hussein.
When he rose on the Senate floor that October to explain his vote in favor of the resolution authorizing force — he'd persuaded himself that his vote might strengthen Powell's hand — he gave a speech that would have required no editing had he decided to vote against it.
What sounded then to the venture's true believers like the scolding of a Cassandra sounds fairly obvious three and a half years later, which is to say that Hagel's words can reasonably be read as prescient: "How many of us really know and understand Iraq, its country, history, people and role in the Arab world?. . .The American people must be told of the long-term commitment, risk and cost of this undertaking. We should not be seduced by the expectations of dancing in the streets." [...]
The attributes that make Hagel look presidential – seriousness, strong convictions, foreign-policy experience – may well doom him as a candidate. From top, with Senator Lugar, Baghdad, 2003; with Bush in Nebraska, 2003; at John Bolton's confirmation hearings, 2005; with Senator Joe Biden in Iraq, 2002.
As the months and years wore on, Senator Hagel's public musings on Iraq became less measured, as if his gorge rose a little higher with each day's casualty report. He would say that the White House was out of touch with reality, that the reconstruction effort in Iraq was "beyond pitiful," that he had lost confidence in Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, that we were losing the war and had destabilized the Middle East, that the United States was getting "bogged down" in Iraq the way it had been in Vietnam.
[...]in the upper reaches of his party in Washington, the senator's candor was not universally viewed as refreshing. His timing was held against him even more than his dissent.[…] Obviously, this was not a team player. Some of his closest friends and supporters fretted that he was killing whatever small chance he might have had to be the national candidate he plainly aspired to be. Now — 33 months before a presidential election, two years before the first primaries — his chances aren't merely discounted; he's seldom even mentioned in Republican circles….
The fact that Hagel himself emerged with two Purple Hearts from Vietnam, where he served as an enlisted man in the infantry, has often been mentioned in news reports quoting him on Iraq as if memories, or maybe nightmares, dating back to the war from which he still carried bits of shrapnel in his chest were primary and extenuating factors shaping his seemingly irrepressible utterances on the latest intervention, his regular brushes with apostasy.
Compelling as it is, Chuck Hagel's history as an ordinary soldier, a grunt from small-town Middle America who grew up to be a senator, is more layered, less simple. Unlike Senator Kerry, he had never been a Vietnam veteran against the war. Unlike his own younger brother Tom — with whom, against standard Army practice on exposing brothers to risk, he walked point in the same infantry unit — he supported that war to the bitter end. [...]
Chuck Hagel never became a dove, but he became a bird that's nearly as rare in the Republican aviary. He became an internationalist, someone who's capable of feeling intensely about alliances, multilateral endeavors, the value of global institutions; a fellow traveler of the Council on Foreign Relations, a politician who actually reads Foreign Affairs. A singular Great Plains Republican, in other words, who cares about the rest of the world for reasons that don't begin and end with agricultural exports.
[...]An instinctive and unwavering conservative on most issues — in particular, big government and deficits — he was the antithesis of a neocon, a profile to which The Weekly Standard paid backhanded tribute in 2002 when it included him (along with Powell, Scowcroft and The New York Times) in what it called "the axis of appeasement." In the cruelest cut, in that brief period of easy, triumphalist anticipation before the invasion and its turbulent aftermath, National Review put Nebraska's senior senator down as Senator Hagel (R., France).
If his tendency to fall out of step with the administration and to ignore talking points sent around by the Republican National Committee has been most conspicuous on foreign affairs, he has been just as much his own man on domestic issues. ("Nothing in my oath of office," he recently told reporters, "says, 'I pledge allegiance to the Republican Party and President Bush.' ")
The senator from Nebraska broke with his party leadership to vote against the new prescription-drug program under Medicare, the No Child Left Behind bill and a big farm bill stuffed with incentives for corporate agriculture. Each, he felt, was ill conceived in practical terms and unwarranted as an expansion of federal mandates and spending. Only on the Bush tax cuts — all of which he has supported — has he been deaf to warnings about the consequences for the federal deficit. (Though, he says, he'd never take "the pledge" to oppose any and all tax hikes.)
It can be argued, as David Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union, pointed out, that Hagel has taken a more conservative position than the Bush administration every time he has broken with it on a major issue. Keene's outfit gave the senator a 100 percent rating for his votes in 2003. His lifetime rating for his first eight years in the Senate stood at 85 on the union's scorecard, which translates into baseball talk as better than a .300 batting average.
Here's a certified conservative, then, who has regularly decried partisanship — even during the do-or-die Florida showdown in 2000, when he suggested a statewide recount — and doesn't go on about "values." […]Facing conservative audiences, he struggles to overcome the suspicion that he's unpredictable, a throwback to old-school G.O.P. moderation, a dissident.
That suspicion isn't altogether baseless. Hagel is typically more interested in facts on the ground than doctrine. For instance, while he's reliably anti-abortion — earning a legislative rating of 100 from the Christian Coalition in 2004 — he's ready to think through an issue that's a litmus test for some religious groups without bothering to figure out what it might cost him.
I asked whether he, like the Bush administration, resisted assistance to groups that distribute condoms in the fight against AIDS in Africa. The senator didn't have a potted answer, so I got to watch him think. He said he thought the United States should be careful about the conditions it lays down; he also had no problem with contraception, he said. As far as I could tell, the answer had come through unfiltered, without political calculation.
None of this easily adds up to a mandate to seek the presidential nomination of the Republican Party, even if you're the senator and happen to believe strongly that the party has lost its way at home and abroad. Hagel leaves no doubt that this is how he feels, even when he's trying to hold in check the reflexive, often surprising directness that makes him a favorite on Sunday-morning TV gab shows.
[...]Though he can be scathing about the Bush administration's policies, he almost always avoids direct criticism of the president (except to express astonishment that a Republican could go five years without vetoing a single spending bill). He also doesn't praise him.
[...]
[verbatim excerpts from the first two pages of a several page story which can be found at this addy, if you're registered, which is free:]
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/12/magazine/12hagel.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
By JOSEPH LELYVELD
Published: February 12, 2006
New York Times Magazine
With a bluntness that seems habitual — and more than occasionally strikes fellow Republicans as disloyal — Senator Chuck Hagel started voicing skepticism about the Bush administration's fixation on Iraq as a place to fight the Global War on Terror more than half a year before the president gave the go-ahead for the assault. What the senator said in public was milder than what he said in private conversations with foreign-policy gurus like Brent Scowcroft, the national security adviser in another Bush administration, or his friend Colin Powell, the secretary of state, who thought he still had a chance to steer the administration on a diplomatic course. The Nebraskan wanted to believe Powell but, deep down, felt the White House wasn't going to be diverted from its drive to topple Saddam Hussein.
When he rose on the Senate floor that October to explain his vote in favor of the resolution authorizing force — he'd persuaded himself that his vote might strengthen Powell's hand — he gave a speech that would have required no editing had he decided to vote against it.
What sounded then to the venture's true believers like the scolding of a Cassandra sounds fairly obvious three and a half years later, which is to say that Hagel's words can reasonably be read as prescient: "How many of us really know and understand Iraq, its country, history, people and role in the Arab world?. . .The American people must be told of the long-term commitment, risk and cost of this undertaking. We should not be seduced by the expectations of dancing in the streets." [...]
The attributes that make Hagel look presidential – seriousness, strong convictions, foreign-policy experience – may well doom him as a candidate. From top, with Senator Lugar, Baghdad, 2003; with Bush in Nebraska, 2003; at John Bolton's confirmation hearings, 2005; with Senator Joe Biden in Iraq, 2002.
As the months and years wore on, Senator Hagel's public musings on Iraq became less measured, as if his gorge rose a little higher with each day's casualty report. He would say that the White House was out of touch with reality, that the reconstruction effort in Iraq was "beyond pitiful," that he had lost confidence in Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, that we were losing the war and had destabilized the Middle East, that the United States was getting "bogged down" in Iraq the way it had been in Vietnam.
[...]in the upper reaches of his party in Washington, the senator's candor was not universally viewed as refreshing. His timing was held against him even more than his dissent.[…] Obviously, this was not a team player. Some of his closest friends and supporters fretted that he was killing whatever small chance he might have had to be the national candidate he plainly aspired to be. Now — 33 months before a presidential election, two years before the first primaries — his chances aren't merely discounted; he's seldom even mentioned in Republican circles….
The fact that Hagel himself emerged with two Purple Hearts from Vietnam, where he served as an enlisted man in the infantry, has often been mentioned in news reports quoting him on Iraq as if memories, or maybe nightmares, dating back to the war from which he still carried bits of shrapnel in his chest were primary and extenuating factors shaping his seemingly irrepressible utterances on the latest intervention, his regular brushes with apostasy.
Compelling as it is, Chuck Hagel's history as an ordinary soldier, a grunt from small-town Middle America who grew up to be a senator, is more layered, less simple. Unlike Senator Kerry, he had never been a Vietnam veteran against the war. Unlike his own younger brother Tom — with whom, against standard Army practice on exposing brothers to risk, he walked point in the same infantry unit — he supported that war to the bitter end. [...]
Chuck Hagel never became a dove, but he became a bird that's nearly as rare in the Republican aviary. He became an internationalist, someone who's capable of feeling intensely about alliances, multilateral endeavors, the value of global institutions; a fellow traveler of the Council on Foreign Relations, a politician who actually reads Foreign Affairs. A singular Great Plains Republican, in other words, who cares about the rest of the world for reasons that don't begin and end with agricultural exports.
[...]An instinctive and unwavering conservative on most issues — in particular, big government and deficits — he was the antithesis of a neocon, a profile to which The Weekly Standard paid backhanded tribute in 2002 when it included him (along with Powell, Scowcroft and The New York Times) in what it called "the axis of appeasement." In the cruelest cut, in that brief period of easy, triumphalist anticipation before the invasion and its turbulent aftermath, National Review put Nebraska's senior senator down as Senator Hagel (R., France).
If his tendency to fall out of step with the administration and to ignore talking points sent around by the Republican National Committee has been most conspicuous on foreign affairs, he has been just as much his own man on domestic issues. ("Nothing in my oath of office," he recently told reporters, "says, 'I pledge allegiance to the Republican Party and President Bush.' ")
The senator from Nebraska broke with his party leadership to vote against the new prescription-drug program under Medicare, the No Child Left Behind bill and a big farm bill stuffed with incentives for corporate agriculture. Each, he felt, was ill conceived in practical terms and unwarranted as an expansion of federal mandates and spending. Only on the Bush tax cuts — all of which he has supported — has he been deaf to warnings about the consequences for the federal deficit. (Though, he says, he'd never take "the pledge" to oppose any and all tax hikes.)
It can be argued, as David Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union, pointed out, that Hagel has taken a more conservative position than the Bush administration every time he has broken with it on a major issue. Keene's outfit gave the senator a 100 percent rating for his votes in 2003. His lifetime rating for his first eight years in the Senate stood at 85 on the union's scorecard, which translates into baseball talk as better than a .300 batting average.
Here's a certified conservative, then, who has regularly decried partisanship — even during the do-or-die Florida showdown in 2000, when he suggested a statewide recount — and doesn't go on about "values." […]Facing conservative audiences, he struggles to overcome the suspicion that he's unpredictable, a throwback to old-school G.O.P. moderation, a dissident.
That suspicion isn't altogether baseless. Hagel is typically more interested in facts on the ground than doctrine. For instance, while he's reliably anti-abortion — earning a legislative rating of 100 from the Christian Coalition in 2004 — he's ready to think through an issue that's a litmus test for some religious groups without bothering to figure out what it might cost him.
I asked whether he, like the Bush administration, resisted assistance to groups that distribute condoms in the fight against AIDS in Africa. The senator didn't have a potted answer, so I got to watch him think. He said he thought the United States should be careful about the conditions it lays down; he also had no problem with contraception, he said. As far as I could tell, the answer had come through unfiltered, without political calculation.
None of this easily adds up to a mandate to seek the presidential nomination of the Republican Party, even if you're the senator and happen to believe strongly that the party has lost its way at home and abroad. Hagel leaves no doubt that this is how he feels, even when he's trying to hold in check the reflexive, often surprising directness that makes him a favorite on Sunday-morning TV gab shows.
[...]Though he can be scathing about the Bush administration's policies, he almost always avoids direct criticism of the president (except to express astonishment that a Republican could go five years without vetoing a single spending bill). He also doesn't praise him.
[...]
[verbatim excerpts from the first two pages of a several page story which can be found at this addy, if you're registered, which is free:]
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/12/magazine/12hagel.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
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