While it’s still too early for the Obama administration to be doing any end zone celebrations, it looks like Chuck Hagel will be confirmed as Secretary of Defense next week. I wonder what his opponents think they have accomplished?
Who are his opponents, anyway?
Obviously, there are those who don’t want to see Israel criticized ever, even a little, by any government official. But these are really some extreme cases. Within the Jewish community, at least, no one of significance has had much of a problem with Hagel. If he’s good enough for Chuck Schumer and his constituents, he can’t be bad for U.S.-Israel relations.
There are the neo-conservatives like Sens. McCain and Graham, who don’t want anyone who opposes them running the Pentagon.
But the biggest source of opposition comes from Republicans who don’t like turncoats who go from being a colleague one day to a harsh critic the next. I understand. I wouldn’t be too thrilled with Zell Miller running the Pentagon. The difference is that Zell Miller is one Mint Julip away from a murder-suicide incident. He’s unstable.
But what was gained by all these attacks? Did they make it less likely that ambitious people will question Israel’s settler policy in the future? I honestly don’t know the answer to that question. They may have proven that such criticism is more acceptable than previously thought.
Did they make neo-conservatism more popular? I’d argue that they merely made it more urgent for Hagel to purge those types of people from the Pentagon.
Did they make it less likely that future Republicans would defect from the party? In the foreign policy/national security realm, I’d argue the opposite. They drove respectable people out of the Republican Party with their treatment of Hagel. Couple it with Dick Lugar’s primary defeat, and I’d say that they GOP no longer has any realist establishment at all. Obama has brought them over.
Maybe Hagel will be somewhat weakened in the Pentagon, but I just don’t see how that can balance out in the favor of the people who made a giant stink about his nomination.
Filibustering him also created a nasty precedent that could easily come back to bite his opponents. We didn’t have to let John Ashcroft become Attorney General, after all. He didn’t have 60 supporters in the Senate.
It’s not just that Hagel’s opposition has been reprehensible in their behavior and rhetoric; it’s that they don’t seem to have accomplished anything with their antics. They weakened themselves. They made themselves look like half-beserk losers.
