Chuck Hagel, Profile in Courage

Reprinted from National Journal

In his Pulitzer-winning book Profiles in Courage, which told the stories of eight U.S. senators who defied their parties and public opinion to stand up for what they believed was right, John F. Kennedy wrote: "A man does what he must--in spite of personal consequences, in spite of obstacles and dangers and pressures--and that is the basis of all human morality."

At a time when Republican leadership in Washington seems to be all but absent, and courage nonexistent, perhaps we should remember that an antiabortion GOP senator with a respectable lifetime rating of 84 from the American Conservative Union made the same choice, a decade ago, as the heroic figures portrayed in JFK’s book. In the process, Chuck Hagel effectively sacrificed his political career for his beliefs—which, by and large, turned out to be right.

Let’s not kid ourselves or the reading public. Hagel may have said some questionable things about Iran, Israel, and “the Jewish lobby” over the years. But it is largely because of his sin of defiance a decade ago, and for the bigger sin of getting the biggest strategic choice of the 21st century right when so many others—both Republicans and Democrats—got it wrong that Chuck Hagel is persona non grata on Capitol Hill today. Given the rising resistance to him, it is looking less likely that Hagel will be the next Defense secretary (after all, President Obama hasn't even nominated him yet). But if that’s the case, we at least ought to be clear on the reasons.

Here’s the record. Beginning in early 2002, shortly after President Bush declared in his State of the Union speech that America must take on the “Axis of Evil” consisting of Iraq, Iran, and North Korea, Hagel began speaking his mind about the increasingly errant course of the administration’s “war on terror,” which even then was losing sight of the real quarry, al-Qaida. "Iran actually has been quite helpful in Afghanistan," Hagel, then a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, toldCongressional Quarterly on Feb. 1, 2002, in his initial act of apostasy. "They pledged twice what the United States did to the interim [Afghan] government. They have found some common interests with us that have been helpful.... We're giving them the back of our hand.” Presciently, Hagel added: "We're not isolating [the Iranians]. We're isolating ourselves.... We ought to be a little more thoughtful. That [axis] comment only helps the mullahs."

Hagel’s reading of the situation was dead-on. As it turned out, Bush’s “Axis of Evil” conceit backfired disastrously--first, in losing whatever positive ground America had gained with Iran; and second, in beginning to sow serious doubts among U.S. allies about what had been, until then, a united global front against al-Qaida. As some of us have previously reported, immediately after 9/11, U.S.-Iranian relations grew closer than at any time since the fall of the shah. Washington wanted Iran's help in Afghanistan, and Iran gave it, partly out of fear of an angry superpower and partly to be rid of its troublesome Taliban neighbors next door.

Indeed, according to an interview I did with Jim Dobbins, Bush's first envoy to Afghanistan, five years after Hagel’s comments, the Nebraska Republican had it right. The leader of the Iranian delegation to the Bonn talks on postwar Afghanistan, Javad Zarif, had been enormously helpful to the U.S. on a number of fronts. Zarif, a good-humored University of Denver alumnus who would later become Iran’s U.N. ambassador, even urged the American delegation to commit Afghanistan to democratization, Dobbins said. And toward the end of the Bonn talks, Dobbins told me in 2007, "we reached a pivotal moment." The various parties had decided that American-backed Hamid Karzai would lead the new Afghan government. But Karzai was a Pashtun tribal leader from the south, and it was Tajik rivals from the Northern Alliance who had actually occupied the capital. At 2 a.m. on the day before the deal was to be signed, the Northern Alliance delegate, Yunus Qanooni, was stubbornly demanding the vast majority of ministries in the new government. After negotiators gathered in the suite of United Nations envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, Zarif translated for Qanooni. Finally, according to Dobbins, at close to 4 a.m., the Iranian leaned over to whisper in the Afghan's ear that he’d have to take less: " 'This is the best deal you're going to get.' " Qanooni said, " 'OK.' "

That moment, Dobbins said, was critical. "The Russians and the Indians had been making similar points," he said. "But it wasn't until Zarif took him aside that it was settled.... We might have had a situation like we had in Iraq, where we were never able to settle on a single leader and government." A month later, Tehran backed up the political support with financial muscle: at a donor's conference in Tokyo, Iran pledged $500 million (at the time, more than double the Americans' contribution) to help rebuild Afghanistan.

Imagine, then, the reaction from Tehran after Bush included Iran in his Axis of Evil. "Those who were in favor of a rapprochement with the United States were marginalized," Mohammad Hossein Adeli, an Iranian Foreign Ministry official, told Newsweek in 2007. "The speech somehow exonerated those who had always doubted America's intentions." 

As the year 2002 wore on, and Bush’s designs on Iraq became clearer, Hagel began to speak out more against the administration’s direction, and to urge more peacemaking efforts between Israelis and Palestinians instead, despite the recalcitrance of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. Appearing on CNN on Jan. 12, following Senate colleagues such as John McCain and Joe Lieberman who were already talking about the need to take on Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, Hagel said: “I think it would be unwise and dangerous if the United States would move unilaterally against Iraq. My fundamental question is, "What happens next? So if you take Saddam Hussein out who governs? Do you let Iraq be fractured into many components?”

Hagel also began calling for a real national debate about Iraq. It is one that never really occurred, as Democrats were afraid of being seen as squeamish and as leading pundits like Thomas Friedman of The New York Times began calling blithely for a “war of choice” against Iraq. Hagel found himself increasingly alone. "We need a national dialogue," Hagel told The Times in July 2002. "That was a debate we didn't have with Vietnam." But even as other skeptics faded, Hagel refused to relent in his public skepticism. Why was he so isolated? As Michael O’Hanlon of Brookings (another Iraq skeptic turned hawk) explained around that time: "There's no real political benefit to opposing Bush. If we oppose him and he does go to war, there is a definite political cost."

Hagel began paying that cost. Once frequently mentioned as a Republican prospect for president, he grew increasingly strident and alone. He began to cast doubt on the administration’s case for war, saying in August 2002 that the CIA has "absolutely no evidence" that Iraq possesses or will soon possess nuclear weapons (another correct view). Ultimately, in a moment of weakness, Hagel backed the Senate’s war-powers resolution in the fall of 2002, but he reached across the aisle to work with then-Sen. Joe Biden to restrain Bush’s freedom to invade. And, as 2003 got under way, Hagel kept calling for more time for U.N. inspectors (who, unbeknownst to most of the American public, were being given unfettered access to all of Saddam’s WMD sites, bar none).

"We should give them that time and continue to share intelligence and information with them that will assist them in identifying possible weapons sites and supplies," Hagel said. A week before the invasion, on March 6, he told CNN: “The diplomatic channels have not yet been fully exhausted,” adding that Bush needed to stress his efforts at the U.N. “America must be seen as a just and careful and wise leader. If we are able to project that image, then I think nations will come with us, even if we have to use a military option.”

Later, after the invasion, and as the Iraqi insurgency rose, Hagel began to criticize the administration’s management of the war; but by then, of course, he had plenty of company.

The truth about Chuck Hagel is that he saw before most that America was embarking on an unparalleled strategic disaster by diverting its attention from al-Qaida a decade ago. He saw, and had the courage to say, that his own president and party were failing to anticipate the enormous cost of going into Iraq and of losing focus in Afghanistan. He saw that Bush was isolating himself by inventing an entirely new war that both defied world opinion and—in another enormous strategic misconception—gave al-Qaida new life by vindicating Osama bin Laden’s once-unheeded warnings to his fellow Islamists that the real peril was the “far enemy,” the United States. As Hagel divined, by invading Iraq, Bush displaced the dictatorships in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and other “near” regimes as the bogeyman in the jihadi imagination.

We are still paying dearly for that mistake in blood and treasure, and yet very few people who supported it--senators, pundits, editors--have shown the integrity thus far to admit that they were wrong. And that Hagel was right.

In Washington, one is forgiven many things: sex scandals, massive errors of judgment. Being right is another matter. For too many lawmakers on Capitol Hill, it would be just too uncomfortable to have Hagel restored to power. He would be a living, nagging reminder of just how much they got wrong.

What Really Drives John Kerry

Reprinted from National Journal

What kind of secretary of State will John Kerry be? The best answer to that question probably lies in something Kerry said 41 years ago, long before he became a politician—a statement that is still, unquestionably, the most memorable thing Kerry has ever said. With his thick hair gone gray, his long face looking longer and more world-weary with the years, it’s easy to forget that this is the same John Kerry who rocketed to national celebrity in April 1971 in a riveting appearance before the sameSenate Foreign Relations Committee he now chairs.

Kerry was then a 27-year-old Navy lieutenant who had lost his best friend, Dick Pershing, in Vietnam. The newly returned vet was anguished about his own guilt, having admitted on Meet the Press that he had “committed the same kinds of atrocities as thousands of others in that I shot in free-fire zones … joined in search-and-destroy missions, and burned villages.” Despite his Silver Star and three Purple Hearts, Kerry had also decided the whole war was terribly wrong, and the cost of its needless expansion was now being counted in the young Americans still dying needlessly, day after day. “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?” Kerry asked the rapt senators in a quavering voice.

It is a question that has resonated through the years, on through the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, even driving Bruce Springsteen to write a song (“Last to Die”) and pen a note to Kerry on the album cover (which hangs on his Senate office wall): “John, thanks for the inspiration.” It is also a point of view that he shares with the man who has just nominated him to be secretary of State, Barack Obama—Kerry is expected to be easily confirmed—who has repeatedly made clear that war must always be a last resort.

According to Kerry aides and friends, the experience of bitter personal loss in a war he thought never should have been fought has since shaped his entire political career, and it will unquestionably shape what is expected to be the tenure of a decidedly activist secretary. “Kerry knows the cost of ignoring diplomacy, of seeing foreign policy through a military prism,” says Jonah Blank, a former key aide to Kerry on the Foreign Relations Committee.  “He really believes in the power of diplomacy. He’s the kind of person who’s going to get on a plane when other people without his experience might say it’s a waste of time.”

Beyond that, Kerry is plainly ambitious. It’s not just that his chance at State is almost certainly, for Kerry, the last brass ring in a political career once so full of promise, but which all but ended with a humiliating loss to George W. Bush in the 2004 presidential election, a defeat that left a sour taste because of his apparent passivity in the face of outrageous slanders about his Vietnam war service. It’s also that, as historian Douglas Brinkley, a Kerry biographer, writes in Foreign Policy, Kerry, the son of a career Foreign Service officer, “was raised to be a public servant.”  “I think he really would like to go down as one of the great secretaries of State,” says Blank.

To do that, Kerry knows he must go beyond what his friend and predecessor, Hillary Rodham Clinton, has done. Clinton has reset America’s diplomatic agenda, and is leaving office as a popular public figure, but she has no signature diplomatic triumph or doctrine to her name. During her tenure she left most high-level mediation to regional envoys such as George Mitchell and Richard Holbrooke.

Kerry knows he must get his hands dirty with direct mediation, and he has far more experience at that than Clinton does. As chairman he has made many restless trips abroad and carried the administration’s water in the well of the Senate, marshaling votes on the START pact, leading a valiant if failed effort on climate change, and mediating in Sudan. Another reason Kerry is Obama’s pick is that he served an invaluable role in bringing Hamid Karzai along in Afghanistan long after other key envoys, including Richard Holbrooke, had given up on the Afghan president. Kerry also knows that is likely to be in a part of the world that looks all but intractable right now: the Middle East. While there are no immediate prospects for peace talks between the Israelis and Palestinians, Kerry would be expected to play a key role in overseeing transition in Syria and continuing to isolate Iran. He will also undoubtedly be the point person in pushing Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi, who is also a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood group that gave birth to Hamas, to play a broker’s role in breaking through the diplomatic permafrost that has prevented negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians for most of the 21^st century.

As Brinkley puts it: “Just as he learned everything he could about Southeast Asia from the 1960s to the 1990s, Kerry has amassed an encyclopedic knowledge of the Middle East—often putting him ahead of his potential future boss on the region's urgent crises. He was the first senator to call for President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt to step down, pressed the administration to create a no-fly zone in Libya to topple Muammar el-Qaddafi, and has been a sharp critic of Syria's murdering of its own citizens, having meticulously tested Bashar al-Assad's willingness to change his ways in 2009 and come away unimpressed." 

A key issue will be Kerry’s relationship with Obama, which is seen as compatible in personality and worldview without being cozy. Indeed, Kerry will always be aware that he was the president’s second choice after U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice, who withdrew from consideration after coming under intense fire from Republican critics. Rice, said one Obama aide, represented “Obama’s foreign policy in a way that Kerry doesn’t, in other words a new way of being a Democrat on foreign policy.” It was a reference to Obama’s carefully cultivated self-image as a tough commander in chief willing to apply diplomatic leverage to get what he wants and use power aggressively, especially covertly. Still, this aide said, Obama has enormous respect for Kerry.

As ever with Kerry, caution and passion will remain at war inside him. Some who are loyal to him think that he wants to be a pragmatic elder statesman but the restless young Kerry, the war veteran inside him, won’t allow it. “There’s a side of him that doesn’t want to be Henry Kissinger, that still wants to be the John Kerry of 1971,” one of his advisers told me in 2010. 

Holbrooke, perhaps the foremost U.S. diplomat of his generation until his sudden death in December 2010, said in one of his last interviews that Kerry’s reduced political horizons have made him a much better public official. “He reached for the biggest of the brass rings, which he had spent his whole life preparing for,” Holbrooke said in an interview with National Journal. “Then he hoped to be Obama’s running mate, hoped to be Obama’s secretary of State. He got nothing, and emerged as chairman of this committee, and one of the most effective ones ever, in terms of his focus and his activism abroad.”

No doubt we’ll see even more of that John Kerry in the years ahead.

How Benghazi is playing out like Abu Ghraib

Reprinted from National Journal

And so the reckoning begins. Only hours after a special task force concluded on Wednesday that “systemic failures and leadership and management deficiencies” may have contributed to the deaths of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans in Benghazi, Libya, the State Department’s security chief resigned and three other officials were relieved of duty.

What was lacking in the report, however, was any sense of who was responsible farther up the chain. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s Accountability Review Board—chaired by retired Ambassador Thomas R. Pickering and vice chaired by another national-security heavyweight, former Joint Chiefs Chairman Michael Mullen—detailed a broad failure of U.S. intelligence officials and policymakers to fully understand the growing Islamist threat in Libya, but without naming the names of those who were responsible for that failure. As the report put it, using the passive tense, “There was little understanding of militias in Benghazi and the threat they posed to U.S. interests.”

Even more damning, in its absence, was the report’s failure to step back and question whether the Obama administration, at its highest levels (starting with the president), created the conditions for Benghazi by overstating the decimation of al-Qaida and playing down the significance of the extremist elements, possibly al-Qaida-linked, that have reemerged in the aftermath of the Arab Spring in Libya and elsewhere. Unless this reckoning is made, it is easy to imagine a similar disaster happening in post-Assad Syria, or elsewhere in the region. This has been a chief Republican talking point against Obama since the Benghazi attacks occurred on Sept. 11.    

A disturbing subtext of the report is the broader failure of the U.S. intelligence community to catch up ideologically with extremist threats, even as the CIA and FBI have burrowed deeply into Islamist networks at home and abroad. As demonstrated by the October arrest of a would-be terrorist plotting to blow up the New York Federal Reserve, the FBI is now deeply embedded in the domestic Muslim community, and the CIA has gotten fairly adept at penetrating jihadist networks abroad, especially online (a striking contrast to the U.S. law-enforcement community’s inability to root out the nation’s Adam Lanzas before they kill).

But, in a worrisome replay of the intelligence community’s cluelessness before 9/11, the report supplies further evidence that U.S. intelligence has largely failed to anticipate how new al-Qaida-style cells have been incubating in the extremist groups enfranchised by the Arab Spring abroad. Nor has the Obama administration reckoned with the ideological backlash caused by the indiscriminate use of drone strikes.

The Pickering-Mullen report was also reminiscent of  the early reports on the Abu Ghraib interrogation and detention scandal of nearly a decade ago. Even as President George W. Bush continued to blame the scandal on "a few American troops who dishonored our country," it only gradually came to light that the practices at Abu Ghraib stemmed from a series of decisions made at the highest levels, including the president himself. And much as the State Department did here, the Pentagon sought to investigate itself over Abu Ghraib, carefully limiting in rank those it questioned at first.

Thus, the Pickering-Mullen report confined its findings to the failures at “senior levels within two bureaus of the State Department,” Diplomatic Security and Near Eastern Affairs, concluding that “certain senior State Department officials” in these bureaus “demonstrated a lack of proactive leadership and management ability in their responses to security concerns posed by Special Mission Benghazi.” Even so, the task force “did not find reasonable cause to determine that any individual U.S. government employee breached his or her duty.”

The report also did not explain why U.S. intelligence was, in general, not keeping up, even though it found that “fundamentalist influence with Salafi and al-Qaida connections was also growing [in Libya], including notably in the eastern region.... At the time of the September attacks, Benghazi remained a lawless town nominally controlled by the Supreme Security Council (SSC)—a coalition of militia elements loosely cobbled into a single force to provide interim security—but in reality run by a diverse group of local Islamist militias.”

In another unsettling reminder of how laggard U.S. intelligence has remained in the 11 years since 9/11, the report drew parallels between the failure in Benghazi and what happened after terrorists attacked U.S. facilities in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam in 1999. “Simply put, in the months leading up to Sept. 11, 2012, security in Benghazi was not recognized and implemented as a ‘shared responsibility’ in Washington, resulting in stove-piped discussions and decisions on policy and security,” the report said.

Shot through the report are other reminders of incompetence at the highest levels: the State Department’s failure to “issue a worldwide caution cable to posts related to the [9/11] anniversary; and a failure “to link formally the many anti-Western incidents in Benghazi, the general declarations of threat in U.S. assessments and a proliferation of violence-prone and little understood militias, the lack of any central authority, and a general perception of a deteriorating security environment to any more specific and timely analysis of the threat to U.S. government facilities,” as the report puts it.

The report also notes “a tendency on the part of policy, security, and other U.S. government officials to … overlook the usefulness of taking a hard look at accumulated, sometimes circumstantial information, and instead to fail to appreciate threats and understand trends, particularly based on increased violence and the targeting of foreign diplomats and international organizations in Benghazi.” The report said board members “were struck by the lack of discussion focused specifically on Benghazi.” It also said that “known gaps existed in the intelligence community’s understanding of extremist militias in Libya and the potential threat they posed to U.S. interests.”

All of which raises the question: Where do these gaps begin? The answer is: at the highest levels, of course. A real reckoning of Benghazi will have to await further reports.

The Obama-Biden-Kerry-Hagel Doctrine

Reprinted from National Journal

In the summer of 2008, while the two of them were on a trip to Afghanistan, then-Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., gave a bit of advice to then-presidential candidate Barack Obama. "I told Obama he should pick [Joe] Biden as his running mate," Hagel recalled in a 2010 interview. "I said, 'He understands governance better than anyone else. In particular, he understands Congress. He understands how it fits together like no one else you could get. He's got the political piece. He 's got the policy piece. There's nobody in his league.'"

On Aug. 25 of that year, Obama did indeed name Biden as his vice presidential nominee. The move surprised many people. But apparently not Hagel.

Today, Hagel is reportedly President Obama's top choice to be Defense secretary, while John Kerry , D-Mass., another old Obama colleague from the Senate who has influenced the president's thinking on Afghanistan (as have Hagel and Biden), is expected to be named secretary of State, perhaps this week. Biden, meanwhile, has become one of the most powerful and influential vice presidents ever, even by his own testimony. "I literally get to be the last guy in the room with the president," Biden said in a speech in 2012. "That's our arrangement."

It's difficult to say what the presence of this Senate "team of mentors" might mean for Obama's second-term foreign and defense policy, but they will probably counsel extreme caution in most things, with a wild-card possibility of bold new action in other areas, for example Mideast peacemaking. Kerry and Hagel, a generation older than Obama, are both Vietnam vets known for their prudence and judiciousness (Hagel even came out against Obama's "surge" in Afghanistan). That suggests something close to the status quo on Iran's sanctions policy, and Obama's mix of tough realpolitik and engagement toward China. But interestingly, both Kerry and Hagel are also men who've fallen somewhat into eclipse with something to prove. In Hagel's case, the onetime GOP star found himself persona non grata in his party after his fierce opposition to the Iraq invasion and later the surge. As Foreign Relations Committee Chairman, Kerry has had to claw his way back to respectability in the  Democratic Party after his humiliating loss to George W. Bush in the 2004 presidential race, a defeat made all the more embarrassing by the "Swift-boating" attacks Kerry endured over his record as a war hero in Vietnam.

In Kerry and Hagel, Obama likely sees two statesmen who largely share his views and will be eager to follow up on his first-term foreign-policy theme: the "restoration of the United States' prestige and power in the world" after the Bush administration, in the words of National Security Adviser Tom Donilon (a former Biden aide). "We came in after an exhausting time for foreign policy and a huge expenditure of capital," Donilon said at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School on Nov. 28. Hagel, especially, has inveighed for years against military over-extension abroad. And the description that Donilon gave in his speech sounds like it could have been recycled from many of Hagel's and Kerry's own discussions about building cooperative military arrangements and engaging diplomatically. Donilon described the strategy of recovering from the Bush years as five-pronged: rebuild the U.S. economy; repair alliances frayed by Bush's unilateralism; fix neglected "great-power" relationships with Russia and China; shift focus from the Mideast, "where we were over-invested" (read: Bush went too far in invading Iraq), to East Asia; and pull together new groupings of nations--for example, including India, Brazil, South Africa and Turkey--to solve future problems of global governance.

Based on interviews with Obama administration officials and policy experts, the president is said to be focused on several major agenda items right now: stepping up nuclear nonproliferation; forcing nuclear surrender by Iran; making China a fair trader; transforming America's energy profile; and laying down long-term rules of the road for covert war. And despite the eagerness to leave the Mideast behind somewhat, the administration is likely to get dragged back in, which could mean a harder line with Israel, one that might also be in accord with past views expressed by Hagel especially. (Hagel has already been criticized by Jewish groups for his restrained view of Iran sanctions and his typically blunt statement, in a 2006 interview, that "the political reality is that the Jewish lobby intimidates a lot of people up here" on Capitol Hill.)

Kerry, meanwhile, has been carrying Obama's water on foreign policy for four years, marshaling votes on the START pac;, leading a valiant, if failed, effort on climate change; mediating in Sudan; and negotiating with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad on Mideast peace and Lebanon in the years before the latter engaged in a civil war with rebel forces.

Hovering over all of this is the presence of Biden who, to an extent little acknowledged, has been guiding Obama on foreign policy since the latter was a junior member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee . At a critical hearing with the then-Iraq commander, Gen. David Petraeus, in the spring of 2008, it was Biden who counseled Obama to lower expectations for what Iraq might look like after the U.S. withdrawal--a policy that later shaped both of their approaches to the debate on Afghanistan. Obama, by then a presidential candidate, earned plaudits by telling Petraeus: "When you have finite resources, you've got to define your goals tightly and modestly. I'm not suggesting that we yank all our troops out all the way. I'm trying to get to an endpoint." Biden said that exact language was suggested, behind the scenes, by him: "He asked for my advice."

Kerry, another old Senate hand--and Obama's predecessor as presidential nominee--has also lent his advice to Obama. In February of 2008 Kerry, Biden, and Hagel traveled to Afghanistan together for a now-famous dinner with Afghan President Hamid Karzai at his palace. The three Senate heavyweights were upset about the corruption in Karzai's government, including runaway graft and alleged narcotics connections. Biden ultimately walked out, declaring, "This dinner is over." After Biden was elected vice president, relations between Karzai and the Obama administration, including its top envoy, Richard Holbrooke, fell into an even worse temper, and Biden counseled for a quick pullout. But Kerry's intervention helped Obama settle on a middle course, including a troop surge. After Karzai fixed the elections, it was Kerry who rescued things, persuading the Afghan president to hold a second round of voting. In 2010, shortly before his death, Holbrooke, described Kerry's role as "extraordinary." "He worked Karzai over the elections very effectively, talking to him very personally from the gut," Holbrooke told National Journal. "He talked about his own acceptance of the outcome in Ohio  in 2004, in order to get Karzai to understand there was nothing wrong with getting a second round."

Now Obama is about to offer up a second round of foreign-policy decisions, with four years of hard-won experience under his belt. To some extent, it bespeaks enormous self-confidence that he would rely on a group of men whom he once regarded as mentors. But rest assured: Any future "Obama doctrine" will almost certainly also be a Kerry-Hagel-Biden doctrine

Chuck Hagel, Political Hero

Chuck Hagel, the former Nebraska Republican senator who is reported to be one of President Obama's  top choices to be Defense secretary, was one of the bravest and most prescient voices of dissent before the 2003 Iraq invasion, one of those who clearly saw the strategic mistake as it was happening. 

Like Hagel, these voices were, surprisingly,  often Republican. They were realist hawks anguished by the potential costs in blood and treasure and by the failure to focus on al-Qaida. They were justifiably skeptical of the flimsy evidence that Saddam had WMD or ties to bin Laden’s network. Also among them were former National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, and retired Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni, who in early 2002, while serving as a Bush envoy to the Middle East, spoke against the Iraq war. (The Democrats were not without their gutsy dissenters, among them then-Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., who as head of the Intelligence Committee opposed the war as a major distraction from the real fight. )

Hagel is also an example of something increasingly rare in modern political life. He is a political hero who very directly (and consciously) sacrificed his rising political career as a GOP presidential contender to come out, loudly and often, against the Iraq war. He was a friend of Colin Powell's, a fellow Vietnam vet, and a devotee of the "Powell doctrine" restricting the use of force. But unlike Powell, who did not resign from the Bush administration as secretary of State when he could have, Hagel threw it all away for his beliefs. 

Hagel's integrity and gutsiness  is also a contrast to  the many media pundits who also backed the Iraq war and, even today, have not shown enough integrity to admit they were wrong about the biggest strategic issue of their lives. These pundits -- many of them liberal members of what New York Times Editor Bill Keller once called the “I-can’t-believe-I’m-a-hawk-club”— became what Bush’s former press secretary, Scott McClellan, later described as “complicit enablers” absorbed in “covering the march to war instead of the necessity of war.” 

What turned Chuck Hagel into a profile in courage? Hagel is, by his own admission, haunted by Vietnam. When asked to explain his early opposition to George W. Bush's 2003 Iraq invasion in an interview in 2011, the former Nebraska senator harked back to his experience as an Army private fighting the Tet offensive in 1968. That maverick stance cost Hagel his reputation as a leading Republican, and it may be one reason why President Obama is now considering him as his next Defense secretary, with Leon Panetta set to retire. "We sent home almost 16,000 body bags that year," Hagel told me. "And I always thought to myself, 'If I get through this, if I have the opportunity to influence anyone, I owe it to those guys to never let this happen again to the country.' "

When Obama mounted a Bush-like "surge" in Afghanistan in 2009, Hagel wasn't happy either. "I'm not sure we know what the hell we are doing in Afghanistan," Hagel told me in 2010. "It's not sustainable at all. I think we're marking time as we slaughter more young people." Hagel had also opposed the surge in Iraq. In a dramatic moment on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2007, Hagel implored his fellow Republicans to stop avoiding the truth about what he called the futile "grinder" of Iraq, and asked them not to send in more troops. "Don't hide anymore; none of us!" Hagel declared, raising his voice. Although several Republicans expressed misgivings, in the end only Hagel voted in favor of the nonbinding resolution.

All of which raises a question: Is Chuck Hagel a pacifist? Hagel, a warrior who earned two Purple Hearts in Vietnam, would say certainly not. His views are much more complex than that; he emphasizes diplomacy and devolving conflicts onto regional powers as often as possible. And Hagel can lay claim to a certain amount of prescience; like Obama himself, who first came to national renown in 2002 by speaking against the planned Iraq invasion as a "dumb war," Hagel saw earlier than most in Washington the pitfalls of launching a new war (Iraq) in the middle of an ongoing one (Afghanistan). "Many of those who want to rush this country into war and think it would be so quick and easy don't know anything about war," he told me in the summer of 2002. "They come at it from an intellectual perspective versus having sat in jungles or foxholes and watched their friends get their heads blown off. I try to speak for those ghosts of the past a little bit."

Michele Flournoy, the former under secretary of Defense who is also a leading candidate to replace Panetta, is also somewhat haunted by the ghosts of Vietnam, by her own account, but in a very different way. Though far too young (she turned 52 on Friday) to have served there with the 66-year-old Hagel, Flournoy warned in a speech this week that military planners might still be too "risk-averse" because of the Vietnam experience. She said the military was endangered by a new "Vietnam syndrome" in which planners might seek to avoid the lessons of counterinsurgency and guerrilla warfare simply because the last decade of this kind of conflict has been so costly in Iraq and Afghanistan.

At a time when Hagel was worried about the cost of the Afghan surge in body bags, Flournoy was promoting the idea as a leading supporter of counterinsurgency strategy in 2009. During this period, a fierce debate occurred inside the Obama administration over whether to pare down the U.S. presence in Afghanistan and Pakistan to mere "counterterror operations"--the position taken by Vice President Joe Biden, a longtime Hagel ally--or whether to mount a larger counterinsurgency or "hearts-and-minds," nation-building-type war. After leaving the Pentagon, Flournoy took over the Center for a New American Security, a think tank known for its work in counterinsurgency policy.

Yet Flournoy is no neocon hawk, says her former Pentagon aide, Janine Davidson. "She knows what battles to choose," says Davidson, who worked as deputy assistant secretary for plans under Flournoy. "She's very pragmatic about the application of military in an engagement and prevention role.... [I] think she has a very grounded sense of what America's role in the world should be should be and how the military should support that role."

Hagel's blunt views on Iraq and Afghanistan are a reminder that, if Obama is hoping to look bipartisan in naming a Republican to a top post, he's not limiting himself to those in good standing with the GOP. Hagel became persona non grata inside the party after his opposition to Iraq and never regained his standing. Nor has he ever let up in his criticism of what he called "mad, wild dash into Iraq," which he blamed on "the lack of any clear strategic critical thinking" about the causes of 9/11. "I think when history is written of this 10-year period, it will record the folly of great-power overreach," he said in 2011.

In the end, if Hagel is chosen, his views may be more in tune with the American public's--and Obama's. The American public is clearly war-weary. According to a new Pew poll, only about a quarter of Americans (27 percent) say the U.S. has a responsibility to do something about the fighting in Syria, while more than twice as many (63 percent) say it does not.

Yet Hagel's blunt criticism of the Afghan surge, which has already been wound down (some 68,000 pre-surge U.S. troops remain in Afghanistan), would put him directly at odds with the president he would serve. In a 2010 interview, he also criticized the president's decision to send in additional armor with the troops. "It's a huge mistake to get bogged down with over 100,000 American troops. And this latest decision to bring in armor, that's astounding to me at a time when we're trying to work our way out. When you sink in a battalion of armor, sophisticated tanks, you're going in deeper. You're not getting out. The optics of that go back to Vietnam. When people see tanks in their country, they think occupation. That's not something that's winnable."

He may be right.

Obama Dithering over His Next Chief Diplomat

Reprinted from National Journal

President Obama is “genuinely conflicted” about whether to nominate his favored candidate, U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice, or Sen. John Kerry as his next secretary of State, two aides said. Rice faces stiff resistance from some Republican senators — as well as grumbling among some foreign-policy elites who question her suitability — yet the GOP objections may backfire, making the president even more likely to nominate her so as not to be seen as backing down.

White House officials say only the president knows at this point whom he will choose to replace Hillary Rodham Clinton, who has indicated she will depart before the second term begins. Obama, who told Bloomberg TV on Tuesday that he has not yet made his decision, may be putting it off so as not to disrupt the critical negotiations underway over avoiding the year-end “fiscal cliff.”

Despite harsh criticism of Rice from Republicans, Obama is leaning hard toward her because she’s been one of his closest advisers since 2007, and “she and the president are on exactly the same page on all foreign-policy issues,” said an Obama team official who is privy to the transition discussions. “She represents Obama’s foreign policy in a way that Kerry doesn’t, in other words a new way of being a Democrat on foreign policy.” It was a reference to Obama’s carefully cultivated image as a tough commander in chief willing to apply diplomatic leverage to get what he wants and use power aggressively, especially covertly.

In addition, Obama is developing an ambitious foreign-policy agenda for the second term, including nuclear nonproliferation, and “it would be clear to foreign leaders that when Susan Rice is speaking she’s speaking for the president,” the official said. At the same time “he really respects John Kerry, who did an amazing job on debate prep. He respects Sen. Kerry as a leading figure in our party,” said this official, who like others spoke only on condition of anonymity about transition deliberations. Both this official and a senior administration official used the same words in describing the president as “genuinely conflicted” over the choice, which could come as early as next week.

Part of the issue with Rice is not just what has dominated the headlines recently: her controversial statements on one day of Sunday talk shows in September about the extremist attacks that killed U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans in Benghazi, Libya on Sept. 11. Some Republican senators — such as Bob Corker of Tennessee, who is slated to take over as ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that will sit in judgment on the nomination, and the moderate Susan Collins of Maine — have raised questions about whether she is too “political” in her loyalties to Obama. 

The doubts about Rice are not exclusively partisan. A longtime foreign-policy expert who has worked for Democratic administrations, and who has dealt with Rice personally, also raised questions about whether she is temperamentally suited for the job, saying she doesn’t brook disagreement well. He said that Rice lacked the authority for the job.

Still, the president is described as personally offended by unfair attacks on Rice over a series of talking points about Benghazi that the intelligence community has taken responsibility for providing to her, and which she merely repeated on TV. On Tuesday, news outlets began noting a Sept. 22 Senate resolution signed by the leading critics of Rice—GOP senators John McCain, Lindsay Graham, andKelly Ayotte—which said that the U.S. facility in Benghazi was "swarmed by an angry mob of protesters on September 11, 2012." These same senators now claim that Rice was dishonest in saying effectively the same thing on Sept. 16, though the intelligence community admits that it got that original assessment wrong, that there were no protests in Benghazi and that Stevens and the others were killed in a terrorist attack. "In living memory, no nominee for secretary of State has ever been subjected to such a bizarre and politicized assault,” a former administration official said.

The decision over other top posts, including Defense secretary, is not believed to be nearly as close at hand. Partly that is because current Pentagon chief Leon Panetta may stay on longer than Clinton in his job. The leading candidates to replace Panetta are said to be Kerry, former Republican Sen. Chuck Hage — like Obama a vociferous critic of the decision to go to war with Iraq — and former Defense Undersecretary Michelle Flournoy, who emerged as the administration’s key national security spokesperson during the election campaign.

Kerry has remained studiously discreet about his own ambitions, but it’s no secret that he has long coveted the job at State, having acted largely as an advocate for the administration’s policies over the past four years as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. But giving Kerry that post — or the Pentagon one — also means opening up a Senate seat in Massachusetts. That would prompt a special election that could allow newly defeated Republican Sen. Scott Brown to recapture his job in 2013, a risk Democrats may prefer not to take given they have a slew of other vulnerable seats on the line in 2014.

Still, Kerry is clearly being seriously considered. At the Democratic convention in early September, it was the Massachusetts senator, a Vietnam war hero, who was chosen to deliver a speech arguing that Obama has restored America’s leadership in the world.