Chuck Hagel for President!

By Robert Scheer

"Chuck Hagel for president! If it ever narrows down to a choice between him and some Democratic hack who hasn’t the guts to fundamentally challenge the president on Iraq, then the conservative Republican from Nebraska will have my vote. Yes, the war is that important, and the fact that Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York, the leading Democratic candidate, still can’t or won’t take a clear stand on the occupation is insulting to the vast majority of voters who have.

Sen. Hagel is a decorated Vietnam War vet who learned the crucial lessons of that Democrat-launched debacle of post-colonial imperialism. Even more important, he has the courage to challenge a president from his own party who so clearly didn’t.

“The speech given last night [Jan. 10] by this president represents the most dangerous foreign policy blunder in this country since Vietnam,” Hagel said. “We are projecting ourselves further and deeper into a situation that we cannot win militarily.

“To ask our young men and women to sacrifice their lives to be put in the middle of a civil war is wrong. It’s, first of all, in my opinion, morally wrong. It’s tactically, strategically, militarily wrong,” he added......

Ever since President Ronald Reagan painted foreign policy as a simplistic war of good versus evil, the Republican Party has been in the thrall of neocon adventurers. Yet, the national emergence of Hagel reminds us that, two decades earlier, it was Dwight D. Eisenhower, a war hero and a Republican, who was the only president to clearly challenge the simplistic and jingoistic militarism that most Democrats embraced during the Cold War. It was Eisenhower, in fact, who refused to send troops to Vietnam, and his Democratic successors who opened the gates of war.

True conservatives, going back to George Washington, have always been wary of the “foreign entanglements” that our first general and president warned against in his farewell address. And it is in that spirit, recognizing the limits to U.S. military power, that Hagel spoke this past Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”....."