Senator Hagel Says “No Victory or Defeat” in Iraq

Senator George Aiken of Vermont said of Vietnam in January, 1966, “I’m not very keen for doves or hawks. I think we need more owls.” Stepping into the role of owl on Iraq, Nebraska’s Republican Senator Chuck Hagel wrote a very insightful piece in yesterday’s Washington Post. Under the title of “Leaving Iraq, Honorably,” Senator Hagel said, “There will be no victory or defeat for the United States in Iraq. These terms do not reflect the reality of what is going to happen there.”

America and its allies went to war with the Saddamite regime in Baghdad because the neoconservatives in the administration insisted that the Iraqi dictator had weapons of mass destruction that threatened the US and its allies. There was no other reason debated, and there was no other overt political objective beyond disarming and/or toppling the regime. There were no weapons of mass destruction. So, the war was pointless, and everything that has flowed from it proves the law of unintended consequences is alive and well.

Senator Hagel also wrote, “America cannot impose a democracy on any nation -- regardless of our noble purpose. We have misunderstood, misread, misplanned [sic] and mismanaged our honorable intentions in Iraq with an arrogant self-delusion reminiscent of Vietnam. Honorable intentions are not policies and plans. Iraq belongs to the 25 million Iraqis who live there. They will decide their fate and form of government.” Further along in the piece he wrote, “The United States must begin planning for a phased troop withdrawal from Iraq.”

Now, Senator Hagel has long been a critic of the Bush administration’s actions in Iraq, but the important thing is his membership in the Republican Party. A “phased withdrawal” is a Democratic proposal, and one that hasn’t been very popular on the other side of the aisle – “cut and run” was the label while “staying the course” was the White House plan. Now, the basis of a bipartisan policy is beginning to emerge, and it's a phased withdrawal by any name.

Senator Hagel may be running for the White House in 2008 or maybe not. However, he is positioning himself as a man of the sensible center, while remaining an optimist. Near the end he wrote, “It is not too late. The United States can still extricate itself honorably from an impending disaster in Iraq. The Baker-Hamilton commission gives the president a new opportunity to form a bipartisan consensus to get out of Iraq. If the president fails to build a bipartisan foundation for an exit strategy, America will pay a high price for this blunder -- one that we will have difficulty recovering from in the years ahead. To squander this moment would be to squander future possibilities for the Middle East and the world. That is what is at stake over the next few months.” Quite.

© Copyright 2006 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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