[Peace-discuss] Left Hagelianism

[C. G. Estabrook]

[A post to the Left Business Observer mailing list sets out a good case 
for Sen. Hagel's being preferable to the Democratic contenders for 
president. --CGE]


Look at Chuck Hagel's record.  An F for Darfur (from the Genocide
Intervention Network) is especially promising, and 1+ for
Israel/Palestine (from both the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli
Occupation and Jews for Peace in Palestine and Israel) is as good as
it gets among the electables.  In contrast, from the same groups, HRC
gets an A+ for Darfur, and -4 for Israel/Palestine ("Senator Hillary
Rodham Clinton,"
<http://votesmart.org/issue_rating_category.php?can_id=WNY99268&type=category&category=Foreign%2BAid%2Band%2BPolicy%2BIssues&go.x=8&go.y=10>),
and John McCain gets a C for Darfur and -3 for Israel/Palestine.

Hagel was an infantryman in Viet Nam, unlike McCain, and served around
the time of the Tet Offensive.

Arab Americans like him.

And he wants a grand bargain with Iran.

The choice is clear!  (But he's not running yet, and he probably won't run.)

<http://www.vote-smart.org/issue_rating_category.php?can_id=BC031069&type=category&category=Foreign%2BAid%2Band%2BPolicy%2BIssues&go.x=8&go.y=6>
Foreign Aid and Policy Issues

2006  In 2006, The Genocide Intervention Network--Darfur Scores
assigned Senator Hagel a grade of F based on voting records, bill
sponsorship and other activities related to ending the genocide in
Darfur.

2004  Senator Hagel supported the interests of the Washington Report
on Middle East Affairs (WRMEA) 100 percent in 2004.

2003-2004  Based on a point system, with points assigned for actions
in support of or in opposition to U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli
Occupation's position, Senator Hagel received a rating of +1.

2003-2004  Based on a point system, with points assigned for actions
in support of or in opposition to Jews for Peace in Palestine and
Israel's position, Senator Hagel received a rating of +1.

<http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2007/01/17/EDGC7N755E1.DTL>
A man for our times -- Chuck Hagel
Robert Scheer, Creators Syndicate, Inc.
Wednesday, January 17, 2007

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 Democratic-launched debacle of post-colonial
imperialism. Even more important, he has the courage to challenge a
president of 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.

If Sen. Barak Obama of Illinois, another Democratic darling, has
uttered words of such clarifying dissent on the president's disastrous
course, then I haven't heard them. Instead, too many leading
Democratic politicians continue to act as if they fear that if they
are forthright in opposing the war, they will appear weak, whether on
national security or the protection of Israel, and so ignore the
clear, strong voice of the American people that just revived their
party's fortunes.

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."

Independent Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, late of an
oft-opportunistic Democratic Party that saw fit to nominate him as
recently as 2000 for the vice presidency, had just finished accusing
those who don't support Bush's escalation of the war of being "all
about failing." In his defense of the indefensible, Lieberman baldly
repeated many of Bush's lies that launched this war four years ago.

"The American people ... have been attacked on 9/11 by the same enemy
that we're fighting in Iraq today, supported by a rising Islamist
radical super-powered government in Iran," said the fearmonger.
"Allowing Iraq to collapse would be a disaster for the Iraqis, for the
Middle East, for us, that would embolden the Iranians and al Qaeda,
who are our enemies. And they would follow us back here."

Never mind the ridiculous image of "super-powered" Iran invading the
United States, or the fact that foreign jihadists -- arriving after
the overthrow of anti-fundamentalist strongman Saddam Hussein -- make
up a tiny fraction of the combatants in Iraq. The question is how the
apparently intelligent Lieberman doesn't understand that the main task
of our troops for most of their stay in Iraq has been, de facto, to
expand the power of Shiite theocrats trained for decades in Iran.
Tehran couldn't have baited a better trap.

In any case, Hagel refused to bite on Lieberman's apocalyptic vision,
which somehow manages to skip the hard truth that Iraq has collapsed
because of our involvement, not despite it.

"[T]he fact is, the Iraqi people will determine the fate of Iraq,"
Hagel responded, in what amounts to a radical opinion in
paternalistic, arrogant Washington. "The people of the Middle East
will determine their fate. We continue to interject ourselves in a
situation that we never have understood, we've never comprehended
[and] we now have to devise a way to find some political consensus
with our allies [and] the regional powers, including Iran and Syria.

"To say that we are going to feed more young men and women into that
grinder, put them in the middle of a tribal, sectarian civil war, is
not going to fix the problem," he added.

Words of wisdom that set the standard for anyone running for president.

E-mail Rscheer at truthdig.com
This article appeared on page B - 9 of the San Francisco Chronicle

<http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/18/washington/18vietnam.html>
March 18, 2007
Different Paths From Vietnam to War in Iraq
By JANNY SCOTT

Senator Chuck Hagel spent 13 months as a lowly grunt in the Mekong
Delta in the deadliest period of the Vietnam War. He saw the horror of
war from the bottom up — men sheared in half by explosives,
half-decapitated by sniper fire, bleeding to death in the gloomy
swelter of the jungle. Thirty years later, he came to believe he had
been used.

Senator John McCain was shot down 3,500 feet above Hanoi on a bombing
run one month into his tour. He spent five and a half years as a
prisoner of war; he was held in solitary confinement, tortured, beaten
until he could not stand. An admiral's son and a Navy pilot, he came
to believe, like many pilots, that the war had been winnable, if only
it had been fought right.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

What role does the Vietnam experience of the two senators, longtime
allies and friends, play in their divergent thinking about Iraq? Mr.
McCain says his years as a pilot and a prisoner of war play no part —
although one aide said that the year he spent studying the war at the
National War College probably did. Mr. Hagel, however, says his
Vietnam experiences unquestionably inform his thinking.

"Surely it has affected how I have seen this war and why I have spoken
out as I have," Mr. Hagel said in an interview last week. "I was part
of, I think, the forgotten group of people in all wars — that is, the
person at the bottom who is expected to fight and die and has very
little to say in policy, even tactics."

His faith in the rightness of the Vietnam War was worn down by reading
history and traveling abroad, but what changed his mind most, he said,
was listening to tape recordings released in the late 1990's of
telephone conversations in which President Lyndon B. Johnson confided
that he saw the war as pointless. That was in 1964, and Mr. Johnson
said he feared impeachment if he tried to withdraw.

"The dishonesty of it was astounding — criminal, really," Mr. Hagel
said. "I came to the conclusion that they used those people, used our
young people. So I am very careful, especially now. We'd better ask
all the tough questions. This administration dismissed every tough
question we asked. We were assured, 'We know what we're doing.' That's
what they said in Vietnam."

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Chuck Hagel was 21 when he arrived in Vietnam in December 1967 in the
weeks leading up to the Tet offensive, which is considered the turning
point in the war because of the effect it had on Americans back home.

Infantrymen patrolling populated areas came in regular contact with
civilians, sometimes indistinguishable from enemy combatants. Mr.
Hagel and his brother, Tom, who served with him, saw children with
explosives taped inside their shirts, a woman in a rice field with a
tripwire tied to her toe. Under the rules of engagement, American
soldiers fired on from a village could open fire or even call in an
air strike to obliterate it.

Mr. Hagel has described seeing a sniper take off the top of the head
of a young captain crouching near him in a cemetery. A mine sheared
off a fellow soldier at the hips. The execution of the war was
baffling. "I saw strange things, as all our guys did," Mr. Hagel said.
"We would take a village, inflict casualties, hold it for a day or
two. Then orders come down to get out. You wondered: What was the
point?"

Mr. McCain's experience in Vietnam was different, though no less
grueling. A graduate of the Naval Academy, he reported for duty on the
aircraft carrier Oriskany on Sept. 30, 1967, and joined an attack
squadron. On his 23rd bombing run, a missile hit his plane. He
ejected, breaking a knee and both arms and landing in a lake in Hanoi,
where he was taken captive.

<http://www.cfr.org/publication/9220/>
A Conversation with Senator Chuck Hagel on The Middle East and U.S.
Foreign Policy
Speaker: Chuck Hagel, Member, U.S. Senate (R-NE)
Presider: Richard N. Haass, President, Council on Foreign Relations

November 15, 2005
Council on Foreign Relations
Washington, DC

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Iran is a regional power; it has major influence in Iraq and
throughout the Gulf region. Its support of terrorist organizations and
the threat it poses to Israel is all the more reason that the U.S.
must engage Iran. Any lasting solution to Iran's nuclear weapons
program will also require the United States' direct discussions with
Iran. The United States is capable of engaging Iran in direct dialogue
without sacrificing any of its interests or objectives. As a start, we
should have direct discussions with Iran on the margins of any
regional security conference on Iraq, as we did with Iran in the case
of Afghanistan.

As Abbas Milani, Director of Iranian Studies at Stanford, Co-Director
of the Hoover Institution's Iran Democracy Project, and former
professor at Tehran University, wrote in the Wall Street Journal on
October 31:

"The time for a new grand bargain with Iran's people has arrived.
Instead of saber-rattling, the U.S. must encourage the unfolding
discussions in Iran…Every element of this new bargain—ending the
embargo and replacing it with smart sanctions; lifting the bans on
airplane spare parts and offering earthquake warning systems; and even
direct discussions with the regime—must be seen as part of a grand
strategy to help the Iranian people achieve their dream of democracy."

America and the West need to pursue a wise course in considering the
impact of our actions on those in Iran who would welcome a new
openness in their country. Engagement, backed by confident and strong
U.S. leadership, would re-frame our relationship. More unilateral U.S.
sanctions—particularly third country sanctions—are exactly the wrong
approach. Why would the United States want to give the Iranian regime
more reasons to point to a foreign threat and alienate our friends and
allies who share our concerns about Iran's nuclear weapons program,
its threat to Israel, and its support for terrorism? That course is
dangerous and self-defeating.

<http://www.adc.org/index.php?id=3055>
Sen. Chuck Hagel featured speaker at ADC Convention
Washington, DC | February 28, 2007

-- Yoshie ___________________________________

http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk