Chuck Checks Out: Hagel Fails to Adapt to Obama’s Controlling White House

This
morning’s news cycle has temporarily shifted away from fretting
about what might happen in Ferguson, Missouri, to the news that
Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel is resigning after serving less than
two years. The New York Times got the
news, which will apparently be announced formally in a
statement this morning:

The officials described Mr. Obama’s decision to remove Mr.
Hagel, 68, as a recognition that the threat from the Islamic State
would require a different kind of skills than those that Mr. Hagel
was brought on to employ. A Republican with military experience who
was skeptical about the Iraq war, Mr. Hagel came in to manage the
Afghanistan combat withdrawal and the shrinking Pentagon budget in
the era of budget sequestration.

But now “the next couple of years will demand a different kind
of focus,” one administration official said, speaking on the
condition of anonymity. He insisted that Mr. Hagel was not fired,
saying that he initiated discussions about his future two weeks ago
with the president, and that the two men mutually agreed that it
was time for him to leave.

But Mr. Hagel’s aides had maintained in recent weeks that he
expected to serve the full four years as defense secretary. His
removal appears to be an effort by the White House to show that it
is sensitive to critics who have pointed to stumbles in the
government’s early response to several national security issues,
including the Ebola crisis and the threat posed by the Islamic
State.

Well, that’s one way to put it, but later on in the story,
reporter Helen Cooper notes Hagel’s struggles to fit in with a
White House full of intense Obama campaign insiders and their need
to control all messaging:

A respected former senator who struck a friendship with Mr.
Obama when they were both critics of the Iraq war from positions on
the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Mr. Hagel has nonetheless
had trouble penetrating the tight team of former campaign aides and
advisers who form Mr. Obama’s closely knit set of loyalists. Senior
administration officials have characterized him as quiet during
Cabinet meetings; Mr. Hagel’s defenders said that he waited until
he was alone with the president before sharing his views, the
better to avoid leaks.

Whatever the case, Mr. Hagel struggled to fit in with Mr.
Obama’s close circle and was viewed as never gaining traction in
the administration after a bruising confirmation fight among his
old Senate colleagues, during which he was criticized for seeming
tentative in his responses to sharp questions.

Jerry Tuccille
noted how Hagel’s leadership played out early in 2013 in
regards to fears of chemical weapon use in Syria. One day in April
Hagel publicly stated there was no evidence Syria’s government was
using chemical weapons on its own citizens. Then he reversed
position the very next day, saying that it likely that they had.
The Times notes that Hagel also contradicted the White House in
descriptions of ISIS. The president had compared the terrorist
group to a JV basketball team, while Hagel described them as an
“imminent threat to everything we have.” A gap that wide does
indicate, though, issues bigger than just messaging. The
administration chose extremely poorly with that metaphor, but
certainly Hagel is exaggerating about the actual threat ISIS
represents.

One of the top choices to replace Hagel is Michéle
Flournoy, a former undersecretary of defense under Hagel’s
predecessors. She’s also an administration insider. She was part of
Obama’s transition team, and when she
stepped down from her work within the administration in 2011,
said she was going to work on helping Obama get re-elected in 2012.
Her name had been
bounced around at the same time as Hagel’s in 2012 as a
possible replacement for Leon Panetta.   

Flournoy is also a co-founder and CEO of a non-profit
military/national security focused think tank named the Center for
New American Security. She seems to think it’s possible for America
to “achieve its strategic objectives in Afghanistan” as long as we
stay committed with money and resources. Read her report
here, and then read some of examples of where money sent to
Afghanistan is actually going
here.

The progressive anti-war group Institute for Policy Studies
describes Flournoy’s love of military intervention and spending
from the left here.
They note she actually has more support from neoconservatives than
Republican Hagel, vocal critic of the Iraq war. Rather than
proposing a different course for the administration’s foreign
policy, she appears to possibly be the person to entrench it for
rest of Obama’s term.

Now seems a good time to mention January’s issue of
Reason magazine focuses on what a realistic libertarian
foreign policy should look like and includes interviews with both
Ron Paul and Rand Paul.