For all his flaws, Chuck Hagel as Secretary of Defense might be a smart move.

The battle over Barack Obama’s nomination of Chuck Hagel to be U.S. secretary of defense has many of the elements of a typical episode of insider bloodletting. These happen routinely in every administration whenever powerful interests perceive a threat to their power. Fortunately, this brawl carries with it the potential to explode some foreign policy shibboleths that have imprisoned insider thinking and undermined the nation’s interests and ideals for more than 30 years.


In almost every respect relevant to the position for which he was nominated, Hagel is remarkably well qualified. A highly decorated Vietnam veteran, he told an interviewer that he could recall promising himself during his time in Vietnam: “If I ever get out of all of this, I am going to do everything I can to assure that war is the last resort that we, a nation, a people, call upon to settle a dispute. The horror of it, the pain of it, the suffering of it – people just don’t understand it unless they’ve been through it.” 


Despite a bevy of decidedly unorthodox views for a Republican senator, Hagel is also enormously respected by what remains of the old bipartisan foreign policy establishment. A number of its denizens, including former top national security officials calling themselves the Bipartisan Group, have taken out advertisements protesting what they believe to be the unfair attacks on “a man of unshakable integrity and wisdom” and “a rare example of a public servant willing to rise above partisan politics.”


Hagel is perhaps best known for his vociferous opposition to the Iraq War inside the Senate, which was noteworthy not only for his having been a Republican, but also because he had initially supported the invasion. This stand required immense intellectual self-confidence and personal courage, and it compares favorably with that of Washington insiders like Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, who remain stubbornly attached to the folly of their original (and misguided) arguments in favor of the invasion. For this reason alone, the Very Serious People at the Washington Post editorial page are correct to label Hagel as “near the fringe of the Senate that would be asked to confirm him.” (Interestingly, the Post editors see fit to condemn Hagel without once addressing Iraq, or their own complicity in the arguments that helped perpetuate that war.)


The allegation rests in significant measure on a 2008 quote in which Hagel – whom the interviewer, author and former U.S. diplomat Aaron David Miller termed “a strong supporter of Israel and a believer in shared values” – criticized the use of political intimidation by the “Jewish lobby,” an infelicitous phrase he accidentally used to describe American-Israeli PAC. Hagel later said he misspoke and had meant to refer to the “Israel lobby,” just as he did elsewhere in Miller’s interview. 


It’s an easy mistake to make, since the “Israel lobby” is pretty darn Jewish. (Dick Cheney, for instance, has made the same error.) As it happens, Hagel is a better friend to Israel than the Likud quislings and apologists who make up what journalists mistakenly term the “pro-Israel lobby;” for starters, he is willing to tell its leaders the truth. 


What these hysterics may actually indicate is a genuine fear on the part of the neocons and conservative professional Jews that they are about to be exposed as generals without armies, demanding fealty to policies opposed by the vast majority of American Jews for whom they profess to speak. How marvelous, then, that Obama finally decided there was one time he’d rather fight than switch. 


ERIC ALTERMAN is a a regular columnist for The Nation magazine. His latest book, co-authored with Kevin Mattson, is The Cause: The Fight for American Liberalism from Franklin Roosevelt to Barack Obama (Viking).