In the spring and summer of 2007, Congress was consumed by motions attempting to force the President to change course in Iraq. Sometimes these were resolutions to narrow the mission; sometimes they were efforts to defund the troops. Sometimes they were bills mandating DOD to keep more troops in the US. It didn’t matter. None of them passed.
During that time, of course, the surge was working. It was reducing the sectarian violence, defanging Iran and the militias, and bringing disaffected Sunni tribes back into the fold. It was doing the things that Chuck Hagel and Barack Obama had become famous by claiming that it would not do. But that didn’t matter for Hagel.
By then he was already a pasha, serving as an informal foreign affairs advisor to Obama’s campaign and even earning whispers of a Vice-Presidential slot. He lent Obama the credence of expertise, but it was an expertise built on a hollow reality: that the surge had not worked, and that Obama and Hagel’s assumptions about force and war were still valid.
In The New York Times, anonymous administration officials said that Hagel left because the mission changed. That’s true. He was hired to slash the budget, downsize the Army, and be loyal. In that, he was successful. But that mission wasn’t enough. The entire hollow consensus of Hagel, Obama, and the anti-surge stewards has been put to the test by Putin and ISIS and it has failed. The mission has indeed changed now. The question is, have they?
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