{"id":33554,"date":"2013-01-09T09:03:31","date_gmt":"2013-01-09T13:03:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=33554"},"modified":"2013-01-09T09:05:42","modified_gmt":"2013-01-09T13:05:42","slug":"that-hagel-thing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=33554","title":{"rendered":"That Hagel thing"},"content":{"rendered":"

Of course, despite fierce opposition, the president has nominated Chuck Hagel for the Secretary of Defense during the President’s second term. it almost makes sense that Obama would nominate Hagel, because Hagel shares Obama’s world view. Hagel voted for the war in Iraq, then backed off and called it a “war for oil”<\/a> like a stupid hippie. He joined Harry Reid in condemning the Iraq surge as “getting bogged down<\/a>” like Vietnam. As if hippies were writing his talking points.<\/p>\n

The Democrats need a Republican to be the Secretary of Defense – Leon Panetta was the first Democrat in that position since 1997 – and I guess they thought Hagel would be a good choice because he was a squad leader in Vietnam and he was also a friend of that partisan veterans organization VoteVets. Jimbo at Blackfive<\/a> writes about Dana Milbank at the Washington Post who thinks all of that trumps any actual position on the issues that affect the troops. Because we’re all chickenhawks if we oppose Hagel.<\/p>\n

I read that the Democrats think that Hagel will apply the lessons we learned in the war in Iraq to the upcoming confrontation with Iran. Yeah, well, the lesson that we should have learned is that countries in that region don’t respond to economic pressure – they only understand strength. And that’s how the surge worked in Iraq. The insurgents in Iraq thought that the Democrat win in the Congress was going to result in an immediate withdrawal of forces from Iraq, instead we injected thousands more into the war and they were disheartened and decided they’d be better off joining us than fighting us.<\/p>\n

But Hagel nor Obama see the lesson that way. they’re convinced that their sanctions will work, even though there’s not one example of that outcome in recent years. Remember that Qaddafi gave up his weapons of mass destruction when he thought he was next in line for an invasion after we invaded Hussein’s Iraq? All they understand in that region of the world is strength, and the only thing they respond to is force. Neither Chuck Hagle nor President Obama recognize that simple truth. <\/p>\n

Of course, that’s probably good news for the troops because I’m pretty sure that they wouldn’t be very happy fighting a war that no one would have any intention to win. We’ve had enough of those the last few years.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Of course, despite fierce opposition, the president has nominated Chuck Hagel for the Secretary of Defense … That Hagel thing<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[46,84],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33554","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-barack-obama","category-military-issues"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33554","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=33554"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33554\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=33554"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=33554"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=33554"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}