Obama Expected to Pick Hagel for Defense Next Week

[TwilightGardener]

15. He was ambivalent about it, and voted for it reluctantly--

Good article from last week posted on DU:

http://www.nationaljournal.com/nationalsecurity/chuck-hagel-broke-party-lines-on-iraq-is-he-now-being-punished-20121227

"Hagel also began calling for a real national debate about Iraq. It is one that never really occurred, as Democrats were afraid of being seen as squeamish and as leading pundits like Thomas Friedman of The New York Times began calling blithely for a “war of choice” against Iraq. Hagel found himself increasingly alone. "We need a national dialogue," Hagel told The Times in July 2002. "That was a debate we didn't have with Vietnam." But even as other skeptics faded, Hagel refused to relent in his public skepticism. Why was he so isolated? As Michael O’Hanlon of Brookings (another Iraq skeptic turned hawk) explained around that time: "There's no real political benefit to opposing Bush. If we oppose him and he does go to war, there is a definite political cost."

Hagel began paying that cost. Once frequently mentioned as a Republican prospect for president, he grew increasingly strident and alone. He began to cast doubt on the administration’s case for war, saying in August 2002 that the CIA has "absolutely no evidence" that Iraq possesses or will soon possess nuclear weapons (another correct view). Ultimately, in a moment of weakness, Hagel backed the Senate’s war-powers resolution in the fall of 2002, but he reached across the aisle to work with then-Sen. Joe Biden to restrain Bush’s freedom to invade. And, as 2003 got under way, Hagel kept calling for more time for U.N. inspectors (who, unbeknownst to most of the American public, were being given unfettered access to all of Saddam’s WMD sites, bar none)."