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Did Obama Just Fire his Secretary of Defense for being a Republican?
Posted By Daniel Greenfield On November 24, 2014 @ 11:12 am In The Point | 43 Comments
As scapegoats go, Chuck Hagel satisfies no one and aside from ISIS, there’s no major crisis that requires throwing him under the bus. Obama has gotten into the habit of firing commanders, but much of the war is run past the Secretary of Defense anyway.
The various excuses that Hagel was not speaking up enough in cabinet meetings (a joke to anyone who remembers that cabinet meetings are irrelevant in this administration) or being too tentative don’t fly.
The officials say the White House has lost confidence in Hagel to carry out his role at the Pentagon. According to one senior official, “He wasn’t up to the job.”
What job is that exactly? I don’t like Hagel, but he was more qualified for his job than Panetta was. He’s more qualified than whoever Obama replaces him with.
The current talked about replacements are former Undersecretary of Defense Michele Flournoy (who would be the first female Defense Secretary) and former Deputy Secretary of Defense Ashton B Carter. Talk about two jokes without a punchline.
Multiple sources also said that Hagel was originally brought to the job to wind down the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but, as the fight against the Islamic State ramped up, he was not as well matched for the post.
“Rather than winding down two wars, we’re winding up,” said one source close to Hagel and top Pentagon officials.
Which almost implies that Hagel was too anti-war. That’s an interesting notion, but doesn’t quite match his current political profile.
Obama Inc. often uses the New York Times as a mouthpiece. What does it say?
He raised the ire of the White House in August as the administration was ramping up its strategy to fight the Islamic State, directly contradicting the president, who months before had likened the Sunni militant group to a junior varsity basketball squad. Mr. Hagel, facing reporters in his now-familiar role next to General Dempsey, called the Islamic State an “imminent threat to every interest we have,” adding, “This is beyond anything that we’ve seen.” White House officials later said they viewed those comments as unhelpful, although the administration still appears to be struggling to define just how large is the threat posed by the Islamic State.
If anything that suggests that Hagel was being too realistic about the need for a war. On the other hand, Dempsey hasn’t been fired yet.
So what does that leave? Gates and Panetta both went on to bash Obama after leaving the same post. Obama might be paranoid about what Hagel will say about him, but isn’t firing him the fastest way to accelerate that?
That leaves two options.
1. Blockage – Hagel was interfering with or not fully implementing some policy favored by Obama’s inner circle. Open guess as to what that might be, but could be anything from gay rights to terrorism. There’s no way to know yet.
2. Spite – Hagel was a Republican. Obama seems to be raging after the midterm elections. His pre-emptive amnesty was a giant middle finger to Republicans and voters. How crazy is Obama getting? Hagel was hardly a model Republican and a useful anti-war symbol. Now that Obama no longer needs an anti-war symbol, he might have decided to take it out on a former Republican senator.
Or he might have decided that even having a former Republican senator on the outside is too dangerous for whatever he’s doing.
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