When it comes right down to it, America's chicken hawks have done more to damage and maybe destroy our respect for defense than anyone else. Warrior-fantasists, they sit on their butts in Congress and play the Congressional equivalent of violent video games. Only, in their case, the people taking the hits are fellow Americans who actually suffer and die in their playtime wars.
They're the group aiming to shoot down Chuck Hagel now.
In the bitter debate that led up to the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska said that some of his fellow Republicans, in their zest for war, lacked the perspective of veterans like him, who have “sat in jungles or foxholes and watched their friends get their heads blown off.” ...
...The campaign now being waged against Mr. Hagel’s nomination as secretary of defense is in some ways a relitigation of that decade-old dispute. It is also a dramatic return to the public stage by the neoconservatives whose worldview remains a powerful undercurrent in the Republican Party and in the national debate about the United States’ relationship with Israel and the Middle East. ...
...“This is the neocons’ worst nightmare because you’ve got a combat soldier, successful businessman and senator who actually thinks there may be other ways to resolve some questions other than force,” said Richard L. Armitage, who broke with the more hawkish members of the Bush team during the Iraq war when he was a deputy to Secretary of State Colin L. Powell. ...NYT
Comments