“We Have Done Terrible Things”
You can read an interview with Chuck Hagel here; the SPIEGEL had the pleasure to talk to this American politician. He had some interesting things to say. I suggest you all head on over to the SPIEGEL to read the interview in its entirety, here’s a short excerpt:
SPIEGEL: Senator Hagel, your friend and Republican presidential candidate John McCain says that the United States Army has a moral obligation to stay in Iraq. Is he right? Hagel: We have responsibilities, no doubt about it. We invaded Iraq, we are occupying Iraq and we have made Iraq dependent on us. By our actions we have done terrible damage to our own country and undermined our interests in the world.
SPIEGEL: What are the consequences?
Hagel: Our first moral obligation is to our own people whom we keep sending back to Iraq again and again. Four-thousand US soldiers have given their lives, over 30,000 have been wounded, many seriously. I just got an e-mail today from the father of a helicopter pilot. His son is going back to Iraq for the fifth time. That is not acceptable.
SPIEGEL: The question is: Should the US go or should it stay?
Hagel: We need to get out, but responsibly. Much depends on how we are going to engage Iran. That spills over into the peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians. It spills over into Lebanon. It spills over into the relationship with Syria. We need a regional strategy, and in my view that means a permanent Middle East conference in which all Middle East nations participate. The longer we stay in Iraq, the more difficult it becomes to implement such a process. Many of the Arab nations don’t trust us. …
SPIEGEL: You are, then, an advocate of America relying more on soft power than on the military?
Hagel: That’s the way we will make progress. We have to use our economic and also our cultural strength. Trust is the crucial currency in international relations. We willfully diminished the value of this currency and we now have to rebuild it. Trust is more important than anything else. North Korea was a part of the Axis of Evil, but now the United States is using the instruments of diplomacy in the Six Party talks.
SPIEGEL: But that would mean that you are closer to Democrat Barack Obama than to your own party as far as foreign policy is concerned?
Hagel: Well, that’s right, but I don’t develop my position on foreign policy based on which politicians I support or do not support. I was espousing this position on Iraq and Iran before Obama even got to the Senate.
Sorry Chuck…
we ain’t going anywhere
"Soft power" is non-existent in the absence of a demonstrated willingness to use hard power in pursuit of essential objectives.
Re: North Korea, I would note that President Bush was pursuing the multi-lateral talks at the same time he was labelling them, correctly, as part of the Axis of Evil.
Is that like the "soft power" we and everyone else has been using with Iran?
Hagel should be arrested for treason and then executed after a fair trial at GITMO.
As usual, Rudi, you do not fail to miss an opportunity for substance and embrace an opportunity for sophomoric caricature.
JS That was just a little snark. But I believe some nutcases at HotAir or RedState would be serious.
I have followed Hagel for a couple of years, while I admire his FP experience, he’s more conservative than McFlip-flop, and I still like him as a politician. Hagel has to reflect his constituents, but some honest candor is appreciated.
Others scoffed at his "naive" embrace of soft power, but didn’t softpower lead to the fall of USSR and freedom in Eastern Europe. We didn’t go to war when dissidents in Hungary and Prague were stamped out. Was our weakness to the Soviets back then appeasment or realist FP?
Blue jeans, RFE and the Beatles were more affective than thousands of M1A1 tanks, but the tanks were a needed in conjunction with talks.
Is this HotAir or RedState? Have any of those people posted here? NO. Perhaps you could do us the courtesy in the future of waiting until some of the people you are supposedly responding to with sophomoric caricatures are actually present before contaminating our threads with your dislike of them. Our posters here deserve more respect than to be responded to automatically as if they were avatars of some mythological creatures over at HotAir or RedState, don’t you think?
Yes, that is similar to the point I make today in my post about Bolton’s critique of Obama as "naive". But it is important not to go too far in the "soft power" direction either. As a scholar of international security, I would say that "soft power" was essential to defeating the Soviet Union in the Cold War, but that "soft power" was backed up by an underlying support framework of hard power. The establishment and maintenance of NATO was essential to allowing time and space for democracy to triumph. And the "economic race" that ultimately broke the Soviet back culminated in the "star wars" proposal that the Soviets could not afford to match without perestroika (leading to unexpected internal revolt that brought down the USSR) — hard power and soft power combined to create the final conditions for Soviet defeat. And some like Michael Lind have made a decent case for the claim that even the Vietnam war was a necessary part of a hard power underpinning to the Cold War victory.
So soft power works well, but it takes a long time to work. That means that hard power concepts like deterrence, containment, and even occasional interventions are necessary in the intervening time. In North Korea, decades of “soft power” influence were totally ineffective because of the near-complete social/economic isolation of the regime until China (which holds an economic stranglehold over North Korea) could be brought on board. And it took 50 years of hard power deterrence before the conditions were right for that to happen.
BTW, recognizing practical limits to strength is not "weakness". People need to stop with the simplistic strong/weak dichotomy.
LOL Secret Sqirrel and JS agree. There is a difference in military strengths between the Commie Afghanistan/USSR/Nazi Germany and Iraq/Iraq/Grenada. But beating up Grenada is more show and politics than serious FP.
BTW – We need more Hagel’s and less Clinton’s, Hassert’s and Rep. Don Young.
Well, as my friends in the USAF used to say, it was amazing how fast those Cuban “construction workers” beat their plowshares into AK-47s…
I would add that we need more Scoop Jacksons and Sam Nunns and fewer Maxine Waters and Ron Dellums (and Ron Pauls). Foreign policy stupidity is not the sole province of the right, Rudi.
My point in bringing up the politician I mentioned wasn’t about FP, it was about corruption. The Democrats lost in 1994 because of hubris and corruption, both are non-partison.