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Hagel’s Ritual Resignation, and The War Ahead
Patrick Henningsen
21st Century Wire
Another ritual resignation took place today in Washington…
Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel (R) threw in the towel today by tendering his resignation to President Barack Obama, amidst all the usual pomp and circumstance at the White House (America’s equivalent to a royal divorce). This could be for a number of reasons – health, stress from having to lie to the public on a daily basis, or simply poor performance.
Did Hagel really resign, or was he actually relieved of duty by his betters? The writing was already on the wall…
You could read it on his face from day one. Hagel wore a permanent look of awkwardness at every press briefing, having to re-spin the spin coming out of the White House.
Hagel’s appointment in February 2013 was a political one - from a blue White House wanting some red trimming for its kitchen cabinet. He was labeled a ‘self-hating Republican’ by right-wingsters for flying under Obama’s command wing, and couldn’t have landed the job during a worse period in US and World history. He stepped into a swamp of White House and Neoconservative agendas already well underway: NATO’s encirclement of Russia, a military pivot towards Asia, no-win hangovers in Iraq and Afghanistan, the road-to-nowhere ‘peace process’ in Israel-Palestine, a nuclear standoff with Iran, and a covert, proxy war in Syria.
As a combat veteran himself he’s an oddity these days, with most DoD heads being bureaucrats or ‘businessmen’, and completely unlike his predecessors – a career Mandarin like Leon Panetta, a career insider and super-spook like Robert Gates, or a passive income-obsessed board room junky like Donald Rumsfeld.
Maybe it was the ISIS crisis which did Hagel in. Hagel’s main problem, aside from the fact that he was subservient enough for the Emperor in the White House, is that he was not hawkish enough for war maniacs like Senator John McCain (R-AZ) and confused Strangelove-types like General Martin Dempsey.
Notice how it’s no longer in vogue to fire anyone in central government these days. It’s a new sort of gentleman’s agreement between high-profile bureaucrats. Mostly it’s the fear of legal reprisals should a sacking affect their future earnings.
In truth, Obama (and his handlers) needed a new face for the War on ISIS. White House officials speaking to the press on conditions of anonymity, said that the President’s ‘removal’ of Chuck Hagel was, “A recognition that the Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL) would require a different set of skills than those Hagel was brought on to employ”.
The Poison Pen
At the end of October, Hagel wrote a memo to the White House which was said to be highly critical of Obama’s perceived ‘fight against ISIS’. What Hagel asked in his memo was only common sense, but for a wishy-washy, opinion poll-obsessed Administration it might as well have been a plot for a coup d’état. He asked that the White House clearly define its strategy against ISIS and its plans for ‘regime change’ of the Assad government in Damascus. In Hagel’s own words, “A sharper view is needed of what to do about the Assad regime”. It wasn’t the content of this memo which infuriated the President and his handlers, however, it was the challenge to the President’s authority, akin to a member of the court challenging the King in public on matters of state. White House handlers would have been furious because of how this challenge might negatively affect opinion polls and approval ratings in the run-up to the all-important November 2014 midterm elections. The Democrats lost the Senate in the midterms, so maybe Hagel was, in part, a casualty of that political battle.
On November 13, at the Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on Capitol Hill, senior US officials denied that the Obama administration saw the removal of Bashar al-Assad as “the key plank in its strategy to defeat the Islamic State (IS)”, but more likely it was a harbinger of Hagel’s removal from the cabinet.
Upon questioning, Hagel’s response was, “We could change Assad today, and that’s not going to change all the dynamics,” he said. “Who are you going to replace Assad with? What kind of an army can take on [IS]?”
“Assad’s part of the equation, of course,” Hagel said. But “just alone dealing with Assad, where we are now … that’s not going to put [IS] back in the box.”
History will eventually show (we hope) that the elephant in the room isn’t ‘how to deal with ISIS’, but how to conceal and whitewash Washington’s integral role in building up, funding, training and arming today’s extremist ISIS fighters.
When Hagel arrived as Secretary of Defense, it was hailed as a ‘breakthrough’, because so many saw Hagel as more of a dove than the typical DC hawk. No doubt, he will be replaced by a more able hawk than himself, and one that will better further a ‘New American Century’. His exit paves the way for January 2015 and the new look Republican US Senate, led by John McCain who will certainly be issuing some loud demands not just for more billions in aid and arms for “moderate rebels” in Syria, but for boots on the ground in Iraq and Syria. The new Secretary will also need to be a lot more chummy with globalist agents like Susan Rice and Samantha Power.
ISIS is a big issue in the US media, but perhaps a bigger geopolitical cloud was United States pushing NATO right up to the borders of Russia, and egging on its NATO allies for a renewed conflict between the West and Russia. A US State Department and CIA-back ouster of a democratically elected government in Kiev only ramped-up those tensions, repositioning the geopolitical chessboard back into previously abandoned Cold War positions. 2014 proved that Washington DC was more than willing to trash the Warsaw Pact, breaking promises made in perpetuity between previous leaders of the east and west, opting instead for a neocolonial Treaty of Versailles power -politics mentality.
Sheepish wolves like Martin Dempsey will be more than happy to keep taking more wild stabs in the dark, eager it seems to see ever more bloodshed in the Middle East. Dempsey wants 15,000 more Syrian ‘rebels’ (foreign fighters for hire, and future ISIS members) in order, he says, to “put enough pressure on [IS] forces in eastern and northern Syria”.
Indeed, that’s exactly where the conversation will be heading come January.
“It will be a force large enough to defend initially so that it can actually hold territory,” Dempsey said. “And then it should have the capability over time to become offensive.”
As we can see from his comments, Dempsey, like the other tired old dogs of war in Washington, is completely detached from reality. But they keep giving it that old Ivy League try…
“We’ll just give it another try. It might work this time…”
The names and faces may change, but to agenda rolls on.
READ MORE ISIS NEWS AT: 21st Century Wire ISIS Files
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21st Century Wire is an alternative news agency designed to enlighten, inform and educate readers about world events which are not always covered in the mainstream media.
Source: http://21stcenturywire.com/2014/11/24/hagels-ritual-resignation-and-the-war-ahead/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=hagels-ritual-resignation-and-the-war-ahead
