Chuck Hagel's Unsettling History

By Dr. Barrasso is a Republican senator from Wyoming.

*excerpt*

Mr. Hagel's judgment has come up short on other important issues in the Middle East. He voted in favor of the Iraq War, but within a few years he had shifted with the political winds and turned against it. By late 2006, he wrote in the Washington Post: "The time for more U.S. troops in Iraq has passed."

When President Bush announced the troop surge in Iraq, Mr. Hagel called it "the most dangerous foreign policy blunder in this country since Vietnam." Democrats like Sen. Carl Levin who opposed the surge would later admit that it was the right decision and had helped stabilize Iraq. Mr. Hagel has not to my knowledge made a similar admission regarding the surge's success.

During my recent trip to Afghanistan, I saw that we cannot afford to pull out our troops entirely, an option the White House is reportedly considering. As secretary of defense, Mr. Hagel would advise Mr. Obama on American troop levels in Afghanistan after combat operations cease in 2014. Based on his poor judgment about troop deployments in Iraq, can we trust that he would give sound military advice on Afghanistan?

Quite apart from any particular conflict or hot spot, the Pentagon's greatest challenge may be how to protect our nation in a time of tighter budgets. On March 1, the sequester will kick in and over the next decade cut the defense budget by half a trillion dollars. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has insisted these cuts would be "devastating" and would inflict "severe damage on our national defense." Mr. Hagel, on the other hand, said in 2011 that the Pentagon is "bloated" and "needs to be pared down."

The president seems to want to install Mr. Hagel at the Pentagon so Democrats can slash the military budget and have someone else's fingerprints on the machete. Congress needs to know that it is dealing with a defense secretary who will stand strong against reckless cuts that could harm national security.

Time after time, Mr. Hagel has shown himself to be out of the mainstream on important issues related to national security. In each case, later events have shown he was wrong.

When we are faced with unpredictable national-security crises, we can't afford to have a secretary of defense who has unpredictable judgment.

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