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Subject: As The World Burns, Obama Fires Hagel
SYSOP    11/25/2014 11:13:07 PM
 
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avatar3    Soldier on Sgt Hagel   11/27/2014 7:43:06 AM
A great analysis, hits the mark! I personally don't think that history will harshly judge the tenure of Secretary of Defense Hagel or even the DOD.  He was, to his everlasting credit, a combat veteran  and an Army Sergeant, lets see White House Staff tar up those factoids!
 
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Banzaibutch    Perhaps...   11/27/2014 11:36:35 AM
Austin's explanation is possible-  just as the Bush Administration's liberal critics description of the Iraq invasion as nothing more than thinly veiled reelection strategy and family revenge was possible. I don't find Austin's explanation any more compelling than I found Bush's liberal critics.
 
Or perhaps there are other reasons for Chuck Hagel being canned after having been Defense chief for less than two years? Competence aside, part of the answer could be that the White House has moved from seeing events in Iraq and Syria through the "Vietnam lens" to the "Nazi Germany lens", and Hagel is still seeing them through the "Vietnam lens"?

One paradigm is that for the last fifty years, American foreign policy has swung between two views: Through the Vietna m lens, we don’t want to be dragged into foreign civil wars that can end up costing tens of thousands of American lives. But through the Nazi Germany lens, we must stop barbarous and aggressive movements or states before they overwhelm their neighbors. Obama himself began with Vietnam lenses (he was after all elected on a clear anti-war agenda of extracting the US from Iraq) but perhaps now, he and his advisers now view the Islamic State as more like Nazi Germany. 
 
 
 
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CJH       11/27/2014 12:11:00 PM
Obama does not have another election to worry about unless it might be someone else's in 2016. He can pick anyone he wants to replace Hagel.

It's telling though that Obama won in 2012 with fewer votes than McCain got in 2008. Obama will be gone in 2017 but the essential conditions which are responsible for the disaster of his presidency remain.

Chief among them in the moral paralysis of a degenerate GOP against which any talented bum could win.

 
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TRAD    Get It Right   11/29/2014 9:27:14 AM
We are a point in our history where we are in relative decline in a declining world beset by deficits in imagination and hard resources. We are being challenged by powers that are existential threats and on the other hand those who are currently not.
 
Putin's hubris now makes past equations produce wrong answers, and the Chinese are adding variables to the defense equation. They have to be deterred across the full spectrum of industrial, military, and intelligence resources. We made it easy on them by fighting in Afghanistan, tamping down a mutual threat.  We are making it easier on our Russian and Iranian backed enemy, Syria.  We have alienated traditional allies, Israel and Egypt. We have pissed off Saudi Arabia in favor of Iran. In fact it would be fair to say we have managed to systematically insult, belittle and take for granted most of our traditional allies while sucking up to enemies who now little respect us as the fear factor is gone.    
 
We seemed to have a foreign policy crafted by an idiot and executed by a moron. ISIL is currently not a known existential threat however repulsive it is.  They need to be pushed back away from needed resources and the Iraqi's need to get serious about what kind of country they are going to have if it is to remain whole.  
 
It is important to realize that unlike world war two where the allies had most of the worlds material resources to draw on, the West is in a position more akin to Germany then to us then.  We better go back to the basics. We need to repair our relations with cultural allies and deal with preparation for a full spectrum war.
 
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