{"id":182034,"date":"2016-01-13T20:29:00","date_gmt":"2016-01-14T01:29:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2016\/01\/13\/f-me-i-agree-with-chuck-hagel\/"},"modified":"2016-01-13T20:29:00","modified_gmt":"2016-01-14T01:29:00","slug":"f-me-i-agree-with-chuck-hagel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2016\/01\/13\/f-me-i-agree-with-chuck-hagel\/","title":{"rendered":"F%$# Me, I Agree with Chuck Hagel"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>He was generally clueless as a Senator and as Secretary of Defense, but his statement that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.defensenews.com\/story\/war-in-syria\/2016\/01\/13\/hagel-us-paralyzed-syria-assad-focus\/78769202\/\">the US focus on deposing Bashar al Assad is crippling us diplomatically and militarily<\/a> is spot on:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: blue;\">The US has backed itself into a corner by insisting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad be removed from power before the Obama administration will work with Russia and Iran to fight the Islamic State group, former Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel said.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">\u201cWe have allowed ourselves to get caught and paralyzed on our Syrian policy by the statement that \u2018Assad must go,\u2019\u201d Hagel said at a Wednesday event hosted by the Atlantic Council.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">Russia and Iran have said they are willing to join with the US in fighting ISIS, but not at the expense of Assad, a longtime regional ally for both nations. The US continues to insist that no serious discussions on working with those two nations can occur until Assad is removed.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">The focus on Assad, Hagel indicated, has clouded the situation.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">\u201cAssad was never our enemy. A brutal dictator? Yes. There are a lot of brutal dictators out there. I\u2019m not for brutal dictators. But we should have learned from Saddam Hussein and Gadhafi, you can take a brutal dictator out but you better understand what you may get in return,\u201d Hagel said. \u201cLet\u2019s get to this platform of stability.\u201d<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Our policy is incoherent.<\/p>\n<p>Arguably it has been as incoherent under Obama as it was under Bush, notwithstanding their claims of having, &#8220;Don&#8217;t do stupid sh%$,&#8221; as a central tenet.<\/p>\n<p>This is not a problem of any particular Presidential administration.&nbsp; It is a problem with the commonly accepted foreign policy beliefs, a sort of Council of Foreign Relations consensus, that is dysfunctional and delusional.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>He was generally clueless as a Senator and as Secretary of Defense, but his statement that the US focus on deposing Bashar al Assad is crippling us diplomatically and militarily is spot on: The US has backed itself into a corner by insisting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad be removed from power before the Obama administration &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[981,964,986,982,980],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-182034","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-civil-war","category-foreign-relations","category-middle-east","category-stupid","category-syria"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182034"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=182034"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182034\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=182034"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=182034"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=182034"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}