"Odd Man Out" --Chuck Hagel's Republican Exile (Excerpt: The Russia-McCain Disagreement)

Fascinating article re Chuck Hagel in from 11/2008 discussing his background, his views on Iraq, Iran, Terrorism and his battles with the Bush Administration. With a new Cold War with Russia brewing I found this section of the long article very interesting. Actually, on many levels this article is very revealing given that Iran negotiations are in crucial phase and his views on ME are so relevant to our current situation. It does make me wonder what the real story is behind his resignation. Which I imagine will take awhile to sort out given that there are several differing reports out there today.

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The Political Scene November 3, 2008 Issue
Odd Man Out
Chuck Hagel’s Republican exile.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/11/03/odd-man-out

On the morning of September 17th, five weeks after the former Soviet republic of Georgia attacked the separatist Georgian province of South Ossetia, and the Russian Army invaded Georgia, William J. Burns, the State Department’s Under-Secretary for Political Affairs, testified before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. Hagel asked Burns what was being done to repair America’s relationship with Russia, and said, “We’re going to have to find some new common ground and new high ground to deal with Russia,” taking into account the Russians’ ”interest, as perceived by them, not just perceived by us, but their optics.” Hagel was invoking, as he often does, the need to see through an antagonist’s eyes. He asked Burns whether President Bush and President Dmitri Medvedev, and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, were talking on a regular basis and what new initiatives were being discussed.

Burns responded by citing initiatives that had existed before the Russian advance into Georgia.

“In all due respect, Mr. Secretary, I understand all that, you’ve covered that ground,” Hagel went on. “Let me go back to my question. Are we doing anything new, anything fresh, taking the reality that we have before us? . . . Has the President talked to President Medvedev very often?”

Burns said that Rice had spoken with Lavrov that week and that he was unaware of any recent conversation between Bush and Medvedev.

“The President has not spoken with President Medvedev since the Russianincursion into Georgia?” Hagel asked, incredulous.

Burns said that he would check.

According to the State Department, Bush had spoken with Medvedev the day after the incursion, but not since. “I just don’t think that that’s a smart way to handle this,” Hagel told me. “We’ve got to be very careful that we don’t misplay all this and unwind some of the progress we’ve made and go back, intentionally or unintentionally, to another form of a Cold War.

“We’re going to have differences, of course,” he went on. “But you have to look at where the common interests are.” He listed the global challenges for which Russian coöperation is vital: proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, energy, terrorism, the environment, Iran, North Korea, Iraq, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “Across the board, Russia is woven into this fabric,” he said. “That’s the reality.”

Last January, Hagel travelled to Russia and met with more than a dozen Russian officials. (Vladimir Putin and Medvedev, whom Hagel knows from earlier visits, were travelling abroad.) Nearly all of them raised objections to recent American proposals and objectives, including NATO membership for Georgia and Ukraine, missile-defense systems in the Czech Republic and Poland, and independence for Kosovo. “They made it very clear that if we continued to unilaterally push on these things without at least giving them some opportunity to respond and work through these issues, then there would be a consequence,” Hagel said. “When I came back, I called Bob Gates”—the Secretary of Defense—“and had a long private conversation with him and passed on to him what I heard.” He went on, “This disproportionate Russian response to the Georgians attacking South Ossetia . . . should not have come as any surprise to us.” Hagel added that he had been to Georgia many times and knows President Mikheil Saakashvili well. “I think Saakashvili made a very, very disastrous miscalculation that somehow we would be there.”

McCain has been a passionate supporter of Saakashvili and has encouraged Georgia’s efforts to join NATO, as part of a strategy to contain Russia. (According to the Times, for at least four years, until last March, McCain’s top foreign-policy adviser, Randy Scheunemann, was a lobbyist for Georgia.) American officials have repeatedly stated that the U.S. missile-defense systems intended for the Czech Republic and Poland are to be used against possible missile attacks from Iran. But, even before the Russian incursion into Georgia, McCain described the missile-defense systems as “a hedge against potential threats from possible strategic competitors, like Russia and China.” The day the ceasefire between Russia and Georgia was declared, the McCain campaign issued a press release stating that McCain had told Saakashvili, “Today we are all Georgians.” Referring to McCain’s statement, Hagel said, “That’s an interesting thing to say, but I’m not sure what John means by that. Is he willing to put F-16s in the air and attack the Russians?”

Hagel, citing McCain’s repeated calls for Russia to be expelled from the Group of Eight, the association of major industrial democracies, said, “You’re not going to isolate Russia—that’s completely crazy!” He told me that McCain’s approach to Russia was one of the reasons that he could not endorse him.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/11/03/odd-man-out