The Hagel hearings have not yet been scheduled. They are for now a mythical event. But as President Bush's war in Iraq becomes more maddening to Americans, the more Hagel talks as if he is the Republican who will become to Bush what J. William Fulbright once was to Lyndon Johnson.

Fulbright was the Democratic senator from Arkansas who publicly turned against Johnson's war in Vietnam. Fulbright used his power as the head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to hold nationally televised hearings to debate the merits of the war. Hagel is the Republican senator from Nebraska, a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, and a Purple Heart Vietnam veteran. In recent months, Hagel has become the top Republican critic of Bush's war.

On Sunday, Hagel moved a step closer to Fulbright. On ABC's ''This Week," he said, ''We're locked into a bogged down problem, not unsimilar, dissimilar to where we were in Vietnam. The longer we stay, the more problems we're going to have."

''Stay the course is not a policy," Hagel said, adding: ''I think by any standard when you analyze two and a half years in Iraq where we have put in over a third of a trillion dollars, where we have lost almost 1,900 Americans, over 14,000 wounded, electricity production down, oil production down -- any measurement, any standard you apply to this, we're not winning."

Hagel, the second-ranking Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee, has been building to this ever since it was clear that weapons of mass destruction would never be found in Iraq. In September 2003, Hagel said the Bush administration ''did a miserable job of planning for a post-Saddam Iraq. They treated many in Congress, most of the Congress, like a nuisance."

In May 2004, he noted with dismay how the committee chairman, Richard Lugar, a Republican from Indiana, was left out of foreign policy planning. This summer Hagel told US News and World Report: ''The White House is completely disconnected from reality. It's like they're just making it up as they go along. The reality is that we're losing in Iraq."

Highlighting a critical aspect of the chaos, Hagel said: ''We keep putting our forces who are over there in these impossible situations, asking them to do these impossible things when there's not enough force structure over there and there was never enough force structure. . . . It's an absolute joke to say that we have a coalition of the willing."

The more disconnected the Bush administration becomes, the more Hagel -- who is said to be testing the waters for a presidential run in 2008 -- finds himself linking himself to the legacy of Fulbright. A measure of how badly Bush has botched events since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, is that a Republican might run on something that smacks of an antiwar platform.

In a January speech before the World Affairs Council, Hagel noted Fulbright's Vietnam hearings. ''Fulbright received criticism for holding public hearings on Vietnam, especially with a president of his own party in office," Hagel said. ''Fulbright later wrote that he held those hearings 'in the hope of helping to shape a true consensus in the long run, even at the cost of dispelling the image of a false one in the short run.' "

Hagel continued by saying, ''Today, we must not be party to a false consensus in Iraq or any foreign policy issue."

That echoes Fulbright's famous statement: ''The biggest lesson I learned from Vietnam is not to trust government statements." As the second-ranking member of the Foreign Relations Committee, Hagel does not command the actual power of Fulbright. Up to now, the committee chairman, Richard Lugar, a Republican from Indiana, has gone back and forth between criticizing ''incompetence in the administration" and saying, ''I have no desire to lead a revolt."

As the nation shuns the war, Hagel is becoming the principled face of revulsion from within, to the point of saying Bush should have met with antiwar protester Cindy Sheehan, who lost a son in Iraq. Reminded last month on NBC's ''Meet the Press" that Vice President Dick Cheney called him ''wrong" and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld called him ''flat wrong," Hagel said: ''I watched 58,000 Americans get chewed up over a process of 1961 to 1975 . . . during a time when in fact we had a policy that was losing. And the members of Congress were interestingly silent and absent in asking tough questions. As long as I'm a United States senator, I will do everything I can to ensure that we have a policy worthy of these brave young men and women who are sacrificing their lives and doing the things that they do for this country. I don't think that policy is there today."

If that policy does not arrive, the Hagel hearings may be televised sooner than you think.

© 2005 Boston Globe

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