Hagel-ography and the Tired, Destructive Thinking of Washington, DC

Think of it as the Great Obama Shuffle. When U.N. ambassador Susan Rice went down in flames as the president's nominee for secretary of state, he turned to ally, former presidential candidate, and chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee John Kerry (who had essentially been traveling the world as a second secretary of state during Obama's first term). Next, he nominated his counterterrorism "tsar" and right-hand man in the White House-directed drone wars to be the next head of the CIA, which dominates those drone wars. Then he picked White House chief of staff (and former Citigroup exec) Jack Lew to head the Treasury Department. Meanwhile, he tapped his key foreign policy advisor and West Wing aide Denis McDonough to replace Lew as chief of staff.

He also renominated Richard Cordray, whose recess appointment as director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was recently endangered by a federal appeals court, to the same position, and picked B. Todd Jones, the acting director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, as the man to reinvigorate that agency. Otherwise, Tom Donilon will remain his national security advisor and James Clapper, his director of national intelligence. And so it goes in Obama's Washington where new faces and fresh air are evidently not an operative concept.

In such an atmosphere, the nomination of retired Republican Senator Chuck Hagel, the co-chairman of the president's Intelligence Advisory Board, as secretary of defense was the equivalent of a thunderbolt from the blue. Republicans, in particular, reacted as if the president had just picked Noam Chomsky to run the Pentagon, as if, that is, Hagel were the outsider's outsider. When it comes to military and foreign policy, the former Nebraska senator remains the sole breath of fresh air in today's Washington. That's because he has expressed the most modest of doubts about the U.S.-Israeli relationship, as well as the efficacy of the U.S. sanctions program against Iran and a possible attack on that country's nuclear facilities, and because he has spoken, again in mild terms, of "paring" a Pentagon budget that has experienced year after year of what he's called "bloat."

Of course, what little fresh space might exist between the Obama I and Obama II years (not to speak of the George W. Bush II years) has been rapidly closed. Hagel was soon forced to mouth the pieties of present-day Washington, offering an ever friendlier take on Israel and an ever-tougher set of positions on Iran, while assuring everyone in sight that his previous positions had been sorely misunderstood. This should be a healthy reminder that, at least when it comes to war and national security policy, debate in Washington can be fierce and bitter (as over the Benghazi affair), even as what Andrew Bacevich calls "the Washington Rules" ensure that not a genuine new thought, nor a genuinely different position, can be tolerated, no less seriously discussed in that town.

Barack Obama arrived in Washington in 2009 buoyed by the slogan "change we can believe in." The bitter Hagel hearings will be a fierce reminder that, when it comes to foreign policy, old is new, and the words "change" and "Washington" don't belong in the same sentence. It remains something of an irony that, whether it's John Kerry or Chuck Hagel, what little breathing room exists in the corridors of power can be credited to a now-ancient war whose realities, as Nick Turse, author of the new book, Kill Anything that Moves, reminds us in his latest piece, most Americans -- Chuck Hagel evidently among them -- could never truly face or take in.