{"id":2480,"date":"2014-12-05T07:20:08","date_gmt":"2014-12-05T12:20:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=2480"},"modified":"2014-12-05T07:20:08","modified_gmt":"2014-12-05T12:20:08","slug":"tomgram-engelhardt-war-to-the-horizon-tomdispatch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=2480","title":{"rendered":"Tomgram: Engelhardt, War to the Horizon | TomDispatch"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tomgram: Engelhardt, War to the Horizon | TomDispatch<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It was the end of the road for Chuck Hagel last week and the Washington press corps couldn\u2019t have been more enthusiastic about writing his obituary. In terms of pure coverage, it may not have been Ferguson or the seven-foot deluge of snow that hit Buffalo, New York, but the avalanche of news reports was nothing to be sniffed at. There had been a changing of the guard in wartime Washington. Barack Obama\u2019s third secretary of defense had gone down for the count. In the\u00a0phrase<\/a>\u00a0of the moment, he had \u201cresigned under pressure.\u201d Sayonara, Chuck!<\/p>\n

With a\u00a0unanimity<\/a>\u00a0that\u00a0crossed<\/a>\u00a0political\u00a0lines<\/a>, the\u00a0accounts<\/a>\u00a0read as if written by a single reporter. The story went something like this: two years earlier, President Obama had brought in Hagel, a decorated Vietnam War veteran and former Republican senator with a reputation for being leery about the overuse of American military power, to wind down the war in Afghanistan, rein in military critics, and put the Pentagon budget on something closer to a peacetime footing. After a bruising Senate confirmation hearing from which he never recovered, he proved poor at \u201cmessaging<\/a>\u201d the president\u2019s policies, had a \u201ccrappy relationship<\/a>\u201d with National Security Adviser (and Obama buddy) Susan Rice, proved a weak manager at the Department of Defense as well as a \u201cweak link\u201d in the Obama national security team, and could never break into the president’s tight-knit circle of insiders who — everyone agreed — had a nasty habit of \u201cmicromanaging<\/a>\u201d America\u2019s wars (rather than, it seemed, letting the military do what needed to be done). In the end, the president \u201clost confidence<\/a>\u201d in him. It was a \u201cmutual<\/a>\u201d firing or at least Hagel had advanced somewhat voluntarily toward the edge of the cliff before being pushed off.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tomgram: Engelhardt, War to the Horizon | TomDispatch. It was the end of the road for Chuck Hagel last week and the Washington press corps couldn\u2019t have been more enthusiastic about writing his obituary. In terms of pure coverage, it may not have been Ferguson or the seven-foot deluge of snow that hit Buffalo, New […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[1657,525,1658,584,862,865],"class_list":["post-2480","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geopolitics","tag-hagel","tag-military","tag-military-power","tag-obama","tag-war","tag-washington"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2480","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2480"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2480\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2481,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2480\/revisions\/2481"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2480"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2480"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2480"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}