Hegel to obama: "We are at a time where there is a new world order. We don’t control it."

[Luke Nichols]

By Bob Woodward, Published: January 27


Bob Woodward is an associate editor of The Post. His latest book is “The
Price of Politics.” Evelyn M. Duffy contributed to this column.

In the first months of the Obama presidency in 2009, Chuck Hagel, who
had just finished two terms as a U.S. senator, went to the White House
to visit with the friend he had made during the four years they
overlapped in the Senate.

So, President Obama asked, what do you think about foreign policy and
defense issues?



According to an account that Hagel later gave, and is reported here for
the first time, he told Obama: “We are at a time where there is a new
world order. We don’t control it. You must question everything, every
assumption, everything they” — the military and diplomats — “tell you.
Any assumption 10 years old is out of date. You need to question our
role. You need to question the military. You need to question what are
we using the military for.

“Afghanistan will be defining for your presidency in the first term,”
Hagel also said, according to his own account, “perhaps even for a
second term.” The key was not to get “bogged down.”

Obama did not say much but listened. At the time, Hagel considered Obama
a “loner,” inclined to keep a distance and his own counsel. But Hagel’s
comments help explain why Obama nominated his former Senate colleague to
be his next secretary of defense. The two share similar views and
philosophies as the Obama administration attempts to define the role of
the United States in the transition to a post-superpower world.
This worldview is part hawk and part dove. It amounts, in part, to a
challenge to the wars of President George W. Bush. It holds that the
Afghanistan war has been mismanaged and the Iraq war unnecessary. War is
an option, but very much a last resort.

So, this thinking goes, the U.S. role in the world must be carefully
scaled back — this is not a matter of choice but of facing reality; the
military needs to be treated with deep skepticism; lots of strategic
military and foreign policy thinking is out of date; and quagmires like
Afghanistan should be avoided.

The bottom line: The United States must get out of these massive land
wars — Iraq and Afghanistan — and, if possible, avoid future large-scale
war.

Although much discussion of the Hagel nomination has centered on his
attitudes about Iran, Israel and the defense budget, Hagel’s broader
agreement with Obama on overall philosophy is probably more consequential.

Hagel has also said he believes it is important that a defense secretary
should not dictate foreign policy and that policy should be made in the
White House.

He privately voiced reservations about Obama’s decision in late 2009 to
add 51,000 troops to Afghanistan. “The president has not had
commander-in-chief control of the Pentagon since Bush senior was
president,” Hagel said privately in 2011.

If Hagel is confirmed, as appears likely, he and the president will have
a large task in navigating this new world order. Avoiding war is tied
directly to the credibility of the threat to go to war.
Hagel’s experience provides two unusual perspectives. The first is as a
former E-5 Army sergeant in 1968, which he has described as “the worst
year of the Vietnam War.” In summation, another Vietnam must be avoided.

The second is the Georgetown University class that he taught called
“Redefining Geopolitical Relationships.” He asks the class the basic
question: Where is all this going?

For example, he has said that one result of the Iraq war has been to
make Iran the most important country in the Middle East, and he worried
that Iraq could become an Iranian satellite.

When I interviewed President Obama in the summer of 2010 for my book
“Obama’s Wars,” his deeply rooted aversion to war was evident. As I
reported in the book, I handed Obama a copy of a quotation from Rick
Atkinson’s World War II history, “The Day of Battle,” and asked him to
read it. Obama stood and read:

“And then there was the saddest lesson, to be learned again and again .
. . that war is corrupting, that it corrodes the soul and tarnishes the
spirit, that even the excellent and the superior can be defiled, and
that no heart would remain unstained.”

“I sympathize with this view,” Obama told me. “See my Nobel Prize
acceptance speech.”
I had listened to the speech when he gave it, Dec. 10, 2009, and later
read it, but I dug it out again. And there it was:

“The instruments of war do have a role to play in preserving the peace.
And yet this truth must coexist with another — that no matter how
justified, war promises human tragedy. The soldier’s courage and
sacrifice is full of glory, expressing devotion to country, to cause, to
comrades in arms. But war itself is never glorious” — Churchill had
called it that — “and we must never trumpet it as such. So part of our
challenge is reconciling these two seemingly irreconcilable truths —
that war is sometimes necessary and war at some level is an expression
of human folly.”

That is probably the best definition of the Obama doctrine on war.
Applying such a doctrine in today’s dangerous and unpredictable world
will be daunting — but on these issues Obama seems to have found a soul
mate.

http://tshtfspecial.blogspot.com/2013/01/hegel-to-obama-we-are-at-time-where.html

It very well be that it won't be America that cements the New World
Order. How can an indebted nation do anything? We dont lead because
we're superior. We work, in every venue of building the New World Order,
because we have heavily mortgaged the future of our children. It could
be another nation that takes the lead on the NWO.
--
http://www.666themark.com/
http://newworldtalk.freeforums.org/mental-maniacs-post-here-f8.html
http://tshtfspecial.blogspot.com/