Opinion: Hagel Wrong Choice For New Challenges

The ouster of US Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel highlights his persistent problems to adapt to his role as Pentagon chief. But it's also indicative of a White House trying to get a grip on new foreign policy challenges.



From the very beginning, Chuck Hagel got off to a rough start. The confirmation hearings of the lone Republican in President Barack Obama's cabinet did not go well.



Instead of granting Hagel, a long-time former Senator, a smooth ride into his new office as defense secretary, his old colleagues grilled him in an all-day confirmation session that made clear to everyone watching that there was no love lost between him and Senate Republicans.



His party critics like John McCain zeroed in particularly on his stance vis-à-vis Israel and Iran, which many Republicans viewed as too tough on Israel and too lenient on Tehran.



The prospect of Hagel-critic John McCain heading the Armed Services Committee come January when Republicans take over the Senate after their midterm elections victory may have something to do with the timing of Obama's decision to seek a change at the helm of the Pentagon. But it was not the main reason.



Slow on Guantanamo



The discontent with Hagel had been brewing in the White House for some time. A - very public and unusual sign - of dissatisfaction with Hagel's performance came in May of this year when the Pentagon chief vowed to speed up the transfer of prisoners from Guantanamo Bay after President Obama's National Security Adviser Samantha Power urged him a in a memo to do so.



Candidate Obama had promised the closure of the controversial camp back in 2008. With his presidency winding down, time is running out for Obama to fulfill his pledge which is adamantly opposed by Republicans. That his defense secretary needed public prodding to dedicate himself fully towards achieving one of the president's key political goals surely must have rubbed Obama the wrong way.



Another policy area where Hagel did not live up to his role as the main protagonist was the fight against the so-called Islamic State (IS) militant jihad group. Instead of the Pentagon chief shaping and driving Washington's military response against IS publicly and internally, it was most often Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and President Obama himself who fulfilled that role while Hagel remained largely invisible.



No strategy on IS



The result has been a muddled approach in how to deal with IS. Probably the best known example of the Obama administration's botched effort to fight IS occurred on August 28 when the President admitted that "we don't have a strategy yet." Other examples were seemingly contradictory statements coming from the Obama administration regarding key questions like the significance of the IS-beleaguered Kurdish town Kobani and whether the ultimate goal of the fight against IS was to contain or destroy the group.



To be fair, this is not all Hagel's fault. He was originally hired by Obama for very different reasons. Like Obama, Hagel is deeply skeptical about the use of military force to solve international problems. Hagel, a former Vietnam veteran, was - like Obama - a vocal critic of the war in Iraq. Both were also opposed to the surge of troops in Iraq under George W. Bush. Obama's rationale to hire Hagel to finally end the second war started by his predecessor - Afghanistan - and trim down the Pentagon made sense at the time.



But reality quickly took priority over their foreign policy plan to decrease America's military footprint in the Middle East and beyond; the Middle East exploded with the advent of IS; Eastern Europe watched and waited as resurgent Russia's military set up shop in Ukraine. Meanwhile in Washington, the Obama administration has struggled to adapt to the changing geopolitical landscape. It still hasn't fully.



Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel was not the right man for that task. Perhaps Obama now needs someone at the helm of the Pentagon who, in some ways, is less like himself.