XPost: alt.conspiracy.black.helicopters, alt.politics, alt.military   
   From: luken@frontiernet.net   
      
   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   Any assumption 10 years old is out of date.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   military and foreign policy thinking is out of date; and quagmires like   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-a   
   -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/   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)