Andrew Sullivan points out that the GOP senators' attack on Hagel is a ruse to defend their support for the disastrous Iraq war. I couldn't agree more

A spirited defense of Chuck Hagel by Andrew Sullivan:

I was reminded of a few key things today. The first is that the Republican party in Washington has no regrets about the Iraq War. McCain and Butters reveled in the same utter certainty of their moral and strategic high ground today as they did in the run-up to the worst foreign policy mistake since Vietnam, after the worst national security lapse since Pearl Harbor. Sure, we were so negligent we allowed more than 3,000 innocents to be mass-murdered not far from where I am typing this; yes, we reacted to the atrocity by bungling the search for the actual culprits, brutally torturing countless suspects (some to death), and then starting a second war on false grounds that cost a trillion dollars and tens of thousands of American and Iraqi lives. But you, Mr Hagel, were wrong about the surge! 

He wasn't, as I have long argued. The promise of the surge was to buy enough time and peace to get the sectarian mess of post-Saddam Iraq to resolve itself peacefully and form a viable non-sectarian polity. That hasn't happened. What we have is a Shiite authoritarian government in open conflict with both the Sunnis and the Kurds - and greater Iranian influence in the country. The surge did dampen some violence, but the collapse in mass murder was more a result of a political decision by the Anbar tribes to turn against the Sunni extremists, exhaustion after a long period of ethnic cleansing and segregation, and American money to bribe away the rest. It was a face-saver for a war that had manifestly failed. 

Then there is Hagel's heresy on the question of Israel. Although he is, like most of us, a supporter of the Jewish state, he recoiled in the Senate at the way in which the Greater Israel Lobby choreographs the voting. He just refused to do the necessary grand plié whenever AIPAC's emissaries came with their bills and resolutions to be rubber-stamped by the Senate. He dared to think outside the box of American foreign policy options called "What The Israeli Far Right Wants".

Read Andrew's full post