Michael Hirsh, chief correspondent for the National Journal (and a former member of ‘JournoList’), has now penned two columns, here and here, arguing essentially that Chuck Hagel got Iran and other topics right when everyone else got them wrong. From his latest:
The former Republican senator from Nebraska has distinguished himself with subtle, well-thought-out, and accurate analyses of some of America’s greatest strategic challenges of the 21st century–especially the response to 9/11–while many of his harshest critics got these issues quite wrong… Hagel also delivered some of the earliest warnings about the potentially disastrous effects of George W. Bush’s ill-grounded “Axis of Evil” speech, in which the president needlessly alienated Tehran only days after the Iranians had actually delivered up aid and support to stabilize post-Taliban Afghanistan.
As Newsweek’s former diplomatic correspondent, Hirsh is well aware of the full range of facts; he just chooses to ignore them in pursuit of a political agenda and, by so doing, sullies the National Journal. What did Bush know and both Hagel and Hirsh ignore?
- The Karine-A. While Hagel was praising Iran and castigating his President for—gasp—harsh rhetoric, Iran was shipping 50 tons of weaponry to the Palestinian Authority in order to support terrorism and quash the fragile cease-fire.
- Iran’s covert nuclear enrichment facility which was yet to be exposed publicly, but was known in intelligence circles (including presumably the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, on which Hagel served) and to the White House.
- North Korea-Iran cooperation of nuclear and missile proliferation is now well established. Iranian and North Korean scientists and nuclear engineers regularly attend each other’s tests and visit each other’s facilities.
Let’s give Hirsh’s source for both pieces—former ambassador James Dobbins—benefit of the doubt. Iran may have cooperated with him, but he’s guilty of being one the proverbial blind men describing an elephant. It takes a leap of logic to amplify Iranian behavior in Afghanistan—where Tehran believed initially they could out-compete us with soft power and out-influence the Afghan government—with Iranian cooperation across the board. In hindsight, we know that Hassan Kazemi Qomi, the chief Iranian official in Afghanistan at the time, was doing far more than cheering on the Afghans peacefully or drinking tea with American officials. Qomi, by the way, was the Qods Force commander who became Iran’s ambassador to Iraq and oversaw the supply of militias and terrorists killing U.S. forces.
Hirsh also appears willing to blame tension between Tehran and Washington on that one phrase—“Axis of Evil.” Perhaps it would do Hirsh—and Hagel—well to listen to the rhetoric coming from Iranian officials on a weekly if not daily basis, where chants of “Death to America” still reign. When the Iranians shout that, they don’t mean “Let us shower them with puppies and lollipops.”
The Hagel nomination has not only shown light on a fantastically bad nominee who should have gone quietly into retirement, but also on the dishonesty of supposed nonpartisan journalists like Hirsh who appear willing to cast aside any evidence which they don’t like so they can use the pages of their magazines to push personal political agendas. Far from being prescient, Iran showed Hagel to be woefully naive, a useful idiot upon whom to advance Tehran’s own strategic objectives.
The one glue that seems motivates many, if not most of the pro-Hagel partisans in the press, in academia, and among former State Department diplomats seems to be a visceral dislike, or, in some cases, a pathological hatred of Israel and/or American Jews- especially their participation in the American political process. The fact American Jewish politicians in the Democratic Party choose to remain blind to this hatred will forever stain their record. n n
Being pro-Hagel is vicarious, cost free Jew baiting for his non-Jewish supporters. They get to stick it to the Jews and Israel, without being obvious about it. n nThe President seems to think he can hide behind that artifice, but he can;t. Everyday he leaves that incompetent out there as his nominee, simply because the nominee troubles Jews and Israel, is a further testament to Obama's animus. n nHagel's Jewish supporters, on the other hand, are much sadder, uglier cases . . . .
Lumiere1 has it exactly right. n nLet's be clear. Hagel was awful testifying in his own defense. He failed to provide the documentation that the committee demanded. Regardless of his views, the media would have turned on any other nominee who was so ill prepared for his nomination. The fact that Hagel's fans in the media (and elsehwhere) look for virtues that aren't there (and finds fault with critics while ignoring their substantive arguments) shows that they're not endorsing for his qualifications. n nExcept that they embrace his views of being tough on Israel and soft on Iran.
Use the Stalinist term for them–"Democ-rats of Jewish origin." It fits them well!
Yea, Hagel's a fookin' genius, he is. And it takes another genius (and a Jewish genius, no less) like Michael Hirsch to discover the true genius in Hagel no one else can see.
"The leader of the Iranian delegation to the Bonn talks on postwar Afghanistan, Javad Zarif, had been enormously helpful to the U.S. on a number of fronts. Zarif, a good-humored University of Denver alumnus who would later become Iran’s U.N. ambassador, even urged the American delegation to commit Afghanistan to democratization, Dobbins said." n nClearly, Zarif did have a sense of humor. Imagine this representative of the Islamic Republic of Iran urging the American delegation to commit Afghanistan to democratization, which isn't the way we Americans roll, but is so much the way the Iranian theocrats do. n n n n
Hirsh proves that it's the function of leftists of Jewish origin to validate the anti-Semitism of the left. He and his, particularly the Democ-rats of Jewish origin in the Senate, do that well!