Hagel takes helm at Pentagon
Opponents still doubtful
WASHINGTON, Feb 27, (AP): Former senator Chuck Hagel takes charge at the Defense Department with deep budget cuts looming and Republican opponents still doubtful that he’s up to the job.
Hagel was expected to be sworn in Wednesday and was likely to address the staff in his first day as defense secretary. The bitter, seven-week fight over his nomination ended Tuesday as a deeply divided Senate voted 58-41 to confirm him. Just four Republicans joined Democrats in backing the former two-term Republican senator from Nebraska and twice-wounded Vietnam combat veteran.
“I am honored that President Obama and the Senate have entrusted me to serve our nation once again,” Hagel said in a statement. “I can think of no greater privilege than leading the brave, dedicated men and women of the Department of Defense as they perform vital missions around the globe.”
Hagel promised to work closely with Congress, but he faces lingering reservations about his ability to handle the responsibilities. Shortly after the vote, Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham said he still has serious questions about Hagel and his qualifications.
“I hope, for the sake of our own national security, he exceeds expectations,” said the South Carolina Republican.
The top Republican on the Armed Services Committee, Sen Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma, said Hagel’s record on Israel, Iran, defense spending and nuclear weapons “demonstrate, in my view, a profound and troubling lack of judgment on many of the critical issues he will now be confronted with
as the Arab Spring in late 2010. (AP)
Wounded Knee ’versary: American as secretary of defense.”
But Inhofe promised to work with Hagel to avoid the $46 billion in automatic, across-the-board budget cuts that hit the Pentagon on Friday.
Obama alluded to the need for cooperation in his statement welcoming the vote.
The president said he was grateful to Hagel “for reminding us that when it comes to our national defense, we are not Democrats or Republicans, we are Americans, and our greatest responsibility is the security of the American people.”
Retooled
Hagel joins Obama’s retooled national security team, including Secretary of State John Kerry and CIA Director-designate John Brennan, at a time of uncertainty for a military emerging from two wars and fighting worldwide terrorism with smaller, deficit-driven budgets.
Among his daunting challenges are dealing with the budget cuts and deciding on troop levels in Afghanistan as the United States winds down its combat presence. He also will have to work with lawmakers who spent weeks vilifying him.
Republicans insisted that Hagel was battered and bloodied after their repeated attacks during the protracted political fight.
“He will take office with the weakest support of any defense secretary in modern history, which will make him less effective on his job,” said Sen John Cornyn of Texas, the Senate’s No. 2 Republican.
Not so, said Democratic Sen Jack Reed of Rhode Island, who pointed out that Hagel now has the title and the fight is history.
“All have to work together for the Indian activists took over the tiny village of Wounded Knee on South Dakota’s sprawling Pine Ridge Indian Reservation interest of the country,” said Reed.
The vote ended one of the bitterest fights over a Cabinet choice and former senator since 1989, when the Democratic-led Senate defeated newly elected President George H.W. Bush’s nomination of Republican John Tower to be defense secretary. This time, Republicans waged an unprecedented filibuster of a president’s Pentagon pick and Hagel only secured the job after Republicans dropped their delaying tactics.
A 71-27 vote to end the filibuster — a procedural maneuver that blocks a final vote — cleared the way for Hagel’s confirmation.
In the course of the rancorous nomination fight, Republicans, led by Inhofe and freshman Sen Ted Cruz of Texas, insinuated that Hagel has a cozy relationship with Iran and received payments for speeches from extreme or radical groups. Those comments drew rebukes from Democrats and some Republicans.
Democratic Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, dismissed the “unfair innuendoes” against Hagel and called him an “outstanding American patriot” whose background as an enlisted soldier would send a positive message to the nation’s servicemen and women.
Missouri Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill questioned how the confirmation process devolved into a character assassination in which Hagel was accused of “having secret ties with our enemies.”
“I sincerely hope that the practice of challenging nominations with innuendo and inference, rather than facts and figures, was an aberration and not a roadmap,” she said in a statement after the vote. on Feb 27, 1973, in what would become a 71-day, fatal standoff with FBI agents that attracted international attention to the impoverished reservation and the plight of local tribes.
On Wednesday, the occupation’s 40th anniversary, some of the protest’s central figures — most notably Russell Means, the late American Indian Movement’s charismatic leader — will be noticeably absent from a commemoration at the reservation.
But organizers hope the events remind people of the struggles that led to the standoff and problems still reverberating throughout Indian Country, as well as changes the protest helped spark.
“They need to remember how far the anti-Indian policies had pushed us to the point that the only way to fight back was to pick up arms,” AIM co-founder Dennis Banks said. “Of course, that’s not a way to resolve any issue, but we were pushed to that. That was our last degree of how we could struggle back.”
“It just caused a complete awareness all over the world about Indian people and the struggle they’d been going through here in our own country,” added Clyde Bellecourt, who also helped found the AIM movement in the late 1960s. “A lot of good things have happened since then. People across the country are practicing their sovereignty ... You know (tribes) have casinos, they have their own clinics, their own schools, junior colleges.” (AP)