Hagel a victim of Obama’s coterie

Ex- secretary of defence was sympathetic to senior military figures who were furious with foreign policy

The surprise departure of US Secretary of Defence Chuck Hagel from President Barack Obama’s cabinet is the result of a toxic combination of Hagel’s willingness to become the spokesman for the frustrations of the armed forces he was supposed to manage and the dangerous alienation of anyone in the cabinet who is outside Obama’s inner circle of aides who manage the White House — as if they were still campaigning for power.

It is true that Hagel came to sympathise with senior military figures who are furious over Obama’s incoherent policies over a range of issues, like the disastrous refusal to act over Bashar Al Assad’s government using chemical weapons against its own people, the mishandling of Edward Snowden’s mass leak of security documents from the National Security Agency ( NSA), the lack of any meaningful response to Russia’s invasion of Crimea and the current rush to war in Iraq and Syria against Daesh ( Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) without any declared or obvious political objective. All this would have put him on a collision course with Obama’s White House aides ( who were also smarting from Snowden’s treachery).

But even if Hagel did get caught up in fighting for the troops he was supposed to be commanding, he was also isolated as the sole Republican in a cabinet that is dominated by Obama’s cronies from his early days in Chicago. Former cabinet members like Hilary Clinton, Robert Gates and Leon Panetta have all told the same story of being unable to break through Obama’s pretorian guard and consequent failure to build any close relationship with the president.

But there are also policy issues. Hagel was proud to be secretary of defence as the US drew down its active forces in Afghanistan and had finished its fighting in Iraq. He is widely reported as being very uneasy about sending US forces back into Iraq and then extending their mission into Syria. This deep division within White House thinking means that Obama’s new secretary of defence must be willing to make his new and aggressive policies work in the two years he has left to make a mark in the world.