On Aug. 30, 2013, the U.S. military was poised to make war on Syria after Obama had publicly warned Bashar al-Assad that his regime would face severe consequences if it crossed a “red line” by using chemical weapons. Assad was reported to have used the weapons, and the US knew it. President Obama knew it. On that day, then U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel spent his day approving final plans for a large Tomahawk cruise missile strike against Damascus. U.S. naval destroyers were in the Mediterranean, awaiting orders launch their missiles and begin the strike.
But instead, Obama called Hagel and told him to stand down. Obama told him that the United States wasn’t going to take military action against the Syrian government.
“Whether it was the right decision or not, history will determine, but there’s no question in my mind that it hurt the credibility of the president. A president’s word is a big thing, and when the president says things, that’s a big deal,” Hagel has said.
Obama Administration Micromanagement and Meddling
The 69-year-old war veteran, also said that during his time in office, the Pentagon was subject to debilitating meddling and micromanagement by the White House, which is a sentiment also echoed by his predecessors, Robert Gates and Leon Panetta.
The Obama administration's tendency to meddle was such a frequent problem, that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Dempsey, complained that White House staffers were calling generals “and asking fifth-level questions that the White House should not be involved in.”
The three last Secretarys of defense, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and Michèle Flournoy, the former No. 3 official at the Pentagon, have all criticized the Obama’s centralized decision-making, micromanagement and interference with the workings of the Defense Department, some indicating that it raised the very real risk that the executive branch was undercutting the proper functioning of the Pentagon and other cabinet offices.
Appointment as Defense Secretary
Appointed to the Pentagon to oversee a peacetime footing and tough budget cuts for Obama, Hagel ended up having to contend with Russia’s incursion into Ukraine, a new war in the Middle East, and other critical issues like the automatic budget cuts that threw the Pentagon’s budget into chaos; a shooting rampage at the Washington Navy Yard facility that left 12 people dead; a spate of sexual assault cases in the military; and a cheating scandal by nuclear missile crews.
Unproductive, rambling meetings
Once in office, Hagel’s requests to have time with the President were generally granted. But he sometimes found that his personal access to the president did not necessarily mean a one-on-one meeting in the Oval Office.
“There were times that I asked to have a private meeting with the president, and when I showed up, there were others in the room,” he said.
The White House also often summoned him to large Situation Room sessions with last-minute agendas sent out overnight or on the morning of the meeting. Sometimes he found himself in meetings on Syria and other issues run by Susan Rice or her deputies. Hagel indicated that often these meetings led nowhere.
“For one thing, there were way too many meetings. The meetings were not productive. I don’t think many times we ever actually got to where we needed to be. We kept kind of deferring the tough decisions. And there were always too many people in the room,” he said. "I eventually got to the point where I told Susan Rice that I wasn’t going to spend more than two hours in her meetings, some of which would go on for four hours.”
At larger White House meetings, with some staffers in the room he did not even know, Hagel indicated that he was reluctant to speak at length, fearing critical comments and secure information might find its way into media reports.
“The more people you have in a room, the more possibilities there are for self-serving leaks to shape and influence decisions in the press,” he said.
A senior administration official defended the long National Security Council meetings, saying their length was only natural given the complexity of the challenges facing the country: “It speaks to the rigorous policy process that we run.”
Hagel said that in those meetings too much time was spent on “nit-picky, small things in the weeds,” while larger questions were ignored. “We seemed to veer away from the big issues.”
Lack of ISIS/Syria Strategy
Hagel gives a rare view from inside the Obama administration that indicates that Obama was caught flat-footed by the rise of ISIS and the conflict in Syria. His account describes an administration that certainly lacked any clear strategy regarding Syria while he was Secretary of Defense. And Hagel suggests that it does not have one to this day, and may not have one anytime soon either.
When ISIS began to rise, Hagel was asked about the nature of the threat. Hagel told reporters that “this is beyond anything that we’ve seen.” He cited ISIS' military skill, financial resources, and adept online propaganda as an unprecedented danger that surpassed previous terrorist organizations.
Some in the Obama administration were not happy with Hagel’s description. He said, “I got some criticism from the White House.” But events ended up vindicating his remarks.
For Hagel, the administration’s indecision over Syria was driven home in a congressional hearing in September 2014, where he was grilled about the plan to build a force of rebel fighters to fight Assad and the Islamic State.
John McCain (R-Ariz.), an outspoken critic of Obama’s strategy, asked Hagel if the administration would come to the aid of U.S. trained rebels if they were attacked by Assad. The administration had debated that question for weeks with no decision on the matter. So, Hagel was forced to improvise.
“We had never come down on an answer or a conclusion. I said what I felt what I had to say. I couldn’t say, ‘No.’ Christ, every ally would have walked away from us in the Middle East if I had.”
But the question remained a “glaring” omission in the administration’s policy, and Hagel raised this issue a month later. With his concern growing, Hagel fired off a two-page memo to Rice and Kerry...and copied the president. In it he said that the administration needed to decide on its approach to Syria. The memo bluntly stated. "We don’t have a policy.”
It was not well received by the white House at the time, and is not well remembered now.
Asked to comment on Hagel's remarks, a senior administration official rejected them. He called them misleading and said the Defense Department led the training and could have handled any issues itself.
Hagel counters, “In the memo, I wasn’t blaming anybody. Hell, I was part of the National Security Council.”
Differences over Guantánamo
In addition to differences over Syria, Hagel said some of his biggest arguments dealt with Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
Congressional law states that the defense secretary has the responsibility for approving the transfer of Guantánamo inmates to other nations. This meant that Hagel, would bear the blame if a released detainee later took up arms. The White House, trying to fulfill Obama’s promise to close the facility, pressed Hagel over and over to approve transfers of inmates to other countries.
But Hagel often refused, or delayed transfers whenever he felt the security risk was too high.
“It got pretty bad, pretty brutal,” Hagel said. “I’d get the hell beat out of me all the time on this at the White House. “
Although he supported ultimately closing Guantánamo, Hagel indicated that he would not be intimidated into approving transfer for that reason alone. The White House kept arguing that security concerns had to be weighed against the damage to America’s image by keeping Guantánamo open.
These differences over Guantánamo were later cited as the last straw that led to Hagel stepping down. During his two years in office, Hagel approved 44 detainee transfers. His successor, Ash Carter, has approved only 15 transfers since.
Stepping down as Secretary of Defense
After clashing with the White House on Guantánamo, Syria, and other issues, Hagel indicated that it was inevitable that he would be asked to step down. Even so, Hagel indicates that he was not prepared for the humiliating manner it was done, “with certain people just really vilifying me in a gutless, off-the-record kind of way.”
When he was ultimately asked to leave, the White House also asked him if he would stay on until a successor was found. He accepted, but White House officials continued to anonymously comment about him to the press, claiming that he rarely spoke at meetings with the President and that he always deferred to General Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
“They already had my resignation, so what was the point of continuing to try to destroy me?” he asks.
His departue was a painful end to a successful. After his 1968 combat tour in Vietnam, where he was awarded with two Purple Hearts, he served as a Capitol Hill staffer, worked as a deputy administrator for the Veterans Administration, made a fortune in the cellphone industry, handily won two Senate terms from Nebraska, and at one point was considered a potential Presidential candidate.
Though he holds Obama in some esteem, Hagel remains pained at how he was tarnished by what he says were backstabbing personnel in Obama's White House.
...with a beautiful lady by my side and a fine bottle of wine.