Hegseth on Offense

Secretary of War Hegseth’s press conference this morning left us thinking this: Why haven’t we heard such a coherent and impassioned defense of the war in Iran and other theaters from any of the other top officers of the administration? And, for that matter, such a trenchant puncturing of the motives of the Democrats and others plumping for Mr. Hegseth’s impeachment. So much for the predictions that this would be his Waterloo.“I’ll get right to it,” Mr. Hegseth began. “What one disgruntled and defeated Congressman is attempting is not oversight, and it’s not accountability. It’s a political spectacle, a personal manifesto driven by ego and resentment, time for one man’s final days in Congress to try to do damage to this president, this country, and most irresponsibly, the warriors who defend it. It’s a farce and it’s a stunt, and everybody knows it.” We don’t mind saying that up to this point we haven’t thought all that highly of Mr. Hegseth’s conduct of the office. We were shocked down to the ground at how he cashiered some of his generals. We’re not fans of the kind of boastfulness that the country has heard from him after some of the more dramatic successes. We prefer the persona of, say, U.S. Grant, Omar Bradley, or Creighton Abrams, though, of course, they were uniformed officers.Yet we are more shocked at the way the Democrats, not to mention the Kentucky Republican, Thomas Massie, have been searching for laws with which to clobber the man they like least. We marked that in the editorial issued earlier this week, “The Rush to Judgment on Hegseth.” We would be surprised if any of the charges the Democrats and Mr. Massie are rushing to file will prosper at trial, since the Democrats’ motives are so personal and political.That in and of itself is a kind of abuse of the impeachment process. We get how petty impeachment can be. One of the charges on which President Andrew Johnson was put on trial was criticizing Congress — meaning for making, as the solons put it at the time, “certain intemperate, inflammatory and scandalous harangues.” Johnson was acquitted on that and all others counts handed up against him, though by but a single vote. We particularly liked two markers in the secretary’s speech. One is the history, that in “the 250 years of our American republic, no Secretary of War or Secretary of Defense has ever been impeached for carrying out lawful military operations and, in our case, successful ones at that, not once, war powers resolution or not, not under Reagan in Lebanon, not under Clinton in Kosovo, not under Obama in Iraq and Syria, not under Biden in Iraq and Syria.”The other is Mr. Hegseth’s defense of our GIs. It’s something we learned in Vietnam. It’s difficult — impossible, in the end — to truly defend our GIs if one fails to defend the war they’re fighting. The secretary may have gotten off to a rocky start in his tenure at the Pentagon. If, however, the impeachment being bruited this week takes place, our sentiments would be with Mr. Hegseth. We wish him luck in any trial that takes place.

Hegseth on Offense

Hegseth on Offense

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