Obama Calls Hagel Bipartisan, While Many See Consensus-Breaker
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Senator Obama is billing the lawmakers who will join him on an upcoming, high-profile trip to Iraq and Afghanistan, senators Hagel of Nebraska and Reed of Rhode Island, as purveyors of bipartisan agreement on foreign policy, even though Mr. Hagel has often been a rare voice bucking broad congressional consensus on the Middle East.
“They’re both experts on foreign policy. They reflect, I think, a traditional bipartisan wisdom when it comes to foreign policy,” Mr. Obama said Saturday night in advance of the formal announcement of the delegation yesterday. “Neither of them are ideologues but try to get the facts right and make a determination about what’s best for U.S. interests — and they’re good guys,” the presumptive Democratic nominee told reporters aboard his campaign plane, the Associated Press reported.
In 2001, when legislation renewing the Iran Libya Sanctions Act passed the Senate by a 96-2 vote, Mr. Hagel, a Republican, stood in the two-man minority. The following year, when the Senate voted 88-10 to ban the import of Iraqi oil until Iraq stopped payments to the families of Palestinian Arab suicide bombers, Mr. Hagel was among the handful of senators who opposed imposing such a condition.
“These unilateral sanctions are not effective and serve to further isolate the U.S.,” Mr. Hagel said in 2005 as he opposed another renewal of the Iran sanctions, according to the National Iranian American Council.
In 2001, when 87 senators signed a letter asking President Bush not to meet with Yasser Arafat, Mr. Hagel did not join in.
“I’m sure many people will be looking at the positions his traveling companions have taken on a wide range of issues and probably will ask legitimate questions as to whether Senator Obama agrees with those positions or not,” Senator McCain’s foreign policy adviser, Randal Scheunemann, said in a conference call with reporters yesterday.
A spokesman for Mr. Obama, Hari Sevugan, declined to compare the views of the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee with those of Mr. Hagel. However, Mr. Sevugan pointed to a statement yesterday in which Mr. Hagel stressed that the trip was intended to build common ground. “U.S. policies in Iraq and Afghanistan are at the center of America’s national security. These critical issues must be addressed in a bipartisan manner that builds consensus for a bipartisan foreign policy,” Mr. Hagel said.
The senator seems to agree with one of the signature items of Mr. Obama’s foreign policy platform: a willingness to engage in presidential-level, bilateral talks with all nations, even countries such as Iran and North Korea. Last year, Mr. Hagel sent Mr. Bush an unusual letter urging unconditional talks with Iran.
There are signs, however, that the views of Messrs. Obama and Hagel diverge over sanctions. Last year, Mr. Obama joined with Rep. Barney Frank, a Democrat of Massachusetts, to introduce legislation that would permit state and local governments and their pension funds to divest from companies doing business with Iran. “Pressuring companies to cut their financial ties with Iran is critical to ensuring that sanctions have their intended result,” Mr. Obama said.
In an interview aired yesterday, Mr. Obama said he was deliberately being vague about the size of the American military contingent he would leave in Iraq after the bulk of American forces withdraw.
“I have been very careful not to put numbers on what a residual force would look like,” Mr. Obama told CNN’s “GPS with Fareed Zakaria.” “What I am absolutely convinced of is that, to maintain permanent bases, to have ongoing combat forces, to have an open-ended commitment of the sort that John McCain and George Bush have advocated, is a mistake. It is a strategic mistake.”
Asked whether the force might be “large” or as many as 30,000 troops, Mr. Obama neither agreed nor disagreed.
In the same interview, Mr. Obama blamed poor “syntax” for the conclusion in some quarters that he was ruling out the use of Jerusalem as a capital for a Palestinian Arab state when he said last month, “Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel and it must remain undivided.”
“The truth is that this was an example where we had some poor phrasing in the speech. And we immediately tried to correct the interpretation that was given,” Mr. Obama told CNN. “The point we were simply making was, is that we don’t want barbed wire running through Jerusalem, similar to the way it was prior to the ’67 war, that it is possible for us to create a Jerusalem that is cohesive and coherent.
Mr. Obama said he was not attempting to prejudge what has long been considered an issue for Israel and the Palestinians to resolve at the bargaining table. “The intention was never to move away from that basic, core idea that they — that those parties are going to have to negotiate these issues on their own, with the strong engagement of the United States,” he said.