Hagel departure round-up

Can't disagree with such assessments as those of Bing West at NRO's The Corner ("out of his depth from the start") and Gateway Pundit  ("too stupid for even Obama"), but I think West's going on to see where this leads policy-wise is an important part of the conversation:

The Islamic State issue will come to a boil over three questions:

1) Will advisers go into combat? (Yes.)

2) Will our aid flow directly to the Sunni and Kurdish tribes instead of through the corrupt government in Baghdad? (This will end in a frustrating compromise.)

3) Will we insist upon a status-of-forces agreement so that we stay for the long term? (No, we will fight and then leave, with Baghdad in the orbit of Iran.)

The war against the Islamic State will rage for many years. When it is over, Iraq will be divided into three parts — Sunni, Kurd, and Shiite. 

The next SecDef will have much better working relationships with the military, but the White House policies will remain a mess.

Joel Pollack at Breitbart speculates that Hagel's alarm at the rise of ISIS clashed with the preferred complacent-confusion mode the regime was hoping to skate by on for as long as possible:

 . . . there is no immediate or urgent failure that ought to have triggered Hagel's departure. Until he began to "go rogue" on ISIS, he had faithfully carried out Obama's policies. Perhaps the threat of ISIS became too urgent for even Hagel to ignore, as senior military leaders began pushing for ground troops. 

Bryan Preston at PJ Media says that last week's interview with Charlie Rose may have sealed Hagel's fate:

“I am worried about it, I am concerned about it, Chairman Dempsey is, the chiefs are, every leader of this institution,” Hagel said, including Pentagon leadership but leaving both President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden’s names out of his list of officials who are worried about the U.S. military’s declining capability. Hagel said that the Congress and the American people need to know what while the U.S. military remains the strongest, best trained and most motivated in the world, its lead is being threatened because of policies being implemented now.
Hagel went on to note that a good leader prepares their institution for future success, saying that “the main responsibility of any leader is to prepare your institution for the future. If you don’t do that, you’ve failed. I don’t care how good you are, how smart you are, any part of your job. If you don’t prepare your institution, you’ve failed.”

 

 I can speak from experience that it is playing with fire to express misgivings about your workplace in public forums.

Twitchy reports that ISIS has already created a hashtag to gloat about the resignation.

My takeaway from the sum total of this is that, while the guy was nobody's idea of a genius, he truly was disturbed by the fact that the Most Equal Comrade was gutting the military even as the ISIS threat was reaching an existential level.  He said so publicly, and his days were numbered.