[Mb-civic] In Fulbright's footsteps - Derrick Z. Jackson - The Boston Globe

[William Swiggard]

In Fulbright's footsteps

By Derrick Z. Jackson, Globe Columnist  |  August 24, 2005

THE HAGEL hearings have not yet been scheduled. They are for now a 
mythical event. But as President Bush's war in Iraq becomes more 
maddening to Americans, the more Hagel talks as if he is the Republican 
who will become to Bush what J. William Fulbright once was to Lyndon 
Johnson.

Fulbright was the Democratic senator from Arkansas who publicly turned 
against Johnson's war in Vietnam. Fulbright used his power as the head 
of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to hold nationally televised 
hearings to debate the merits of the war. Hagel is the Republican 
senator from Nebraska, a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, and 
a Purple Heart Vietnam veteran. In recent months, Hagel has become the 
top Republican critic of Bush's war.

On Sunday, Hagel moved a step closer to Fulbright. On ABC's ''This 
Week," he said, ''We're locked into a bogged down problem, not 
unsimilar, dissimilar to where we were in Vietnam. The longer we stay, 
the more problems we're going to have."

''Stay the course is not a policy," Hagel said, adding: ''I think by any 
standard when you analyze two and a half years in Iraq where we have put 
in over a third of a trillion dollars, where we have lost almost 1,900 
Americans, over 14,000 wounded, electricity production down, oil 
production down -- any measurement, any standard you apply to this, 
we're not winning."

Hagel, the second-ranking Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee, 
has been building to this ever since it was clear that weapons of mass 
destruction would never be found in Iraq. In September 2003, Hagel said 
the Bush administration ''did a miserable job of planning for a 
post-Saddam Iraq. They treated many in Congress, most of the Congress, 
like a nuisance."

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/08/24/in_fulbrights_footsteps/
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