I was grateful for the editorial about the nomination of former senator Chuck Hagel for defense secretary (“Hagel was right on Iraq — and is being punished for it,” Jan. 15), except for one sentence: “Almost all Hagel’s admonitions [about the Iraq War] proved accurate, which is even more impressive given how few people were giving voice to similar thoughts.”
This is in reference to Hagel’s Landon Lecture of Feb. 20, 2003, in which he raised serious doubts about the idea of a US war on Iraq. Five days earlier, on Feb. 15, I was one of about a million people in New York City, and an estimated 15 million worldwide, who were “giving voice to similar thoughts.”
Comments
The people who were silent were the Democrats in the senate who supported the liberation of Iraq. John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden.....were all hawks on this effort, until it became politically beneficial to be against the war.
I suppose that by "few people" the editorial meant "few people who count," "people who count" being a group including elected representatives, mainstream inside-the-Beltway pundits, political consultants, military purveyor lobbyists and their clients. In the general scheme of things, the rest of us don't count on matters like this.