Chuck Hagel Nomination Battle (2013)

On 7 January, 2013 United States President Barack Obama formally nominated Chuck Hagel for Secretary of Defense. This escalated an extended and high-profile battle, which had already raged for weeks and in which various Israel lobby groups participated, between the former Senator from Nebraska's supporters and detractors. After a bruising process in Congress and the media, Hagel's nomination eventually passed on 26 February 2013.

The Lobby vs. Hagel

Hagel's alleged lack of support for Israel became a major issue in the political and media fight. As Connie Bruck reported,

'From the moment Hagel’s name was leaked as a possible nominee for Secretary of Defense... Hagel’s most vocal critics have been members of what can be called the Israel lobby.'

Opposition to Hagel's nomination from the Israel lobby was led by its more right-wing and openly partisan elements:

• Emergency Committee for Israel

William Kristol's Emergency Committee for Israel (ECI) paid for a full-page anti-Hagel advert in the New York Times, which branded him 'anti-Israel' and expressed the view that his appointment 'will encourage the jihadists'. ECI-funded television adverts highlighted Hagel's opposition to sanctions on Iran and his vote against labelling the Revolutionary Guards a terrorist organisation, among other crimes, while a new ECI website, www.chuckhagel.com, dedicated itself to the proposition that Hagel 'is not a responsible option'. Kristol himself took repeatedly to the pages of the Weekly Standard to insist that Hagel was unqualified for the job and urge Democratic lawmakers to reject his nomination. He accused Hagel of harbouring, inter alia, 'dangerous views on Iran' and an 'unpleasant distaste for Israel and Jews'.

• Christians United for Israel
• NORPAC

NORPAC is an avowedly bipartisan pro-Israel PAC, but, apparently uncharacteristically, it joined forces with neoconservative and partisan lobby groups (like the ECI) to oppose Hagel's nomination. Founded in 1992 by Rabbi Menachem Genack, NORPAC (North Jersey PAC) is a distinct organisation from AIPAC. It is single-issue, focused exclusively on lobbying Congress on Israel-related legislation, including sanctions on Iran. Several former presidents of AIPAC have used NORPAC to funnel personal donations to candidates.

NORPAC issued an Action Alert against Hagel, condemning his positions on Iran as 'fringe' and perhaps 'affected by prejudices'.

• Zionist Organisation of America (ZOA)

Morton Klein, president of the ZOA, lambasted Hagel as 'one of the most hostile critics of Israel that has ever been in the Senate'. It issued regular press releases collating 'Hagel Horrors'—allegedly incriminating quotes—and calling on Obama not to nominate the 'Iran- and terrorist-apologist and Israel-basher'.

• Americans for a Strong Defence

A new group formed specifically to oppose the Hagel nomination, Americans for a Strong Defence, financed a number of anti-Hagel ads in five Democratic states. It focused its efforts on the states of key senators, including Mark Pryor (D-Arkansas), Mary Landrieu (D-Louisiana) and Kay Hagan (D-North Carolina), who face elections in 2014.The ads portrayed him as weak in the face of threats from Iran, Russia and North Korea, because of his alleged preference for '[a]n end to our nuclear program' and '[d]evastating defence cuts'. It is funded by anonymous donors. The 'Issues' highlighted on its website are: defence cuts, nuclear weapons, Israel, Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah and Cuba.

Americans for a Strong Defence seems to have worked through the advertising agency Strategic Media Services.

Its treasurer is Brian Hook, a former foreign policy advisor to Mitt Romney and assistant secretary of state under George W. Bush. The board of Americans for Strong Defence comprises: Hook; Cuba Democracy Advocates executive director Mauricio Claver-Carone; and former Mitt Romney campaign official Danny Diaz, of PR firm FP1 Strategies. Its spokesperson is named Ryan Williams.

Both Claver-Carone and Danny Diaz are "prominent... lobbyists" for maintaining the embargo on Cuba.

• American Future Fund (AFF)

The AFF is a wealthy right-wing lobby group. It 'started as a small, Iowa-based political committee in 2007 and has grown larger since taking a leading role now against Mr. Hagel'. It independently spent about $24m during the 2012 presidential campaign. It launched a multi-state ad campaign against the Hagel nomination, its first big campaign since the election. This included an advert spot on CNN and Fox, which cost the group $500,000. 'We were anxious to get back into the battle,' explained Republican strategies and AFF founder Nick Ryan. 'Post-election we have new battle lines being drawn with the president; he kicks it off with these nominations and it made sense for us'.

• Sheldon Adelson

In a December interview with the Wall Street Journal, anti-Obama and pro-Israel billionaire Sheldon Adelson said he was prepared to 'double' his already prodigious political spending in 2013. It's not clear whether he funded any of the anti-Hagel campaigns, but he 'is so invested in the fight against Hagel,' the New York Times reported, 'that he has reached out directly to Republican Senators to urge them to hold the line against his confirmation'. Sources report that he called them 'in conjunction with the Republican Jewish Coalition', which he finances.

• Log Cabin Republicans (LCR)

Log Cabin Republicans (LCR), a gay and lesbian advocacy group within the Republican Party, funded a number of ads against Hagel, including a full-page ad in the New York Times characterising him as 'Wrong on gay rights, wrong on Iran, wrong on Israel'. The criticism of Hagel as homophobic focused mainly on his 1998 opposition to the nomination of an 'openly, aggressively gay' man (Hagel's words) as U.S. ambassador to Luxemburg. Under pressure, Hagel apologised for and retracted the remark in December 2012. 'Too Little, Too Late', declared another LCR ad (full-page, in the Washington Post).

Full-page ads in the Times and the Post are expensive (more than $100,000 for the Times, apparently), and LCR is not a wealthy group. In response to questioning from Glenn Greenwald, LCR admitted that its anti-Hagel ad campaign was not financed from its regular funds, but 'is being funded by a number of donors'. It refused to identify those donors, who Greenwald suspected were neoconservatives and/or pro-Israel.

Another avowed gay rights group in the anti-Hagel camp was Use Your Mandate. This 'mysterious' organisation, the New York Times reported, sent mailers to seven states and ran television ads against Hagel. 'Established gay rights activists have expressed scepticism about the group's authenticity': it had no website and no proper address. FCC documents link it to Tusk Strategies, a bipartisan political group funded by Bradley Tusk, former strategist for New York's Mayor Bloomberg. Tusk refused to identify Use Your Mandate's donors, but it used Del Cielo Media, an arm of prominent Republican advertising firm Smart Media. Smart Media's clients have included, inter alia the Emergency Committee for Israel.

Other prominent lobby voices against Hagel included former AIPAC spokesperson and current CEO and President of The Israel Project Josh Block, the Washington Post's Jennifer Rubin,, Wall Street Journal columnist and former Jerusalem Post editor Bret Stephens,, Commentary and the Republican Jewish Coalition.

Interestingly, the more centrist and mainstream lobby groups appeared to largely sit the Hagel fight out. Although former AIPAC executive director Morris Amitay was one of the first lobby figures to sound concern over a potential Hagel nomination, AIPAC took no official position on it and appeared anxious to make this fact known. Former AIPAC director Tom Dine explained, 'Hagel’s not going to forget [who opposed him]... When it comes to nominations, they don’t ever forget'. 'It’s about making friends, not getting into fights with people', explained former AIPAC policy director Steve Rosen. Similarly, with the exception of a couple of mild critical comments by officials, the ADL, the Conference of Presidents and the American Jewish Committee largely remained silent. 'In retrospect', J.J. Goldberg wrote in an extended analysis of the episode, 'it's apparent that the Israel lobby had never even shown up for the fight':

'[T]he Israel lobby was never in the fight—that is, if by Israel lobby we mean the network of mostly Jewish American organizations and influentials that defends Israel’s interests and advocates for a strong U.S.-Israel relationship. On the contrary, the campaign was launched by a small group of Jewish Republican Party cutouts—ethnic party outreach arms, support groups and loyal media boosters. It grew to include broader Republican political circles, along with a small group of pro-Likud and pro-settler Jewish hard-liners. But except for a brief media flurry, the opposition never managed to engage the mainstream organizations that speak for American Jews and lobby on their behalf. The narrative that dominated the public debate, of a showdown between the Obama administration and the Israel lobby, was almost entirely fictional.'

Indeed, the mainstream Jewish organisations were criticised at the time by those who were engaged in the attack on Hagel, precisely for their refusal to join in the fight. 'Silence at such a moment', thundered Jonathan S. Tobin in Commentary, 'is impossible for men and women of conscience'.

However, the journalist Max Blumenthal has alleged that AIPAC's official abstention from the Hagel fight masked a 'shadow war', in which the organisation outsourced attacks on Hagel to its former spokesman Josh Block (now of The Israel Project). Blumenthal quotes former AIPAC official M.J. Rosenberg:

'The whole anti-Hagel effort is coordinated by AIPAC... If it didn't want Hagel to be smeared as anti-Israel, he wouldn’t have been. So he is being smeared nonstop and if the effort fails [AIPAC] can say, ‘It wasn't us. We are neutral. These attacks came independently.’ “That’s why they use cutouts... I know because I used to be one of them.'

This analysis is, it must be said, highly speculative, resting almost entirely on the word of M.J. Rosenberg. Granted, Rosenberg has behind-the-scenes knowledge of AIPAC. But Peter Beinart and J.J. Goldberg also have good sources within the organised Jewish community, and both concluded that AIPAC sat the fight out. Moreover even if AIPAC were outsourcing attacks to Josh Block, as Rosenberg claimed, would this not constitute, if not the complete abstention from the battle professed by the organisation, still less-than-full participation in it? After all, if AIPAC could outsource its campaigns without reducing their efficacy, it isn't clear why it would ever do anything else.

• The State of Israel

The Israeli government, perhaps cautious after the failure of its overt pro-Romney meddling during the election campaign, appeared to stay out of the Hagel battle. An exception was Deputy Israeli Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon, who told a meeting of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organisations in New York that Hagel 'is a decent and fair interlocutor who believes in the natural partnership between Israel and the United States'.

Analysis

Why is the Hagel fight interesting? What does it tell us about the lobby?

Internal divisions

The intra-lobby divisions exposed by the Hagel fight appear to have reflected, in part, tactical disagreement over the importance of bipartisanship, and also the different bases of support of the various lobby groups: many of those which campaigned against Hagel have strong links to the Republican Party, which makes sense.

As noted, while the more hawkish and overtly partisan lobby groups campaigned against Hagel's nomination, AIPAC, the Conference of Presidents, the American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation League largely remained on the sidelines. AIPAC has long preferred to concentrate its efforts on Congress, recognising that is influence is much stronger there than in the Executive branch. It has also striven to avoid making Israel a partisan issue. By contrast, the ECI has long sought to make support for Israel 'as partisan as possible'.

Peter Beinart argues that the Hagel battle exposed a rift between the 'Old Jewish Establishment' and the 'New Jewish Right'. The former, he said, are 'bipartisan organisations in a super-partisan age':

'It’s absolutely crucial to the mission of groups like AIPAC, the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee to be perceived as favouring neither Democrats nor Republicans, partly because they’re in the business of ensuring that the U.S.-Israel alliance survives whoever is in power and partly because although their official perspective on Israel is closer to today’s GOP, most of their members, I suspect, are still Democrats...

Their problem is that in the younger generation, more and more of the hard-core “Pro-Israel” activists are Orthodox, and thus not committed to the Democratic cultural agenda. And not coincidentally, they’re mostly Republicans... As a result, AIPAC—the young Jewish Republicans are less involved in AJC and ADL, which take liberal positions on domestic issues—must worry about losing these younger activists to newer, smaller and more partisan “Pro-Israel” groups like the Emergency Committee for Israel and the Republican Jewish Coalition while still staying on good terms with Democrats.'

On the evidence of the anti-Hagel campaign, the Zionist Organisation of America seems to align itself more with the 'New Jewish Right' than the old lobbying establishment. It repeatedly criticised the bigger American Jewish organisations for remaining 'silent' over Hagel, perhaps in an effort to distinguish itself and thereby steal some right-wing support from its larger, more centrist rivals.

Where Beinart emphasises the abstention of young liberals and the growing influence of young Orthodox on Israel lobbying as factor pulling lobby groups to the right (or in boosting groups like ECI and ZOA at the expense of AIPAC), others highlight the role of wealthy Jewish donors. According to James Besser, former Washington correspondent for The Jewish Week, intra-lobby divisions in the anti-Hagel campaign illustrate the increasing ability of a few far-right, wealthy donors to shape the lobbying agenda. Fesser criticised centrist pro-Israel and American Jewish organisations like the AJC, ADL and AIPAC for being silent over, or offering 'cautious support' for, 'extremists' within the pro-Israel lobbying community (like the ECI). These are gaining ground against more moderate lobbies, he suggested, because they are backed by 'wealthy, far-right contributors'.

J.J. Goldberg argues that the battle of Hagel represented 'a crack in the decades-old working alliance between the Jewish pro-Israel advocacy community—the Israel lobby—and the Republican right.' For Goldberg, the decision to fight Hagel's nomination came primarily from radicalised Republicans, not from Israel lobbyists. Seeking to enlist pro-Israel support, the Republicans were rebuffed as the major Israel lobby groups abstained: the Republicans' 'Jewish allies were simply unwilling to go that far'.

The Lobby's power

In the face of all the opposition surveyed above, the Obama administration nominated Hagel and had that nomination confirmed. One might interpret this as a defeat for the lobby—and hence an illustration of the limits of its power—if one takes the view of M.J. Rosenberg that, its denials aside, AIPAC did throw its weight into the anti-Hagel battle. Thus Rosenberg takes the lobby's defeat over Hagel as evidence that the President can defeat the lobby, when he defines a particular issue as a national security interest.

If one takes the Beinart, Tobin, et. al. view that the ADL, AJC, Conference of Presidents and AIPAC largely sat the Hagel fight out, then one can't take Hagel's appointment as a defeat for the lobby—at least, not without qualification.

It is also important to note the fact that those Israel lobby groups who did campaign against Hagel, did not do so alone. It has been noted above that other interests—Cuba lobbyists; Republican Party operatives; neoconservatives—also fought against Hagel's nomination, for reasons other than his alleged positions on Israel and Iran.

Was the anti-Hagel opposition really about Israel?

There is no doubt that Israel featured heavily in the rhetorical campaign against Hagel, in Congress as well as the media. Steve Walt interpreted Hagel's Senate confirmation hearing as 'compelling vindication' of his and John Mearsheimer's thesis, and it's not difficult to see why: Israel was, by far, the most discussed topic at Hagel's Senate confirmation hearing.

Still, many commentators maintained that the attacks on Hagel were not primarily motivated by concern for Israel, but by opposition to the broader administration agenda that Hagel's nomination represented. Specifically, Obama wanted to cut defence spending and withdraw from Afghanistan, and Hagel would have given him the bipartisan and patriotic cover required to do this:

'Chuck Hagel has been nominated to supervise the beginning of... [a] generation-long process of defence cutbacks. If a Democratic president is going to slash defence, he probably wants a Republican at the Pentagon to give him political cover, and he probably wants a decorated war hero to boot.

All the charges about Hagel’s views on Israel or Iran are secondary. The real question is, how will he begin this long cutting process?'

In this analysis, opposition to Hagel's nomination, though couched in concerns about Israel, was in fact driven more by opposition to defence cuts and withdrawal from Afghanistan, and more generally to a perceived reluctance to project American power abroad. As J.J. Goldberg writes,

' Their words were about Israel, but their motives were elsewhere: a combination of partisan opposition to Obama, ideological opposition to his agenda and a history of personal tensions between Hagel and his former Republican colleagues.

Israel was a factor, most observers agree, but it wasn’t a big one. A bigger factor was Obama’s goal, which Hagel shared, of a major strategic reappraisal that would slow the runaway growth of the Pentagon budget. Besides the threat this posed to local pork spending, commitment to military spending “in many respects is now visceral” for many Republicans, said retired U.S. Army Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell and a longtime friend of Hagel’s. “Many of them feel the American military is the last bastion of protection for this republic.”'

And an even bigger one, Goldberg argues, was Republicans' sense of betrayal by Hagel—'one of their own'.

Certainly right-wing Republicans and, especially, neoconservatives had long disliked Hagel for his scepticism about the Iraq war and opposition to the 2007 'surge', as well as his reluctance to escalate military vis-a-vis Iran. Indeed the battle over Hagel appears to have been, at least in part, a fight over the direction of U.S. foreign policy between neoconservatives and 'realists', like those foreign policy luminaries and former officials who publicly defended Hagel during the nomination battle.

There are other reasons to doubt the integrity of at least some of the opposition to Hagel's position on Israel. The Log Cabin Republican and Use Your Mandate campaigns against Hagel's alleged homophobia were widely derided as unprincipled, because Hagel's substantive positions on the issue are no worse, and in many cases significantly better, than many of the candidates those groups endorse or are silent about. Similarly, Hagel's positions on Israel are hardly radical—largely coinciding with Obama and Bush administration policy on the issue—and his position on Iran was identical to Obama's. NORPAC criticised Hagel's positions on Israel, yet has been strong supporter of Sen. Richard Lugar who has taken the same positions. In short, Hagel is hardly pro-Palestinian or anti-Israel, and the idea that his presence in the cabinet would substantially alter U.S. policy towards Israel stretches plausibility. Is it plausible that NORPAC, the ECI, etc. think otherwise?

If much of the opposition was driven by factors other than Israel, why choose to frame it in terms of Israel? Perhaps because campaigning on Israel was seen as more persuasive than campaigning on Iraq, which is deeply unpopular, or on opposition to defence cuts in a time of austerity. Or perhaps because framing it in terms of Israel could unite neoconservatives, radicalised Republicans and wealthy right-wing Jewish donors in the same campaign.

Or perhaps it really was about Israel. As with many case studies of the influence of the lobby, the result appears overdetermined, making it difficult to confidently isolate the role played by Israel lobby groups, and their agenda, from other, tightly overlapping interests.