Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel’s tenure was over, in some ways, before it began. The doubts that hounded him out of office on Monday surfaced for the first time during Hagel’s lackluster and often unconvincing appearances at the Senate Armed Services Committee hearings that preceded his appointment. Given that Hagel’s harsh questioning was mainly driven by right-wing opposition to his supposedly anti-Israel views, it is no small irony that the Israeli defense establishment, with which Hagel maintained excellent ties, may be the most sorry to see him go.

The hesitancy and lack of rhetorical skills that were on display at Hagel’s hearings in late 2012 elicited dismay in the White House, at the Pentagon and among senior Democratic senators. His appointment was ultimately approved by virtue of a partisan showdown between the Democratic majority and the Republican minority, but doubts lingered. When America’s geopolitical situation changed for the worse, the initial skepticism came back to haunt him.

Hagel’s ability to manage the defense establishment at a time of deep budget cuts was a matter of open debate in Washington, but there was not much argument about his deficiencies in “selling” himself or his policies to the entrenched bureaucracy at the Defense Department, to the hyper-partisan advisers at the White House, to the top brass and the Joint Chiefs of Staffs or to an American public increasingly agitated by world events. One of the main lessons for the Democrats following their humiliating drubbing in the recent elections was Obama’s almost inexplicable failure to sell his policies to the U.S. public: Hagel, by this criterion, simply had to go.

Hagel was brought in to withdraw American forces from Iraq and Afghanistan at a time of severe budgetary cuts, but reality in the Middle East and elsewhere had other plans. Rightly or wrongly, through its own fault or that of others, the Pentagon has been perceived in recent months as being caught flat-footed by the rampage of Islamic State in Iraq, the survival of Bashar Assad in Syria, the resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan, the belligerency of Vladimir Putin in Ukraine and more. Under these circumstances, the credibility of America’s veiled threat that “all options are on the table” against Iran also took a serious hit.

Read the article in full at Haaretz.