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Two items from Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb) today....

First, via ThinkProgress, there's this from an interview in GQ. Hagel is discussing the 2002 Authorization for the Use of Military Force. Apparently the White House didn't want to confine itself to Iraq. They wanted the AUMF to cover the entire Middle East.

GQ: Do you wish you’d voted differently in October of 2002, when Congress had a chance to authorize or not authorize the invasion?

HAGEL: Have you read that resolution?

GQ: I have.

HAGEL: It’s not quite the way it’s been framed by a lot of people, as a resolution to go to war. That’s not quite what the resolution said.

GQ: It said, “to authorize the use of United States Armed Forces against Iraq.”

HAGEL: In the event that all other options failed. So it’s not as simple as “I voted for the war.” That wasn’t the resolution.

GQ: But there was a decision whether to grant the president that authority or not.

HAGEL: Exactly right. And if you recall, the White House had announced that they didn’t need that authority from Congress.

GQ: Which they seem to say about a lot of things.

That’s right. Mr. [Alberto] Gonzales was the president’s counsel at that time, and he wrote a memo to the president saying, “You have all the powers that you need.” So I called Andy Card, who was then the chief of staff, and said, “Andy, I don’t think you have a shred of ground to stand on, but more to the point, why would a president seriously consider taking a nation to war without Congress being with him?” So a few of us—Joe Biden, Dick Lugar, and I—were invited into discussions with the White House.

GQ: It’s incredible that you had to ask for that.

HAGEL: It is incredible. That’s what I said to Andy Card. Said it to Powell, said it to Rice. Might have even said it to the president. And finally, begrudgingly, they sent over a resolution for Congress to approve. Well, it was astounding. It said they could go anywhere in the region.

GQ: It wasn’t specific to Iraq?

HAGEL: Oh no. It said the whole region! They could go into Greece or anywhere. Is central Asia in the region? I suppose! Sure as hell it was clear they meant the whole Middle East. It was anything. It was literally anything. No boundaries. No restrictions.

GQ: They expected Congress to let them start a war anywhere in the Middle East?

HAGEL: Yes. Yes. Wide open. We had to rewrite it. Joe Biden, Dick Lugar, and I stripped the language that the White House had set up and put our language in it.

GQ: But that should also have triggered alarm bells about what they really wanted to do.

HAGEL: Well, it did. I’m not defending our votes; I’m just giving a little history of how this happened. You have to remember the context of when that resolution was passed. This was about a year after September 11. The country was still truly off balance. So the president comes out talking about “weapons of mass destruction” that this “madman dictator” Saddam Hussein has, and “our intelligence shows he’s got it,” and “he’s capable of weaponizing,” and so on.

GQ: And producing a National Intelligence Estimate that turned out to be doctored.

HAGEL: Oh yeah. All this stuff was doctored. Absolutely. But that’s what we were presented with. And I’m not dismissing our responsibility to look into the thing, because there were senators who said, “I don’t believe them.”

If and when the administration makes the case that it already has sufficient legal authority to intervene in Iran, this is worth keeping in mind. The Congress considered and rejected a broad presidential mandate, opting instead to grant him a much more narrow authorization. What Congress explicitly refuses to authorize is just as important as what it passes.

Second, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee began meeting this morning to consider how best to respond to the President's plan for escalation. As one of the co-sponsors of the non-binding resoultion opposing the president's plan, Hagel spoke forcefully about the need for congress to act. Via Carpetbagger, a taste:

“We’d better be damned sure we know what we’re doing, all of us, before we put 22,000 more Americans into that grinder,” Hagel said in an impassioned speech in a Foreign Relations Committee hearing. “We better be as sure as you can be, and I want every one of you — every one of us 100 senators to look in that camera and you tell your people back home what you think. Don’t hide anymore. None of us.”

Hagel also responded to fellow GOP committee member Richard Lugar who claimed the passing of Hagel’s resolution would likely send a show disunity between Congress and the president and show the nation’s enemies that “we are divided and in disarray.”

“We fail our country if we don’t debate this — if we don’t debate this we are not worthy of our country,” Hagel said. “We fail our country.”

“Stop the impugning of people’s motives,” Hagel added. “Stop the political stuff — all of us. All of us. This is much bigger than that. And if we’re not adult enough to understand that, we will loose the confidence of the American public. That’s what’s happened right now.”

Thank god these people - at least some of them, anyway - are finally coming to their senses.

Also worth watching today... Obama and Webb are both on the Foreign Relations Committee. It should be interesting to see what they have to say.