In Trying To Sink Hagel, GOP Takes Aim At Obama [View all]

[Purveyor]

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Republicans have found a boatload of reasons to try to sink Chuck Hagel's hopes of becoming the next defense secretary. But the issue they used this week to stall his nomination - the White House's handling of last September's deadly Benghazi attack - may seem entirely unrelated to Hagel's qualifications because, well, it is.

Here are some questions and answers about the connection between President Barack Obama's choice to lead the Pentagon and the campaign by Sen. John McCain and others in the Senate to press for more answers on Benghazi:

Q: How did the Hagel nomination become entangled with Benghazi?

A: The short answer is politics. Hagel had no role in the crisis that took the lives of four Americans, including Ambassador Chris Stevens. Neither did the Pentagon, although some have questioned why U.S. troops did not reach Libya until well after the crisis was over. The answer from Defense Secretary Leon Panetta is that the closest relevant U.S. forces could not get there before the killings; he has said the Pentagon could have acted sooner if it had received intelligence warnings in advance of the attack.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican who has joined McCain, R-Ariz., in temporarily blocking the Hagel nomination, does not claim a connection between the two issues. He asserts that Obama was inattentive when the Benghazi emergency was unfolding, and that by keeping a public focus on this the Benghazi experience could be a teaching tool for future presidents. Graham, in other words, is using Hagel as a political wedge to highlight what he sees as an exploitable Obama failure.

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