These days, Jonathan Gensler lives in Brooklyn and is in business developing solar energy projects. Exactly 10 years ago, he was getting ready to go to Iraq with the Fourth Infantry Division of the United States Army. He was 25, a lieutenant, not long out of West Point. Under him was a platoon of 30 men, all but two younger than he was.
“I couldn’t afford skepticism then,” Mr. Gensler said on Thursday. “My mind was occupied with how I am going to achieve the mission, get my men home safely, and advance America’s interest.
“But I certainly appreciated skepticism.”
As Mr. Gensler was speaking, former Senator Chuck Hagel was parked at the front of a hearing room in Washington, where he faced demands that he repent of his doubts about the wisdom of the Iraq invasion in 2003, and his opposition to a troop surge ordered by President George W. Bush in 2007.
Nominated by President Obama to be the secretary of defense, Mr. Hagel, a conservative Republican and Vietnam War veteran, reluctantly voted to approve the 2003 invasion, quickly came to see it as a blunder, and refused in 2007 to vote for the additional troops requested by President Bush.
Senator John McCain, who supported the escalation, demanded that Mr. Hagel answer yes or no: Had he been right or wrong? Mr. Hagel said he could not answer without elaborating, and he defended his criticism of the war effort.
“Our war in Iraq, I think, was the most fundamentally bad, dangerous decision since Vietnam,” Mr. Hagel said.
For a few minutes, the Hagel hearings became a kind of proxy trial for the Iraq war; as badly as its early years had gone, with no weapons of mass destruction discovered and anarchy reigning, it was important to Senator McCain that Mr. Hagel concede that folly had been redeemed by the surge. He said he might not support Mr. Hagel’s nomination because of what he saw as waffling on that point. “I think history has already made a judgment about the surge, sir, and you’re on the wrong side of it,” Senator McCain said.
Around New York, veterans of Iraq who were following the hearings saw Mr. Hagel’s skepticism about the war — and the surge — as vital qualities in a secretary of defense.
“I was a senior in college in 2005, in R.O.T.C., and I remember Dick Cheney saying that the insurgency was in its last throes,” said Matt Gallagher, who was an Army captain with a unit north of Baghdad. “Hagel wasn’t having it.”
In fact, the insurgency was entering a phase of scorching violence. Mr. Hagel said the administration was “disconnected from reality,” and challenged Mr. Cheney to explain why American casualties were climbing.
Mr. Gallagher, now in New York for graduate studies in creative writing, was sent to Iraq in 2007, during the United States surge. He and other veterans said that it coincided with the emergence of Sunni forces that changed the balance of power. “By the time I got there, it was pretty well recognized that the invasion had been a mistake, but it was up to us do the best we could — to push the country back from the brink of civil war,” Mr. Gallagher said. “The surge’s role is still being debated. Senator McCain is getting ahead of himself.”
Mr. Gensler, who was awarded a Bronze Star during his service, said Mr. Hagel’s “worries were very prescient.”
“They weren’t appreciated by the administration at the time,” he said. “Being willing to go against his party shows the character that we want in a secretary of defense.”
Walking down Eighth Avenue late Tuesday afternoon, Steve Maddox, 35, who went to Iraq in June 2007 with the Marines, said that Mr. Hagel’s experiences in Vietnam, where he was wounded twice, had made him aware of the costs of war and the need to support veterans. “I went to business school on the new G.I. bill,” said Mr. Maddox, now a strategist with Deloitte Consulting. “He said, ‘This is an investment, this is not a cost.’ ” That speaks volumes.
“There are people down in Washington who see conflict as open-ended. They’re saying, when do we get to Syria? When do we get to fight Iran?” Mr. Maddox said. “But Hagel wants to know, how are you getting these kids home? We just do not send men and women into harm’s way on an open-ended conflict.”
War teaches its lessons most directly to people who are in it. “Hagel has been there as an enlisted man,” Mr. Gallagher said. “Paraphrasing Douglas MacArthur, no one hates war like a soldier does. That’s the kind of sensibility Hagel would bring.”
