

Hagel word cloud

In “Why Hagel Laid Down,” Peter Beinart concedes that Obama/Chuck Hagel’s strategy of pulling in his horns and rolling over on any criticism of Israel in the confirmation hearing on Thursday has set back Beinart’s dream of attaining a two-state solution in the next four years with pressure from the U.S.

But if the aim of the hearings was also to begin building a case for Obama’s second term foreign policy—a foreign policy that brings military spending into balance with economic resources and aggressively pursues diplomacy with Iran, and maybe Israel and the Palestinians too—Hagel failed. And if he continues to fail as a foreign policy spokesman once confirmed, that second term agenda will be harder to achieve.

Yousef Munayyer offers a snapshot of the Hagel confirmation hearing Thursday, using computer technology to generate a “word cloud,” above, that assigns the visual weight to a word that it had in terms of its repetition in the transcript:

It’s clear that “Israel” stole the show. “Iran,” which was nearly as prevalent as “Israel,” was discussed as an issue intertwined with Israel and contextualized through the prism of Israeli interests. Now, let’s play a game. See if you can find the following words in the cloud. (Answers below – don’t cheat!) Afghanistan: Those living in the U.S. who follow mainstream media coverage may be unaware but this is a country in central Asia where the United States has been militarily involved longer than any other military campaign in its history; it also currently has about 70,000 troops troops there. There have been over 3,000 coalition deaths in Afghanistan, over 2,000 of which were American troops. Countless civilians have been killed or wounded during the fighting. China: Close to a billion and a half people live in this communist nation that also has several hundred nuclear weapons, borders several significant regional players (some of which it has had increasing tense relations with) and is the U.S.’s largest overseas trading partner. Drones: Perhaps the most controversial of President Obama’s national security policies has been the dramatic escalation in the use of unmanned drones to kill adversaries (including American citizens) and very often civilians. Pakistan: This country borders Afghanistan, is an unstable nuclear power, and has been the target of hundreds of American drone strikes leaving thousands dead, hundreds of which were civilians, including many children. Guantanamo: The location of a controversial American prison camp which the President first promised to close before later back-tracking. International Law: That set of rules and norms agreed upon by states that help govern inter-state relations and, perhaps most importantly, determine what is legal and illegal during war.

Jim Lobe echoes the analysis with his own numbers in, “It’s all about Israel”: