Several weeks ago, Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel made headlines for saying about President Bush, "Before this is over, you might see calls for his impeachment."

Esquire did a fascinating piece on Hagel, and it quickly became clear that there's a lot more depth and substance behind that little soundbite.

I am not jumping on the "Hagel for Prez" bandwagon at this time and he hasn't even announced if he is running yet. But to me, there is something that is so important about having been in combat before you are given the authority to send our courageous soldiers to fight and die. Bush and Cheney, perhaps history's greatest Chickenhawks, simply don't fit the bill. Hagel served with valor in Vietnam; he and his brother had five Purple Hearts between them.

The Esquire piece was powerful; I would recommend reading the whole thing. If you don't have time, here are some of the best parts:

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[Hagel speaking to Condoleeza Rice]

"Some of us," Hagel says, "remember 1970, Madam Secretary, and that was Cambodia, and when our government lied to the American people and said, We didn't cross the border into Cambodia. In fact, we did. I happen to know something about that.

"I have to say, Madam Secretary, that I think this speech given last night by this president represents the most dangerous foreign-policy blunder in this country since Vietnam -- if it's carried out.

"I will resist it."

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[The article's author, Charles Pierce, on congress and the Bush Administration]

It was elected the previous November in large part out of revulsion against a war in Iraq that was built on fraud and that thereafter was prosecuted by an executive branch that seemed to combine the giddy certitude of a sociopath with the geopolitical acumen of the Marx Brothers. A whopping 18 percent of the country believed it to be a good idea to send more American troops there -- and just the night before, the president of the United States had announced that he would do exactly that and that, if need be, he might just have to send some troops into Iran and Syria in order to make his new plan work.

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[Pierce on Mitt Romney]

Governor Mitt Romney of Massachusetts has good looks and a thin resume, and he's stuck in the mud because he had to promise to treat gay people like human beings to get elected in Massachusetts, which isn't playing well in Jesusland.

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[Pierce on Hagel moving towards his brother Tom's negative view on Vietnam.]

Gradually, though, Chuck moved closer to Tom's view of Vietnam. It was the tapes that did it, the release of recordings of Lyndon Johnson's anguished phone calls to Richard Russell in which he tells Russell that he knows the war cannot be won. The calls were recorded two years before the Hagels went to Vietnam.

"To know that, and to continue to send kids into that meat grinder..." says Chuck Hagel, sitting in an office in a building named after Richard Russell, an office across the hall from the one out of which Lyndon Johnson once ran the Senate. It seems impolite to ask him, as his sentence fades away and he shakes the voices of Johnson and Russell out of his head, whether we are still talking completely about the past.

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[The last paragrpah of the article]

Chuck Hagel talks about the night his father died. In the dark, you can barely see his fingers move discreetly under his eyes, wiping away the tears. You can see the pain and loss there, beneath the scars and the bone and everything else that's been built on top of it, the essential archaeology of a man and his time. Any war's wounds are vast and gratuitous. None of its damage is ever collateral.

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