I disagree with your statement “Hagel is embracing a correct position on Iraq, but it is not based on his ideology and it tells us nothing about what Chuck Hagel believes about how government should work and what policies we should be deploying to make our country a better place.” The assumption you are making is that there is only one school of thought that can be called “conservative” and that Hagel is simply being a bit of an unorthodox conservative. The fact is, Hagel, Bush and Pat Buchanan are all “conservatives,” but they differ in their views in important ways because they hold to somewhat different sets of ideological assumptions. Since we like to flatten politics into a one-dimensional spectrum, and since the war is such a critical issue, this leads to a variety of characterizations of who is “moderate” and who is “conservative.”

A similar thing plays out amongst the Democrats regarding who is a “liberal” and who is a “moderate.”

Since I guess that I’m an outsider to the “movement,” I’ll end this comment with a friendly plea to everyone to consider Hagel. One key thing missing in both major political parties is genuine leadership, and Hagel has demonstrated such leadership on the most important issue of our day by being both a principled and courageous critic of the war.