Little news on the Chuck Hagel front. One friend says he’s hoping for Obama to announce his nomination to be Defense Secretary tomorrow. But who knows. Some developments on the mighty power struggle that is the Hagel balloon:

Outgoing congressman Barney Frank “strongly” opposes Chuck Hagel becoming Defense Secretary in the Huffington Post:

Outgoing Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) announced on Monday that he “strongly opposes” the potential nomination of Chuck Hagel as Defense Secretary, due to anti-gay comments the former Republican senator from Nebraska once made.

MJ Rosenberg is cynical: “Barney Frank opposes Hagel. Big surprise. Never deviated from lobby on anything.” Rosenberg says all the Hagel homophobia attacks are cover for Israel. He parodies them:

Alan Dershowitz opposes Hagel: As a law prof, I will not tolerate his views on Marbury v. Madison. He must not be Secretary of Defense. AIPAC working round the clock to stop Hagel. “Gay rights has always been our top priority. Our first loyalty, even.”

[Update: But two weeks ago in Politico, Frank had a different line:

[Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), who is Jewish, said he did not object to what has become one big point of contention about Hagel: an allusion to the “Jewish lobby,” in reference to advocates for Israel in Congress and elsewhere. “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with having Portuguese lobbies, Jewish lobbies, Greek lobbies,” Frank said. “I think he’d be very good. … You need someone intelligent to help cut that budget.”

[“That was 12 days ago,” says Robert Naiman of Just Foreign Policy. “What, exactly, changed about Hagel’s 1998 remarks in the last twelve

days to make them more egregious? What changed about his voting record in Congress in the last twelve days to make it more egregious?”]

Other legislators: Oklahoma Republican Senator Coburn has come out against Hagel, citing “statements” he’s made, while Illinois Senator Dick Durbin seems open to a nomination.

Meantime, Rightweb, which maintains dossiers on militarists in foreign policy, has just posted new profiles of Hagel’s purported rivals Ashton Carter and Michele Flournoy. They are both neocon-friendly; the dossiers remind us that neoconservatism is deeply engrained in the D.C. establishment, including Chez Obama.

The profile of Carter makes him out to be an Iran hawk with deep ties to the defense industry. “Carter has been adamant in his insistence that the United States consider the use of force in its efforts to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons programs.”

He was part of a 2008 report on Iran, coauthored by a bunch of neoconservatives, that Jim Lobe characterized as a “roadmap to war.” Notice the coauthors from the neoconservative Hudson Institute and American Enterprise Institute, and Dennis Ross, too:

Carter was one of several future Obama appointees who served on a Michael Makovsky-ledteam that approved a controversial report on Iran published by the Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC). A lead drafter of the report—titled “Meeting the Challenge: U.S. Policy Toward Iranian Nuclear Development”—was the American Enterprise Institute fellow Michael Rubin, an outspoken proponent of militarist U.S. policies in the Middle East. Other participants included Henry Sokolski; WINEP scholar and Obama adviser Dennis Ross; Stephen Rademaker, the husband of AEI’s Danielle Pletka who worked under John Bolton in the State Department; and Kenneth Weinstein, CEO of the Hudson Institute.[12] The report argued that despite Iran’s assurances to the contrary, its nuclear program aims to develop nuclear weapons and is thus a threat to “U.S. and global security, regional stability, and the international nonproliferation regime,”[13] a conclusion that contrasted sharply with the CIA’s November 2007 National Intelligence Estimate, which found that Iran had put its efforts to develop nuclear warheads on hold.[14] The report stated, “As a new president prepares to occupy the Oval Office, the Islamic Republic’s defiance of its Non-Proliferation Treaty safeguards obligations and United Nations Security Council resolutions will be among the greatest foreign policy and national security challenges confronting the nation.” In contrast to many realist assessments of the situation, the report contended that “Cold War deterrence” is not persuasive in the context of Iran’s program, due in large measure to the “Islamic Republic’s extremist ideology.” Thus, even a peaceful uranium enrichment program would place the entire Middle East region “under a cloud of ambiguity given uncertain Iranian capacities and intentions.”[15]

The profile of Michele Flournoy at rightweb says she is the darling of the neoconservatives and liberal interventionists. Notably, in 2003 she was a contributor to a study by the Progressive Policy Institute that mirrored the militarist projections of the neoconservative Project for the New American Century. “Like the Cold War, the struggle we face today is likely to last not years but decades.” PPI is home to Josh Block, the tireless Israel lobbyist first at AIPAC now at the Israel Project (who seeks to smear Hagel supporters as anti-Semites; “who’s next, Cynthia McKinney’s father”– a reference to a claim that Jews defeated McKinney in congressional race in 2006). Here’s a portion of the Flournoy report– notice that we are married to Israel, notice that she was far more militant than Hagel, who argued for negotiation, in speaking to the Atlantic Council: