The Tampa Bay Times reported on Friday that Sen. Marco Rubio’s (R-FL) will name Foreign Policy Initiative executive director Jamie Fly his new top foreign policy and national security adviser.

Rubio — considered to be a top contender for the Republican nomination for president in 2016 — “has worked to establish his credentials in foreign affairs,” the Times notes, “espousing a hawkish view as he sits on foreign relations and the intelligence committee.” Indeed, Fly’s addition to Rubio’s team would boost the Florida Republican’s hawkish credentials, as Fly is an ardent supporter of war with Iran.

In October, 2011, Fly declared that diplomacy with Iran had “failed” and three months later, writing in Foreign Affairs, Fly and AEI’s Gary Schmitt called for an extended bombing campaign to damage Iran’s nuclear program and set the scene for regime change, a result Fly and Schmitt themselves acknowledged only “might” happen:

Thanks to internal political developments and sanctions, the regime is at its weakest point in decades. But the international community is slowly exhausting the universe of palatable sanctions, and even the pressure brought to bear on Iran thus far has not caused it to halt its program. A limited strike against nuclear facilities would not lead to regime change. But a broader operation might. It would not even need to be a ground invasion aimed specifically at toppling the government.

The United States would basically need to expand its list of targets beyond the nuclear program to key command and control elements of the Republican Guard and the intelligence ministry, and facilities associated with other key government officials. The goal would be to compromise severely the government’s ability to control the Iranian population. This would require an extended campaign, but since even a limited strike would take days and Iran would strike back, it would be far better to design a military operation that has a greater chance of producing a satisfactory outcome.

A bipartisan expert report released last September concluded that in order to achieve regime change, “the occupation of Iran would require a commitment of resources and personnel greater than what the U.S. has expended over the past 10 years in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars combined.”

Moreover, Fly and Schmitt didn’t provide any specific evidence to support their theory that Iranians would both perceive an American attack favorably and use it as a pretext to overthrow the regime. In fact, experts and even Iranian activists have said that a U.S.-led attack would have the opposite effect and solidify the regime’s hold on power. And when asked about these potential flaws, Fly acknowledged that if ordinary Iranians perceived a U.S. strike as an attack on them, “it would be incredibly problematic in terms of what any follow on government and what their posture would be toward the United States or anyone else involved in this military operation.”

The Obama administration, on the other hand, is pursuing a duel approach of tough sanctions — which are having real impact — and diplomacy with Iran to end the nuclear standoff. ” I think that at this point in time, you know, all of us need to — to make clear that the first priority is to sit and negotiate,” Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said in an interview on Thursday. “The last option ought to be military action.”

But for Rubio’s new top foreign policy adviser, military action appears to be the first option. If Rubio does indeed decide to run for president in 2016, his choice of Fly to be his top adviser is further indication that the Republicans just can’t quit the neocons. (HT: Michael Cohen)

Speaking at an American Security Project event today, a group of former high-ranking military officers made clear that caution is required in discussing military possibilities for ending the crisis with Iran over its nuclear program.

Adm. James Fallon (ret.) and Lt. Gen. Frank Kearney (ret.) were led in a discussion by ASP CEO Brig. Gen. Stephen Cheney (ret.) on what they saw as the major costs and potential positives in launching military strikes against Iran. Both Fallon, the former head of U.S. Central Command, and Kearney, former Deputy Commander of Special Operations Command, signed onto a report by The Iran Project in September, outlining what those trade-offs would look like, using it as a launching board for the discussion.

Should a military option be required — an possibility considered to be on the table by all participants in the talk as well as the Obama administration — the panelists sought to make clear that despite a dominant U.S. superiority over Iran in pure military power, any attack on Iran would not be easy. Depending on the objective, the commitment of forces and material required would be substantial.

Even only delaying the progress of Iran by several years would be difficult, potentially taking several weeks of sustained fighting and potentially involving removing the threat of Iranian defenses. “Bottom line is it’s not gonna be a one-time shot,” Fallon said. If the objective is much larger, such as fully dismantling the Iranian nuclear program and fully guaranteeing a change in regime behavior, Kearney said that it would require ground forces in addition to air power, which would prompt, he said, “astronomical” costs.

Fallon said the largest problem in finding a solution to the stand-off between Iran and the West is a “trust deficit with a capital ‘D’.” That theme reemerged when responding to a question about potential verification programs that could form the basis of a negotiated solution. “It comes back to trust,” Fallon said, adding that while little to none exists today, “tamping down the rhetoric is a good place to start.”

Asked whether an attack would give Iran pretext to make the decision to develop a nuclear weapon, both agreed that it would be likely. According to Kearney, the Iranians believe the United States only wants regime change, prompting them to view any attack through that lens. “You have to expect, as a military planner, one of their reactions could be that they’ll sprint towards nuclear weapon capability or increase rhetoric that they will,” he said. That opinion squares with the view of several current and former Israeli officials, as well as U.S. intelligence, who have all determined that Iran has yet to decide to weaponize its program.

In hopes of preventing a situation where military options would be required, a team of negotiators from the International Atomic Energy Association is currently meeting with Iran in hopes of finding a breakthrough regarding new verification of the Iranian nuclear program’s peaceful nature. Likewise, Iran will be returning to the table in talks with the P5+1 group of international negotiators in late January. While the prospects for either set of talks leading to a huge shift in position from the parties, they will provide new life to a process that has lay dormant since June.

This morning, during an appearance on Fox News Sunday, Republican Senator and rising party star Kelly Ayotte (NH) cited Iranian propaganda in explaining her opposition to President Obama’s nomination of Chuck Hagel for Secretary of Defense.

“I have not made up my mind,” Ayotte began, before warning that Hagel has not expressed sufficient commitment to using military force against Iran if it develops nuclear weapons. She then pointed to Iranian propaganda, noting that the country “reacted favorably” to his nomination:

AYOTTE: Iran, this week, kind of reacted favorably somewhat. There were statements that were favorable to his nomination, in fact, they said they were hopeful that with his nomination, they hoped that we would change our policies. What I want to make sure is that Iran is actually not hopeful, but they are fearful as a result of our nominee from a Secretary of Defense perspective, because I think that will cause them to stop marching toward acquiring a nuclear weapon, not hope that we’ll change our policies, they need to change their policies.

On Tuesday, the Iranians responded to the Hagel nomination and used it to take a backhanded slap at the United States, saying, “We hope there will be practical changes in American foreign policy and that Washington becomes respectful of the rights of nations.” Unfortunately, neo-conservatives — desperate to derail Hagel — jumped on the propaganda from Iran’s foreign ministry to make their case.

Hagel has warned against the consequences of war with Iran, but has stated that his position is “fully consistent with the policy of presidents for more than a decade of keeping all options on the table, including the use of military force, thereby increasing pressure on Iran while working toward a political solution.” As a senator, Hagel also voted in favor of several rounds of targeted sanctions against Iran including packages in 1998, 2000, and 2006.

Former Republican senator Rick Santorum launched a campaign on Thursday to try to derail Chuck Hagel’s bid to become the next Secretary of Defense. Santorum — like many of his neocon allies — has problems with Hagel’s views on Iran and Israel. “[H]is confirmation would send a dangerous signal to Iran,” a fundraising letter from Santorum’s group Patriot Voices reads, adding that Hagel “disrespects” Israel.

The well-worn Hagel-hates-Israel-and-loves-Iran charges the neocons have been floating for a month now have been thoroughly discredited, so in the case of Santorum’s anti-Hagel campaign, it’s perhaps more beneficial to note the baseline point of view from where Santorum’s Hagel attacks are rooted. It’s Santorum who is out of the mainstream on these issues. Take a look:

IRAN

The bomb Iran “plan.” One year ago on NBC’s Meet the Press, Santorum said that if he became president, he’d demand that the Iranians open up all of their suspected nuclear program facilities or face “air strikes.” “You would order air strikes…?” host David Gregory asked. “Yes, that’s the plan,” Santorum replied.

Starting a war is preventing a war. This is how the Pennsylvania Republican justified his “plan” to attack Iran: “We’re trying to prevent a war.” He later said that bombing Iran won’t “start a war.”

Iran will use nuclear weapons. Santorum advanced the popular “martyr state myth” that Iran is incapable of engaging in diplomacy and hell-bent on acquiring nuclear weapons so it can actually use them. “They’re a theocracy that has deeply embedded beliefs that — that the afterlife is better than this life” he said. “It is, in fact, an encouragement for them to use their nuclear weapon.”

Kill Iranian nuclear scientists? “[N]uclear scientists who work on that program…are enemy combatants similar to the Taliban and al-Qaeda,” Santorum said on the campaign trail in November, 2011.

Obama wants Iran to get nukes? Santorum floated a conspiracy theory that President Obama wanted allow Iran to get nuclear weapons in exchange for access to Iran’s oil.

ISRAELI-PALESTINIAN CONFLICT

One state solution? In November, 2011, Sanotrum said, “all the people who live in the West Bank are Israelis, they’re not Palestinians,” a position that effectively negates the two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a plan that the mainstream in both the United States and Israel support.

Recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. Santorum attacked both Obama and Mitt Romney for refusing to call Jerusalem the capital of Israel. The U.S. does not recognize Jerusalem as the capital, a policy “that dates back to pre-1948, and has been followed by every U.S. Administration since, regardless of the President or party in the White House.” Officially doing so, as one top expert noted, “would be following Israel into abject isolation, and the United States into an weakened and marginal regional and global role.”

Americans don’t agree with Santorum’s positions on Iran and the Israeli-Palestinain conflict and as such, there’s no reason why they should give any credibility to his attacks on Hagel regarding these issues.

“Americans are broadly supportive of diplomacy as the most important tool in the U.S. national security toolbox, and exceedingly wary of more costly and unnecessary military interventions,” CAP’s Matt Duss wrote this week, adding, “The fact of the matter is, here in the future of 2013, it’s Hagel’s hawkish critics who are out of the mainstream.”

U.S. officials believe a series of cyberattacks striking major banks including Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, U.S. Bancorp, PNC, Capital One, Fifth Third Bank, BB&T and HSBC were the work of the Iranian government, potentially escalating the already tense cybersecurity standoff between the two nations. The type of attack used, a distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS) is relatively harmless — it disrupts access to services rather than stealing money or personal info — but the tactics used by the hackers raise concerns about the security challenges caused by our reliance on the so-called “cloud” storage and security of the data centers it relies on, the New York Times reports:

“Researchers at Radware who investigated the attacks for several banks found that the traffic was coming from data centers around the world. They discovered that various cloud services and public Web hosting services had been infected with a particularly sophisticated form of malware, called Itsoknoproblembro, that was designed to evade detection by antivirus programs. The malware has existed for years, but the banking attacks were the first time it used data centers to attack external victims…

By infecting data centers instead of computers, the hackers obtained the computing power to mount enormous denial of service attacks. One of the banks had 40 gigabits of Internet capacity, Mr. Herberger said, a huge amount when you consider that a midsize business may only have one gigabit. But some banks were hit with a sustained flood of traffic that peaked at 70 gigabits.”

The way your typical DDoS attack works in the recent years is pretty straightforward: A hacker leverages a botnet, a collection of computers connected over the internet whose control has been ceded to a third party by security breaches, to take down a site by overwhelming with too many requests to handle at once. The botnets can be a few hundred computers, or a few million, but are almost exclusively used for nefarious means. In this case the hackers applied that same botnet structure to a network of compromised data centers, dramatically increasing the force.

And as we increase our use of cloud storage and data centers the potential force available from this source is on the rise: Global data center IP traffic is expected to nearly quadruple over the next five years to 6.6 zettabytes annually. For reference, a zettabyte is equal to one billion terabytes.

Ultimately, this should be a wake up call to the security professionals whose data centers were used to perpetrate these cyberattacks: While we often think of security in the cloud as about safeguarding corporate secrets or your personal digital life, if you’re not properly securing your networks it’s not just the safety of your network at risk, it’s the safety of everyone your network could be used against.

An Israeli think tank on Wednesday vigorously defended Chuck Hagel against right-wing smears that he is anti-Israel, anti-Semitic and weak on Iran.

Molad, the Center for the Renewal of Israeli Democracy, wrote in a report released today that Hagel’s nomination as the next Defense Secretary should not have anything to do with Israel, but the fact that Israel’s “self-anointed supporters” dragged the Jewish state into the debate, the group felt compelled to respond:

Senator Chuck Hagel’s nomination as Secretary of Defense is an internal American matter and, as such, should not involve Israel. In fact, the insertion of Israel into American political debates, often by its self-anointed supporters, does Israel a great disservice. Making it a partisan wedge or a hindrance on American interests harms Israel’s long-term interests. Having been dragged into the debate, Israelis deserve a truthful picture of Hagel’s views and his record, not the caricature painted by right-wing propagandists.

A candid inspection of the Senator’s record leaves no doubt about his support for Israel and his commitment to its security. Chuck Hagel is responsible, knowledgeable, and courageous when it comes to Middle East policy. Presenting his independence and refusal to toe the radical right’s party line as anti-Israel is demagoguery that serves neither the United States nor Israel.

The report pushes back, point-by-point, many of the neocons’ baseless charges against Hagel and concludes: “After examining his record on Israel, his credibility on national security, and his understanding of the region, we believe that those who have Israel’s real interest at heart should applaud his nomination for US Secretary of Defense.”

The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) distanced itself from a senior fellow’s claim on Monday that former Republican senator Chuck Hagel, President Obama’s choice as the next Defense Secretary, is anti-Semitic and doesn’t like Jews.

Elliott Abrams, a former Bush administration official who was convicted of charges related to the Iran-Contra scandal, said on NPR on Monday that Hagel “seems to have some kind of problem with Jews.”

A CFR official told Al-Monitor’s Laura Rozen that Abrams’ views do not represent the organization. “The Council on Foreign Relations takes no institutional position on matters of policy,” CFR’s vice president for global communications and media relations Lisa Shields said. “The views expressed by our more than seventy experts, who reflect a broad range of backgrounds and perspectives, are theirs only.”

NPR listeners wrote in to complain about Abrams’ comments, some of which were read on the network’s All Things Considered program on Tuesday:

HOST AUDIE CORNISH: John Shrauger of Venice, Florida writes: Mr. Abrams did not convince me that Chuck Hagel is anti-Semitic, but he did convince me that anyone who is not unequivocally supportive of Israel’s policies still risks being labeled as anti-Semitic. What seems to be clear about Mr. Hagel is that he has the courage to stand up to some of the most powerful lobbies in Washington: the defense contracting lobby as well as the right-wing pro-Israel lobby.

HOST MELISSA BLOCK: And many of you thought we should have told you more about Elliot Abrams’ background. Derek Goldman of Missoula, Montana was among those who wrote to say we should have told listeners that Abrams pleaded guilty to withholding information from Congress in the Iran-Contra investigation. He writes: This information should have been highly important to the story, given the excessive strength of Mr. Abrams’ criticism of Senator Hagel.

Listen to the clip here:

A former Israeli diplomat said this week that the right-wing claims that Hagel is anti-Semitic and anti-Israel are “total and utter nonsense.” “I think that those going after his record are after President Obama rather than after Senator Hagel. And I think these attacks are vile, vicious, ugly and unfounded,” he said.

The neocon smear machine failed to prevent Chuck Hagel’s nomination as the next Secretary of Defense as President Obama announced on Monday that the former GOP senator is his choice to succeed Leon Panetta at the Pentagon. Fresh off their defeat, it seems like the neocons are getting desperate in their efforts to derail Hagel’s bid.

The Iranians today responded to the Hagel nomination and used it to take a backhanded slap at the United States: “We hope there will be practical changes in American foreign policy and that Washington becomes respectful of the rights of nations,” the Iranian foreign ministry spokesperson said.

“Hagel nomination cheers Iran, worries Israel” a CBS headline to the story read, and with that, the neocons gleefully promoted Iran’s participation:

CBS: ‘Hagel Nomination Cheers Iran, Worries Israel’: CBS reports: bit.ly/WsZLIn

— weeklystandard (@weeklystandard) January 8, 2013

Hagel nomination cheers Iran, worries Israel cbsnews.com/8301-202_162-5… via @cbsnews

— Keep America Safe (@KeepAmericaSafe) January 8, 2013

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), who was previously Hagel’s best friend in the Senate but now has concerns about his nomination, tweeted out the the story as well, which AEI’s Danielle Pletka retweeted.

And if that CBS headline sounds a bit misleading, it is. The one worried Israeli the story quoted was a right-wing Likud Party member. In another piece on what Israelis think of the Hagel pick, Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon said of the Nebraska Republican: “I have met him many times, and he certainly regards Israel as a true and natural U.S. ally.”

The first question we have is: who cares what Iran thinks about Chuck Hagel? But it’s sad the neocons have become so desperate in their anti-Hagel smear campaign that they’re now promoting anti-American propaganda from Iran’s foreign ministry to make their case.

President Barack Obama announced today that he has nominated his top counterterrorism adviser John Brennan as the next CIA director and former Republican senator from Nebraska Chuck Hagel for the position of Secretary of Defense, ignoring weeks of neoconservative criticism of Hagel’s record.

“Chuck Hagel is the leader that our troops deserve,” Obama said in the East Room of the White House during the announcement. “He is a champion of our troops, and our values, and our military families.” Outgoing Secretary Leon Panetta said that Hagel is “a patriot, a decorated combat veteran…and I believe his experience and judgment makes him an excellent choice for Secretary of Defense.”

In taking over at the Pentagon from Secretary Panetta, Hagel is tasked with implementing a time of change that began in Obama’s first term. Hagel — who served in the Senate from 1997 to 2009 — was an early supporter of the Iraq War, but quickly became an extremely vocal thorn in the side of the Bush administration as an outspoken critic of the war’s prosecution. That war has now ended under President Obama, with the war in Afghanistan due to come to a close during Hagel’s service in Obama’s Cabinet.

Despite his credentials, and the strong likelihood that he will be confirmed, the path to the Pentagon will be one littered with false attacks and cheap shots that ignore the nuance of Hagel’s past statements. The smear machine has been gearing up for weeks as President Obama weighed his final decision and the White House sent out trial balloons. In response, an avalanche of bipartisan and high-level support has come out in defense of Hagel’s strong record, a few selections of which are listed here:

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