This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, December 17th, 2012.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Former U.S. Senator Chuck Hagel is among a few front runners for the Secretary of Defense Post.

Chris Preble, Vice President for Defense and Foreign Policy Studies at the Cato Institute,

argues that Hagel would be an excellent choice.

We spoke today.

Chuck Hagel, it's often said that he was an opponent of the Iraq war. He eventually was an opponent of the Iraq War.

The speech he gave on the Iraq War resolution could have just as easily supported a

no vote.

He actually did vote in favor.

But within the course of a couple years you really saw his views

on Iraq evolve pretty dramatically and by the time 2006-2007 rolled around he'd become

one of the most vocal Republican critics of the war.

I think that's where he really started to catch our attention, but the fact is it goes much

deeper than that.

His conservative is his kind of pro-freedom

voting credentials are really quite good he's quite good on trade he was he was

quite good on on government regulations and taxes and things like that. It's all rather ironic that what

it takes for you to be labeled a Republican in name only is to be opposed to the Republican

Orthodoxy on foreign policy.

But you know, we've come a long way just in the time that I've been here and now the kinds of

positions that he was advocating almost by himself are now increasingly popular in the Republican Party,

...