I’ll just quote the NRSC’s spin:

Before she was appointed to the Senate by Governor Paterson, Gillibrand broke with fellow Democrats in the House and voted with Republicans in supporting the war in Iraq. On May 24, 2007, for example, Gillibrand joined with Republicans in voting against the Democrat leadership for a bill to provide funding for U.S. efforts in Iraq without setting withdrawal deadlines for troops. In fact, of the five freshman Democrat Members of Congress from New York in 2007, Gillibrand was the only one to vote YES.

The following year, Gillibrand also continued her support for funding the war in Iraq and on June 19, 2008, she once again broke with the Democrat leadership and joined with Republicans in helping to pass another Iraq funding measure.

What’s even more notable about both votes to fund the war in Iraq? In both cases, Kirsten Gillibrand was the ONLY Democrat in the New York congressional delegation to vote with the Republicans in support of the war. In fact, Gillibrand’s votes in support of the Iraq war took place a full three years after Dan Senor left his position as CPA spokesman.

Let’s just revisit the history here. For nearly four years, the United States pursued a strategy in Iraq that, everyone now realizes, was a disaster. Senor was part of the Bush administration and helped spin that strategy. After the 2006 midterm elections that sent Gillibrand to Congress, the Bush administration reshuffled its cards and launched the surge. Gillibrand — as the NRSC admits — bucked most Democrats and supported that strategy. So the strategy is to … attack her for supporting the tactics that worked? A bold prediction: This will not scare Gillibrand off of attacks on Senor’s resume.

An adviser to Spencer Abraham of Michigan when Mr. Abraham was a senator, he has rotated in and out of government over the last two decades. He worked briefly at the politically connected Carlyle Group, a private equity firm in Washington. After the American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, he became the civilian face of the coalition government, as policy adviser to the government and chief spokesman for L. Paul Bremer III, the top American administrator in Iraq.

Ben Smith runs down the reasons why team Gillibrand isn’t broadcasting a lot of fear about this bid — a neoconservative hedge fund manager has, you could say, some potential vulnerabilities in a heavily Democratic state.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Gen. Stanley McChrystal (WDCpix, Oscar Matatquin/ZUMA Press)

[GOP1]Over two days of hearings with Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, and Gen. David Petraeus, the commander of CentCom, Republican members of Congress settled on a common line of questioning. Did the general have everything he needed to win? Did he have everything he asked for? Was President Barack Obama’s proposed July 2011 deadline for the beginning of a troop withdrawal feasible?

“I have heard that your request of the president was anywhere from 10,000 to 80,000 additional troops,”said Rep. Buck McKeon (R-Calif.), during the morning hearings on the House side. “We have not been given your request. All we’ve had to go on is what we’ve heard.”

The afternoon’s questioning in the Senate took on the same tone. “We’ve announced a date divorced from conditions on the ground when we will start to withdraw our troops,” said Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), kicking off his party’s line of questioning. “It doesn’t matter whether we call it a cliff or a ramp or anything else. It’s still an exit sign, and it sends the wrong signal to our friends and our enemies.” Over the course of a long day, McChrystal reiterated his support for the president’s decision, but Republicans got statements on the record about the malleable nature of the proposed July 2011 and cast some doubt on whether the general was getting everything he needed. For the conservative military analysts who’d spent the year consolidating unconditional Republican support for the war, it was a mixed success.

As the Obama administration closes its first year, Republicans have staked out a combative position on the issue that gives the president the most trouble with his restive liberal base. Beginning in March, Republicans and foreign policy hawks whose influence had waned at the end of George W. Bush’s presidency began to argue that the opposition party’s role in Afghanistan policy would be to argue for a sustained commitment. In the summer and fall, as Republicans saw more political openings against the president, they balanced criticism of his approach with avowed support for a troop increase. As Gen. McChrystal departs Washington, Republicans and conservative military analysts are confident that they’ve played a role in the president’s decision and set themselves up for the debate to come.

“Things are going pretty well right now because the Obama administration realized that the American people want McCrystal to make these decisions,” Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) told TWI. Referring to the role Republicans have played in challenging the Obama administration not to back down from a troop surge, Inhofe added that “a lot of that’s our doing.”

Quietly, other Republicans share Inhofe’s opinion. “I think the criticism had the effect of keeping pressure on, and keeping people focused on Afghanistan,” said one GOP aide in the Senate. “Now we’re focused on the success of the strategy. Politically, as far as we’re concerned, the past is the past.”

According to a Quinnipiac University poll released on Tuesday, Republican voters are, as they have been, the strongest supporters of the war in Afghanistan. Seventy-one percent of them say that fighting the war is the “right thing.” However, only 36 percent say they support President Obama’s handling of the war. That’s more support than the president gets from Republicans on other issues–only 21 percent support his foreign policy in general.

The Republican approach to Afghanistan was telegraphed at the start of the year, most publicly with the launch of the Foreign Policy Initiative–a PR-savvy think tank led by Weekly Standard editor-in-chief Bill Kristol, scholar and surge architect Frederick Kagan, and former Defense Department spokesman Dan Senor. The March 30 launch of the new think tank was a festival of praise for President Obama–he made, according to Kagan, a “gutsy and correct” decision in sending 10,000 more troops to Afghanistan in February. The think tank’s goal, said Kagan, was the formation of “a consensus to commit to Afghanistan.”

According to Jamie Fly, the executive director of FPI, the consensus held then and is holding now, especially among Republicans. “On the Hill, a lot of what we do, laying out what the case should be on foreign policy–a lot of our messaging is followed quite avidly,” said Fly. “The hope is that people there will be less likely to be critical of the policy if we’re not critical of the policy.”

Between March and this week, however, the Republican approach to Afghanistan was limned with criticism of President Obama. At McChrystal’s confirmation hearing in June, Republicans voiced support for his strategy in Afghanistan and then moved onto other issues, such as U.S. relations with Colombia and the securing of loose nuclear weapons. Weeks later, on Meet the Press, McCain framed the strategy in Afghanistan as McChrystal’s to run as Congress and the White House gave him what he needed.

“General McChrystal may say we need more troops,” said McCain. “Let’s tell the American people how tough it is. Let’s tell them what’s at stake. And I want to work with the president and make sure we win this thing.”

In September, after the news that McChrystal had submitted a report on Afghanistan that asked for more troops, the Republican argument took on a harder edge. The president’s deliberation over an Afghanistan strategy, said former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton, was a “slow-motion trainwreck.” In the most widely-circulated criticism, former Vice President Dick Cheney accused the White House of “dithering” over whether or not to send more troops, a charge that reporters latched onto in the month between that comment and the president’s announcement.

The most quietly influential criticism of the White House, however, may have been FPI’s September 7 letter, signed by Sarah Palin and other Republican influentials, urging the president–with some sarcastic language that recalled the 2006 report of the Iraq Study Group–to “fully resource this effort” and “do everything possible to minimize the risk of failure.” This, according to strategists, helped inform months of Republican criticism that was critical of the policy without becoming overly partisan. Cheney’s “dithering” attack, said Fly, was a rare (if influential) “wavering” of rock-solid conservative support for the president on Afghanistan.

Since the president’s announcement of the 30,000 troop surge, Republicans have refined their criticism to the areas that came up in this week’s hearings while pledging support for the policy overall. The only visible break from the GOP’s Afghanistan stance came when Rep. Josh Chaffetz (R-Utah), a freshman from Utah, proposed bringing the troops home at a high-profile speech in his home state. Chaffetz’s argument, however, was perfectly in line with Republican criticism of Obama’s decision-making process and of the over-arching argument that the president wasn’t listening to generals. “We can win any war but only with the president’s full commitment to the mission,” Chaffetz wrote in a December 8 op-ed explaining his stance. “Absent such a commitment, our presence in Afghanistan does nothing more than endanger our troops, compromise our readiness, and waste our money.”

The rest of the GOP, with no time for a “bring the troops home” message, have found their footing in critical questions about the policy. On Tuesday, Inhofe prodded McChrystal to agree that the July 2011 timeline is tied to “the conditions on the ground” and “not a calendar decision.” James Cay Carafano, a military analyst at the Heritage Foundation, told TWI that Republicans needed to do more to “get it on the record that this is a risky strategy,” to find out whether the White House passed on a recommendation for more troops, and to undermine the idea that America could leave Iraq before the job is done.

“If things go well, no one’s going to care about the deadline,” said Carafano. “A couple people from Code Pink will run around and nobody else will give a damn.”

Republican messaging on the decision is still in the early stages. Rep. Doug Lamborn, a conservative House Republican from Colorado, answered Obama with a statement praising the decision but hitting the president on two issues — floating a possible start to withdrawal in 2011 and having the audacity to talk about how the war must be honestly funded. “This President has shown no fiscal restraint whatsoever for the past year and now he is pushing for an unaffordable healthcare scheme,” said Lamborn. “His concern for the costs of this war seems insincere at best.”

“Dennis is much more of the view that you cannot solve major problems in the region without dealing with Iran. It’s Iran first, it’s not the Palestinians first,” said Dan Senor, a former chief spokesman for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, who also suggested that Ross would quickly trump other Obama advisors.

“He’s going to become the de facto National Security Advisor because of the portfolio he has, because of the experience he has, and because of the relationships he’s accumulated abroad,” he said. “[George] Mitchell is marginalized because Dennis has Mitchell’s portfolio – only he’s closer to the center of decision making.”

I’m still laughing at the bald-faced assertions that Senor made here. He clearly has no respect for Ben — who treats the quote with appropriate and subtle skepticism — if he thought Ben would publish that at face value. Instead, Ben quotes an unnamed administration source, who says about the administration’s less-hawkish special envoy for the Mideast peace process, George Mitchell, “Mitchell’s much closer to the president on the subject matter than Dennis is.”

But it’s the meta-point that gets me laughing. It’s amazing how Dan Senor would presume to have any idea at all how the Obama White House’s national security apparatus actually works. But so much of what it means to be a Washington player is the assertion of casual knowledge and authority, even when it flies in the face of common sense. As a key figure in the latest neoconservative reputation-rehabilitation vehicle, Senor is executing a slight of hand here, conflating what he’d like to be true with what he thinks is true, as a method of advancing his preferred outcome by a bit of positive thinking in public. Harry Frankfurt wrote a good book about this.

Now, Senor’s approach may not have worked too well in Iraq, but there are some structural journalistic factors at play here that he’s evidently gaming out. Editors need reporters to write pieces explaining events. For a piece like this, we seek outside-the-administration sources to contextualize developments, and sometimes, those sources will attempt to inflate their reputations by throwing in some statements intimating that they have inside knowledge that they’re not actually in a position to possess. Good reporters, like Ben, brush them aside. But they make such bald-faced assertions because they figure they can get away with them, and then more reporters will call them to quote them as a font of insider wisdom and the whole thing snowballs until they’re perceived as the sages they perceive themselves to be. The appropriate response to this game is ridicule. Especially when it’s played by someone who was the spokesman for one of the greatest unforced errors in the history of American foreign policy.

Two West Wing stars, Martin Sheen and Brad Whitford, happened to be walking through the hotel as attendees rolled in. That got a few people at the registration table whispering, but not quite as much as the arrival, right before the panel, of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby. He slowly made his way into the room, talking with well-wishers, getting updates on how their families were doing.

• continued U.S. engagement–diplomatic, economic, and military—in the world and rejection of policies that would lead us down the path to isolationism;
• robust support for America’s democratic allies and opposition to rogue regimes that threaten American interests;
• the human rights of those oppressed by their governments, and U.S. leadership in working to spread political and economic freedom;
• a strong military with the defense budget needed to ensure that America is ready to confront the threats of the 21st century;
• international economic engagement as a key element of U.S. foreign policy in this time of great economic dislocation.

Matt Duss giggles:

On March 31, FPI holds its first public event, Afghanistan: Planning For Success, though, given the heavy representation of Iraq war advocates, I think a far better title would be Afghanistan: Dealing With The Huge Problems Created By Many Of The People On This Very Stage. The broad consensus among national security analysts and aid officials is that the diversion of troops and resources toward Iraq beginning in 2002 was one of the main reasons the Taliban and Al Qaeda were able to to re-establish themselves in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border areas, facilitating the collapse of the country back into insurgent warfare. Having failed to complete the mission in Afghanistan, Bush and the Iraq hawks handed the Obama administration a war that promises to be as difficult and costly as Iraq has been -– if not more. It’s deeply absurd that some of the people most responsible for the crisis in Afghanistan would now presume to tell us how to deal with it.

What the FPI crew might want to ask itself is why the counterinsurgents went to work for the (Democratic-aligned-but-they-don’t-like-when-I-write-that) Center for a New American Security instead of the American Enterprise Institute and other hotbeds of neoconservatism after the neocons went all-out promoting the surge. I won’t hold my breath waiting for weighty introspection about what went wrong during the Bush years from these guys — if I want that, I read Shadow Government.