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.”

AEI is an odd venue for Flournoy for two reasons. First, she co-founded the most influential think tank of the Obama era, the Center for a New American Security. And second, AEI is the locus of neoconservatism, the ideology that, more than any other, encouraged the United States to ignore and under-resource the Afghanistan war during the Bush administration. The left is, I think it’s fair to say, decidedly unhappy with Obama today, and is comparing him to former President George W. Bush. Flournoy’s speech will seem to them something like the last scene in ‘Animal Farm.’

Chances are, Flournoy is speaking to AEI in order to solidify support for the war on the right, which has reacted generally positively to Obama’s speech, notwithstanding its deep antipathy to the president himself. Flournoy’s task will be to see how deeply she can entrench that sentiment and tamp down the rancor that the president identified as deleterious to the war. That puts the right in a box: how to support a war without bolstering Obama?

The event’s topic and speaker list are below the fold.

Islamists have launched a two-pronged effort to suppress free discourse on such subjects as Islam, radical Islam, terrorism, and terrorist funding:
* By filing predatory lawsuits.
* By passing “hate speech” and defamation laws.
Victims of these “lawfare” attacks have included the famous and the obscure, politicians, journalists, analysts and plain citizens.

This inhibition has great consequences, for when discussion of Islam and terrorism are limited, radical Islam is empowered and Western civilization is imperiled.

Issues to be discussed on May 19 include: A close analysis of Islamist methods; the possible need for legislation to protect free speech on these topics; a comparison of the situation in Europe and the United States; and ways to prevent the United Nations from curtailing discussion of Islam.

Co-sponsors include the Federalist Society and the Thomas Jefferson Center. The speaker list for the event next Tuesday:

Hassan Daioleslam (Researcher, IranLobby.com)
Alan Dershowitz (Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law, Harvard Law School)
Frank Gaffney (President, the Center for Security Policy)
Brooke Goldstein (Attorney at law, Director of the Legal Project at the
Middle East Forum)
David Harris (Attorney at law, Director of the International and Terrorist
Intelligence Program, INSIGNIS Strategic Research Inc.)
Joe Kaufman (Chairman, Americans Against Hate)
Marc Lebuis (Blogger, Point de Bascule)
Andrew C. McCarthy (Director, the Center for Law and Counterterrorism)
Alan Mendoza (Executive Director, The Henry Jackson Society)
Douglas Murray (Director, the Centre for Social Cohesion)
Daniel Pipes (Director, the Middle East Forum)
Dean Reuter (The Federalist Society)
David Rivkin (Attorney at law, Baker Hostetler)
Elizabeth Samson (Attorney at law, Visiting Fellow at the Hudson Institute)
Barak Seener (Middle East Section Director, Henry Jackson Society)
Senator Arlen Specter (United States Senator, State of Pennsylvania)
James Taranto (Columnist, the Wall Street Journal)
John J Walsh (Attorney at law, Senior Counsel, Carter Ledyard & Milburn LLP)

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“The only way to avoid that is to see the election of your worst enemy,” said Kagan. “Finally, we’ve achieved that in El Salvador.”

Both hammered home the point of the panel, that, in Kagan’s words, “the stronger we can build a consensus to commitment to Afghanistan,” the easier it will be to keep if and when support for the war falters. Nagl suggested that it would take a decade to bring real stability to the region.

[UPDATE: This post originally quoted Nagl as saying "I'll never get tired of the phrase 'Global War on Terror.'" This was incorrect: Nagl had said he wanted a new phrase to replace "GWOT," and was endorsing the concept, not the phrase.]

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.

“It was not a purge of neoconservatives,” he said. “It was more mundane and grotesque than that. It was part of an ongoing power play by [AEI Vice President for Foreign and Defense Policy Studies] Danielle Plekta. She’s someone who makes Hillary [Rodham Clinton] look pleasant and soft by comparison. She’s pathologically self-serving. She, personally, drove Jeanne Kirkpatrick from AEI by being relentlessly abusive to her. And she has no conceivable qualifications for being in her position in the first place.”

Muravchik is starting to promote his new book “The Next Founders,” about democracy in the Middle East, which he said was completed despite Pletka’s attacks on his travel budget.

Neoconservatism after Iraq is communism after the end of the Soviet Union. Treat Perle like you treat the men in colorful robes who stand in front of the subway claiming to be the lost tribe of Israel, because he’s just as foolish and conspiracy-minded. Avoid eye contact, shuffle awkwardly to your destination and put him out of your mind.

Israel is at war with the Palestinians and unscrupulous right-wing commentators, determined to discredit reporters, allege that prominent journalistic institutions sympathize with terrorists? I don’t know about you, but that takes me back …

It’s 2002, and the air is a fragrant bouquet of warmongering and fearmongering. A plucky new band called Interpol seems like it has potential. Urban youths are pretending to like electroclash. Will Attack Of The Clones prove to be as bad as Phantom Menace?

I’d be interested in seeing a list of all the completely insane things Max has said and written over the last decade.

Why, so would I! But I’m going to be lazy and stick to the locus classicus of Max Boot batshittery: “The Case For American Empire,” from the Weekly Standard’s October 15, 2001 issue. I hear you objecting — Yeah, yeah, we know all about that one. But do you? Do you? Sure, you remember this quote:

Afghanistan and other troubled lands today cry out for the sort of enlightened foreign administration once provided by self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith helmets.

But it’s a shame, really, because the baroque foolishness of that line — no Englishman, for instance, would be ahistorical enough to engage in such unironic empire-nostalgia — has obscured the less-florid-but-still-barking-mad bits of the essay. For instance, let’s take my favorite:

Once Afghanistan has been dealt with, America should turn its attention to Iraq. It will probably not be possible to remove Saddam quickly without a U.S. invasion and occupation–though it will hardly require half a million men, since Saddam’s army is much diminished since the Gulf War, and we will probably have plenty of help from Iraqis, once they trust that we intend to finish the job this time. Once we have deposed Saddam, we can impose an American-led, international regency in Baghdad, to go along with the one in Kabul. With American seriousness and credibility thus restored, we will enjoy fruitful cooperation from the region’s many opportunists, who will show a newfound eagerness to be helpful in our larger task of rolling up the international terror network that threatens us.

Pretty much every clause of that paragraph has been, uh, overtaken by events. It says oh so much about John McCain that he’d pick such a paragon of insight, curiosity and sagacity as a foreign-policy surrogate.