Mitt Romney’s recent visit to Jerusalem drummed up a few controversies: his top adviser upped the war rhetoric on Iran, Romney suggested Palestinian culture is “inferior to Israeli culture,” and he proclaimed Jerusalem as the capital of Israel — a designation no U.S. administration has made in more than six decades.

Now, a right-wing pressure group is out with an ad lauding Romney’s Jerusalem position. But the group appears to be getting “a little ahead” of Romney himself — as an aide put it when a top neoconservative adviser staked out an especially hawkish position on Iran. The group, the Emergency Committee for Israel (ECI), released an ad praising Romney for declaring that Jerusalem is the “capital of Israel.”

But in a press release accompanying the ad, ECI head Bill Kristol said Romney’s position on Jerusalem was even father to the right than anything the candidate has said:

Mitt Romney understands the meaning of Jerusalem, whole and free, the capital of Israel.

The division of Jerusalem is a key sticking point in the stalled peace process between the Israelis and Palestinians. While Israel annexed the whole city — a move the U.S. and international community don’t recognize — Palestinians claim East Jerusalem as the capital of a future Palestinian state. Campaigning in 2008, then-candidate Barack Obama dove into this territory by telling an audience that Jerusalem “must remain undivided,” but walked the statement back shortly thereafter.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, generally regarded as a hard-liner, has gone back and forth on the issue. He told PBS last year that, while he wanted Jerusalem to remain “united,” the city’s final status would only be decided “after a negotiation.” But earlier this year, Netanyahu said, “Jerusalem will remain forever the united capital of the State of Israel.”

Declaring Jerusalem the capital of Israel, while breaking with long-standing U.S. policy, is one thing. But declaring that Jerusalem will not be divided — even if that could potentially kill any dimming hopes for a two-state solution — is quite another. As the vociferous Romney supporter and Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin has written in the past about merely moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem:

If we want to maintain our role as a future broker in the (however presently dormant) “peace process,” we’re not going to make a move that will be read as a fait accompli on the final status of Jerusalem.

Rubin is (was) right, and some intrepid campaign reporter should ask Mitt Romney if he agrees with Kristol’s characterization of his position and whether Jerusalem’s division is, as Netanyahu has claimed before, on the table for negotiations.

Since his 2008 run for the presidency, Mitt Romney has gotten his foreign policy advice from a gaggle of moderates and neoconservatives and other hawks. In this election cycle, the neoconservatives and other “Cheney-ites” reportedly marginalized moderates on the staff. One of the neocons — Dan Senor, who has been advising Romney since 2006 — seems to have stepped into the breech.

Despite a high profile, Senor came under a brighter spotlight in recent weeks for his role in two Romney campaign moves amid the GOP hopeful’s trip to Israel. Senor grabbed attention by, as one campaign official put it, getting “a little ahead” of Romney by backing an Israeli strike on Iran. Then Romney cited Senor’s book about Israeli entrepreneurship in his heavily criticized remarks that suggested economic disparities between Israelis and Palestinians could be chalked up to “culture.”

In a new report, the New York Times looked into Senor’s role on the Romney campaign and found that Senor is Romney’s “closest” foreign policy adviser and “has had his ear” since at least 2006:

His presence in the tight orbit of advisers around the Republican candidate foreshadows a Romney foreign policy that could take a harder line against Iran, embrace Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and move away from being the honest broker in the conflict with Palestinians.

In light of the Times report, here’s a few items from Senor’s resume that may serve to preview what a Romney presidency may look like:

MENTORED BY BILL KRISTOL: “Beginning with Kristol, who is almost two decades his elder, Senor has flourished under the watch of a succession of father figures,” Tablet reported in a recent profile. Kristol, who led the charge into the Iraq war, has been so eager to bomb Iran that even George W. Bush mocked him as a “bomber boy.”

FLACKING FOR THE U.S. IN IRAQ: Remember those famous “rose-colored glasses” through which the Bush administration viewed the Iraq war — or, rather, used to present the Iraq war to the public? That was Senor, who flacked for the Coalition Provisional Authority through its disastrous reign over Iraq. Washington Post reporter Rajiv Chandrasekaran wrote in his book on the CPA that Senor, who was just 31 when he joined up, did “a masterful job of spinning the media.” He reported that Senor once told reporters: “Well, off the record, Paris is burning. But on the record, security and stability are returning to Iraq.”

WALL STREET HEDGE FUND: Since leaving government, Senor attended Harvard Business School and took up positions in prominent businesses, first at the defense giant the Carlyle Group, then at a Wall Street hedge fund. His boss at the hedge fund, Paul Singer, a “vulture capitalist,” is a major Romney backer who, while speculating on oil, funded a Karl Rove-led group that blamed President Obama for gas prices.

NEOCON PRESSURE GROUP: In 2009, Senor joined forces with Kristol to form the Foreign Policy Initiative, modeling it on the group that spearheaded the campaign for war with Iraq. Most recently, FPI called for direct U.S. military intervention in Syria. (Senor did not sign on, but fellow Romney advisers Robert Kagan, Eric Edelman, Stephen Rademaker, and Max Boot did.)

Now, as the Times reports today, Senor is Romney’s top foreign policy adviser, where he leverages his business ties into “success at hitting such people up for campaign cash.” Romney’s emerging hawkishness and critiques of Obama’s policies sound like they could have come straight from Senor — as they did in his comments about “culture.” The profile in Tablet ran down Senor’s myriad connections to the Israeli right — he even volunteered for the 1993 campaign of hard-liner Benny Begin, who opposes a two-state solution to the israeli-Palestinian conflict. If Senor and his ideological comrades hold as much sway over a Romney presidency as they do over his campaign, the situation in the Middle East could be explosive. Maybe that’s why this “policy” adviser is more often lauded for his flacking and fund-raising.

The Weekly Standard’s Bill Kristol and the Foreign Policy Institute’s Jamie Fly this weekend penned an article calling on President Obama to ask Congress to authorize military force against Iran. The piece came just days after a Kristol-led pressure group unveiled a television ad pushing for war.

But Congress has already backed away from authorizing force and even GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney, despite his hawkish advisers, rebuffed the belligerent ask. Appearing on CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday, Romney distanced himself from Kristol’s article:

ROMNEY: I don’t believe, at this stage, therefore, if I’m president, that we need to have a war powers approval or a special authorization for military force. The president has that capacity now.

[...W]e cannot survive a course of action which would include a nuclear Iran, and we must be willing to take any and all action. They must — all those actions must be on the table.

Watch the video:

One of Romney’s advisers — John Bolton — has has recently been pushing for war with Iran but outside of Romney’s militaristic rhetoric, his Iran policy is virtually indistinguishable from that laid out by Obama, including the president’s oft-repeated view that all options remain on the table to deal with a potential Iranian nuclear weapon.

And despite Kristol’s insistence that even if Obama doesn’t ask for an authorization for military force, “Congress can act without such a request,” such a move would be moot: Congress, in each chamber in the past month, overwhelming passed bills specifically repudiating the notion of authorizing force. The Senate passed a new round of U.S. sanctions in Iran in a bill that included language explicitly stating, “[N]othing in this Act shall be construed as authorizing the use of force against Iran.” And the house passed the 2013 defense authorization with an amendment stating the same thing.

A potential Iranian nuclear weapon is widely considered a threat to both the security of the U.S. and its allies in the region, as well as the nuclear non-proliferation regime. U.S., U.N. and Israeli intelligence estimates give the West time to pursue a dual-track approach of pressure and diplomacy to resolve the crisis. Questions about the efficacy and potential consequences of a strike have led U.S. officials to declare that diplomacy is the “best and most permanent way” to resolve the crisis.

But that measured take doesn’t satisfy Kristol, who has been at odds with the Romney during the campaign. As editor of the Weekly Standard and head of the Emergency Committee For Israel and Foreign Policy Initiative, Kristol can make a lot of noise but it seems that no one is heeding his advice.

The Emergency Committee for Israel (ECI) released a new ad today suggesting that the U.S. should immediately bomb Iran. Among those behind the ECI and its ad are the same people who pushed the U.S. into the Iraq war.

The ad from ECI, a group which aims to push pro-Israel voters away from President Obama and is headed up by Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol, tells viewers in its new commercial that Obama is insufficiently committed to preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon and concludes, “Now it’s time to act,” followed by an explosion. Watch it:

ECI’s reflexive hawkishness stems from its hard-right neoconservative disposition. The organization was even born in the same Washington office as the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq (CLI), a short-lived right-wing pressure group that pushed for an Iraq invasion. A major player in the Iraq war push, Kristol, for his part, already called for a war with Iran last October.

ECI, whose board members and director have a history of exhorting acts of violence, ignores U.S., U.N., and Israeli intelligence findings in their efforts for yet another U.S. war in the Middle East — this time with Iran.

In Israel, meanwhile, a growing consensus has emerged among former top security officials that a military strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities would be counterproductive to Israeli interests. And a report last month suggests that the consensus opposing an Israeli attack on Iran extends all the way to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s defense chiefs.
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In a debate two weeks ago on U.S.-Israel policy with J Street president Jeremy Ben Ami, neoconservative don Bill Kristol surprised the audience when he said, “I’ve been mostly supportive of the Obama administration in the last couple of years” on Israel, and that he was “happy to agree with Obama to a considerable degree.” Kristol continued that, “The difference” between Obama and Republican candidate Mitt Romney on issues relating to Iran and Israel “is not that great.”

To say the least, this was a startling admission from a guy who heads up an organization, the Emergency Committee for Israel, that exists solely to scare people about President Obama’s approach to Israel. It was also reminiscent of a previous episode in which ECI’s executive director, Noah Pollak, praised President Obama’s May 2011 speech on the Middle East, but then reversed himself when it became clear that the president’s reference to “the ’67 lines” provided an opportunity for attack.

Well, as before, it looks like Kristol is back on message. In a blog post at the website for his magazine the Weekly Standard, he asks, “Have pro-Israel liberals — at least some of the intelligent ones — finally had enough of President Obama’s incompetence and dithering with respect to Israel and the Middle East?”

In a debate last night with Jeremy Ben Ami of the liberal pro-Israel group J Street, neoconservative don Bill Kristol told the audience in the New York synagogue that he had no problems with President Obama’s Israel policies. But just two months ago, a right-wing pro-Israel group Kristol heads rolled out the latest of its serial attacks on Obama’s policies toward Israel.

The Weekly Standard editor praised Obama and said the difference between Obama’s Israel policies and presumptive GOP nominee Mitt Romney’s “is not that great.” Kristol stated that he was “happy to agree with Obama to a considerable degree.” He went on:

I’ve been mostly supportive of the Obama administration in the last couple of years…

I think President Obama has moved sufficiently on these issues from the Cairo speech in 2009 to the AIPAC speech of two months ago, that the difference between the parties is less than it was.

But as Haaretz and WNYC pointed out, the Kristol-led Emergency Committee for Israel (ECI) consistently lambasts Obama on Israel. The group ran ads in Washington around its campaign asserting Obama was “not pro-israel.” In December, Kristol, in an ECI statement, said Obama “keeps acting to weaken the security of the state of Israel.” (Earlier that year, right-wing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whom Kristol frequently praises, said that under the Obama administration “our security cooperation is unprecedented.”)

Just two months ago — far from the “last couple years” Kristol has been “supportive” of Obama’s policies — the hedge fund-bankrolled ECI released a 30-minute anti-Obama online film, complete with ominous music. In the film, Kristol associate Liz Cheney says Obama attempted to “put distance” between the U.S. and Israel. Neocon pundit Charles Krauthammer says Obama “delegitimized” Israel, and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ Lee Smith said Obama’s “narrative fit [a] rejectionist and resentful narrative.”

This isn’t the first time ECI’s attacks on the Obama administration’s Israel policies have been revealed as disingenuous political maneuvers. Last May, ECI executive director Noah Pollak, commenting via Twitter, publicly praised Obama’s speech on the Middle East, but ECI later condemned the speech in an attack ad. When ThinkProgress revealed the hypocrisy, Kristol disowned the tweets in comments to the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin. Rubin added: “Kristol graciously avoided pointing out that while Pollak has the executive director title, the group is firmly under the control of Kristol and his two co-founders.”

With ECI “firmly under the control of Kristol,” and with Kristol now “happy to agree with Obama to a considerable degree” on Israel, will the organization lay off its right-wing attacks on the president? “We’re trying to decide,” Kristol told WNYC.

Yesterday Mitt Romney attacked President Obama over the administration’s handling of Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng. Citing “very troubling developments,” Romney said yesterday was “a dark day for freedom and it’s a day of shame for the Obama administration.”

Last night on Fox News, Bill Kristol advised Romney to stand down on the Chen case, calling his attacks on Obama “foolish”:

KRISTOL: I’m happy to be critical of the Obama administration as anyone is, but I think this is fast moving story. And if I were advising Governor Romney, I’d say you don’t need to get in the middle of this story. If this turns out badly, and it would be a terrible thing, it will turn out badly. People will know. … To inject yourself into the middle of this way with a fast moving target I think is foolish. [...]

There is no need to butt into a fast moving story when the secretary of state is in Beijing with delicate negotiations and say it’s a day of shame for the Obama administration. Hillary Clinton is waking up right now. Let’s see if she can pull this off in the next 12 hours or so.

Watch the clip:

The State Department announced this morning that the U.S. had reached a deal with China, with Beijing saying Chen could apply to study abroad and Washington saying an American university has offered him a fellowship.