Neoconservative ultra-hawk Dan Senor will be whispering in Paul Ryan's ear

Neoconservative Dan Senor has been assigned as senior adviser to vice presidential hopeful Paul Ryan. Team Romney has assigned Dan Senor to be senior adviser to vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan. Senor will no doubt be helping Ryan fill in one of his gaps, foreign policy. That should make the guy behind the choice of both Sarah Palin and Paul Ryan quite happy. He's neoconservative Bill Kristol. He even wanted Ryan to run for president. Kristol and Senor go back a ways. The two of them, together with Robert Kagan and other prominent neoconservatives, founded the Foreign Policy Initiative in in 2009. That is the successor to the now-defunct Project for a New American Century, the original neoconservative organization. The fourth heavy at FPI is career diplomat Eric Edelman.

Senor, who is married to former CNN anchorwoman Campbell Brown, is an investment banker formerly with the Carlyle Group and his own private equity operation. He later joined billionaire Paul Singer's hedge fund Elliott Management. Singer is a major backer of Romney.

Senor served in the Bush administration as spokesman for the Coalition Provisional Authority and as a senior adviser to the head of the CPA, L. Paul Bremer. In those posts he became the chief spinner of news from Iraq in the early days of the occupation. He was quoted in Rajiv Chandrasekaran's book of life in the Green Zone of Baghdad in that period, Imperial Life in the Emerald City, as having said: 'Off the record, Paris is burning. On the record, security and stability are returning to Iraq.'

Senor has strong ties to senior officials in the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and has written an exceedingly popular book about Israel, Start-up Nation. Allison Hoffman writes:

Senor has been a vital emissary over the past six years for Romney not just to the Israelis and the American Jewish community, but to a Republican foreign-policy establishment that, even today, remains somewhat alien territory. 'Dan was hugely helpful in introducing the governor to his friends and colleagues,' said Beth Myers, Romney's longtime aide-de-camp and a top campaign adviser. 'He's a huge validator.' [...]

A few weeks later [in May 2006] Myers, called from Boston to ask whether Senor would be willing to come talk to the Massachusetts governor, who was considering a presidential run. 'The two of them hit it off immediately,' Myers said. 'I can't think of anyone who Mitt has ever met that he hit it off with so immediately as Dan Senor.'

The New York Times has reported:

'[Senor's] 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 Mr. Senor, Mr. Romney turned to an advocate of neoconservative thinking that has sought to push presidents to the right for years on Middle East policy.

It's not hard to imagine what Paul Ryan will soon be saying about the foreign policy he has no experience in.