Mr. Fleischer said: "After the president announced the surge, and even Republicans started getting nervous, there was a palpable fear among several of us that this fall Congress was going to cut off the funding and the Middle East would explode and America would likely get hit. It really wasn't much more complicated than that."
Over the summer, Mr. Fleischer and the other founders recruited a president, choosing Mr. Blakeman, who served as a deputy assistant to the president in charge of scheduling and appointments. In 2000, Mr. Blakeman led the Bush-Cheney campaign's public relations effort during the 36 days of the deadlocked election. He left the White House in January 2004.
Mr. Blakeman and Mr. Fleischer said they intended to turn Freedom's Watch into a permanent fixture among Washington advocacy groups, waging a "never-ending campaign" on an array of foreign policy and domestic issues. They also hope to build an active, grass-roots support network.
But Eli Pariser, the executive director of MoveOn.org, which was founded in 1998 by two Silicon Valley venture capitalists, said he doubted the group's ability to meet that goal.
"This is the fourth or the fifth group that intends to be the right-wing MoveOn," Mr. Pariser said, naming other fledgling groups like TheVanguard.org and Grassfire.org. "So far, it's not clear that this group is anything other than a big neoconservative slush fund. They are a White House front group with a few consultants who are trying to make a very unpopular position on the war appear more palpable."
Like Freedom's Watch, MoveOn had its origins in an attempt by wealthy political donors, including George Soros, to shape the debate in Washington. MoveOn began shortly after the Starr report was delivered to Congress in September 1998, detailing accusations of perjury and obstruction of justice against President Bill Clinton.
Already, Freedom's Watch and MoveOn have clashed through competing advertisements over Gen. David H. Petraeus's war progress report to Congress earlier this month.
In one Freedom's Watch ad, Sgt. John Kriesel, a National Guardsman from Stillwater, Minn., who lost his legs in a bomb attack near Falluja, pleads with Congress and the American people not to "surrender" in Iraq. As the screen shows a still photograph of the second hijacked plane bearing down on the burning World Trade Center, Sergeant Kriesel adds, "They attacked us, and they will again. They won't stop in Iraq."
Several of the group's spots suggested that Iraq, rather than Al Qaeda, was behind the Sept. 11 attacks, even though the independent Sept. 11 commission investigation and other inquiries found no evidence of Iraq's involvement. But in August, when the organization rolled out the advertisement with Sergeant Kriesel to two focus groups in Pennsylvania, its upbeat, patriotic message was well received, even causing a few viewers to weep, Mr. Blakeman said.
