Neo-cons target terrorism, revive
communism foe By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - A bipartisan group of 41 mainly
neo-conservative foreign-policy hawks has launched the
third Committee on the Present Danger (CPD), whose
previous two incarnations mobilized public support for
rolling back Soviet-led communism but whose new enemy
will be "global terrorism".
The new group,
announced at a Capitol Hill press conference on Tuesday,
said its "single mission" will be to "advocate policies
intended to win the war on global terrorism - terrorism
carried out by radical Islamists opposed to freedom and
democracy".
"The committee intends to remain
active until the present danger is no longer a threat,
however long that takes," said CPD chairman R James
Woolsey, who served briefly as former president Bill
Clinton's Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director and
has often referred to the battle against radical Islam
as "World War IV".
Woolsey appeared with Senator
Joseph Lieberman, a neo-conservative Democrat who was
former vice president Al Gore's running mate in 2000,
and Senator Jon Kyl, a Republican from Arizona with
strong connections to the Christian Right.
In a
joint column published on Tuesday in the Washington
Post, the two senators argued that "too many people are
insufficiently aware of our enemy's evil worldwide
designs, which include waging jihad against all
Americans and re-establishing a totalitarian religious
empire in the Middle East".
"The past struggle
against communism was, in some ways, different from the
current war against Islamist terrorism," they wrote,
evoking the two past CPDs. "But ... the national and
international solidarity needed to prevail over both
enemies is ... the same. In fact, the world war against
Islamic terrorism is the test of our time."
At
the press conference later, Lieberman said the purpose
of the new group is "to form a bipartisan citizens'
army, which is ready to fight a war of ideas against our
Islamist terrorist enemies, and to send a clear signal
that their strategy to deceive, demoralize and divide
America will not succeed".
The two senators also
claimed that the new CPD consists of "citizens of
diverse political persuasions", although the vast
majority of the 41 members are well-known
neo-conservatives who have strongly helped lead the
drive to war in Iraq and have long supported broadening
President George W Bush's "war on terrorism" to include
Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia as well.
Prominently represented are fellows from the
American Enterprise Institute (AEI), such as former
United Nations ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, Joshua
Muravchik, Laurie Mylroie, Danielle Pletka, Michael
Rubin and Ben Wattenberg. Members from Pentagon chief
Donald Rumsfeld's Defense Policy Board (DPB) include
Kenneth Adelman, Newt Gingrich and Woolsey himself.
Committee members from the Center for Security
Policy include CSP president Frank Gaffney, Charles
Kupperman, William Van Cleave, and Dov Zakheim, who just
stepped down as an under secretary of defense under
Rumsfeld.
Board members or fellows of several
other right-wing or mainly neo-conservative think-tanks
have also joined the new CPD, including the Heritage
Foundation, the Hoover Institution, the Manhattan
Institute, Freedom House, the Foundation for the Defense
of Democracies, the former Committee to Liberate Iraq,
the National Institute for Public Policy and Americans
for Victory Over Terrorism.
The majority of
members are associated with policy statements by the
Project for the New American Century (PNAC), whose
charter members in 1997 included Rumsfeld, Vice
President Dick Cheney and a number of other men and
women who have pushed for hawkish positions on the
Middle East and China, particularly from their perches
at senior levels in the Bush administration.
The
original CPD was formed in 1950 with the help of
anti-communist hawks in the administration of the late
president Harry Truman as a "citizens' lobby" by a
high-powered group of Wall Street businessmen, public
relations specialists and university administrators to
raise public concern about Soviet and Chinese threats
and mobilize support for a huge military budget aimed at
maintaining US military supremacy.
CPD-2, which
was officially launched immediately after the election
of president Jimmy Carter (1977-81), was created as a
coalition of neo-conservatives - mostly hawkish
Democrats who had supported the unsuccessful
presidential candidacy of senator Henry Jackson of
Washington state (organized as the Coalition for a
Democratic Majority, or CDM) - and aggressive Republican
nationalists, such as Rumsfeld, opposed to the policies
of detente pursued by Henry Kissinger under former
presidents Richard Nixon (1969-74) and Gerald Ford
(1974-77).
During the Carter administration,
CPD-2 in essence served as a "shadow" foreign-policy
cabinet - churning out position papers and opinion
columns, holding conferences, appearing on television
news shows, and brokering leaks from unhappy hawks to
prominent news media - to build support for much bigger
military budgets, a much more confrontational posture
vis-a-vis Moscow and for "rollback" of Soviet gains in
what was then called "the Third World".
When
Ronald Reagan was subsequently elected president in
1980, no fewer than 46 CPD members advised his
transition team, and most of them were absorbed into his
administration, many at senior foreign policymaking
levels.
While no members of the new CPD go back
to the original one 50 years ago, a significant number
played important roles in CPD-2, including Adelman,
Kampelman, Van Cleave, Kupperman and Kirkpatrick - all
of whom played prominent roles in the older group.
Indeed, many CPD-3 members joined CPD-2 from the CDM,
which was created to fight the anti-war forces that were
becoming dominant in the Democratic Party in the early
to mid-1970s.
Besides being hawkish toward the
Soviet Union and friendly toward the Pentagon, both the
CDM and the CPD-2 were also staunchly pro-Israeli at a
time when the Jewish state found itself increasingly
isolated.
A number of members of the new CPD,
including Kampelman, Kemp, Kirkpatrick, Muravchik,
Gaffney and Woolsey himself, overlap with the membership
of the advisory boards of groups oriented toward
Israel's governing Likud Party, such as the Jewish
Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), the
Middle East Forum or the US Committee for a Free
Lebanon.
In addition, a husband-and-wife team
who played a key role in the evolution of
neo-conservatism from the late 1960s to the present and
were also associated with both CDM and CPD-2, former
Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz and his spouse, Midge
Decter (who co-chaired the Committee for the Free World
with Rumsfeld during the Reagan administration), have
also joined the new CPD.
Still, the new group
does not include a number of individuals who would be
politically compatible with its political views and
institutional genealogy. The former DPB chairman and top
Jackson aide Richard Perle, for example, was not listed
as a member, nor was his AEI colleague, Michael Ledeen.
Similarly, PNAC's leadership, including Weekly
Standard editor William Kristol, contributing editor
Robert Kagan and staff director Gary Schmitt, apparently
opted out. Ironically, Kristol and Kagan were co-editors
of an influential 2000 foreign-policy book that
envisaged much of Bush's post-September 11, 2001,
foreign policy, called Present Dangers.
