On three occasions since the end of World
War II - in 1950, 1976 and 2004 - elite citizen
committees have organized to warn the United
States of what they viewed as looming threats to
national security.
These three Committees
on the Present Danger (CPD) aimed to ratchet up
the level of fear among the US public and policy
community. In each case, the committees leveraged
fear in attempts to increase military budgets, to
mobilize the country for war, and to beat back
isolationist, anti-interventionist and realist
forces in US politics.
In the early 1950s
and in the late 1970s, the Committees on the
Present Danger succeeded in shifting the US to a
war footing - first to launch the Cold War, and
two decades later to end the
move
in the policy community toward detente and
arms-control agreements with the Soviet Union.
The success of the first danger committees
has inspired the country's hawks and
neo-conservatives to imitate the CPD model. Both
the Center for Security Policy, founded by Frank
Gaffney in 1988, and the Project for the New
American Century (PNAC), founded in 1997 by
William Kristol and Robert Kagan, cite the CPD
model.
It was not, however, until the
backlash against the war in Iraq started spreading
that the Committee on the Present Danger name was
resurrected. This time the CPD points to Islamic
terrorism as the present danger the US faces
abroad and anti-war sentiment as the clear and
present danger at home.
To a large degree,
the evolution of the CPD reflects the post-World
War II course of US foreign and military policy.
Whenever the country has started to move from a
wartime footing to a period of decreased support
for the military and increased isolationist
sentiment, the foreign-policy hawks in both
parties have organized fear-mongering campaigns to
expand the global reach of US troops and weapons.
President George W Bush's foreign-policy
team, dominated by the men from the
neo-conservative PNAC, took advantage of the
September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the US to
justify a new military doctrine of preventive war,
regime change and US military supremacy. Less than
three years after the administration launched its
"global war on terror", the public and bipartisan
support that the administration initially enjoyed
started to slip.
The new war party - the
third CPD - formed to stem the growing rejection
of US interventionism and unilateralism. In the
CPD's mission statement, the committee's founders
summarize the history of the two previous
committees and describe the new challenge:
Twice before in American history,
the Committee on the Present Danger has risen to
this challenge. It emerged in 1950 as a
bipartisan education and advocacy organization
dedicated to building a national consensus for
the Truman administration's policy aimed at
"containment" of Soviet expansionism. In 1976,
the Committee on the Present Danger re-emerged,
with leadership from the labor movement,
bipartisan representatives of the foreign-policy
community, and academia, all of them concerned
about strategic drift in US security policy and
determined to support policies intended to bring
the Cold War to a successful conclusion.
In both previous periods, the
committee's mission was clear: raise awareness
of the threat to American safety; communicate
the risk inherent in appeasing totalitarianism;
and build support for an assertive policy to
promote the security of the United States and
its allies and friends. Like the Cold War,
securing our freedom against organized terrorism
is a long-term struggle. The road to victory
begins with clear identification of the shifting
threat and vigorous pursuit of policies to
contain and defeat it.
Will this new
war party succeed, as its predecessors did, in
winning new public and policymaker support for
what this latest CPD describes as "World War IV"?
Or will the US reject the politics of fear and
hate this time, and move toward a more measured,
less militaristic course in international
relations - one that ensures national security
without burdening the US with new wars and a
self-serving military-industrial complex?
Organizing for a Cold War The
original CPD "emerged in 1950 as a bipartisan
education and advocacy organization dedicated to
building a national consensus for the Truman
administration's policy aimed at 'containment' of
Soviet expansionism".
Written by the
current CPD, this description is accurate but also
deceptive. While it was a bipartisan committee of
prominent citizens, the first CPD was created at
the initiative of the administration of president
Harry Truman with the explicit purpose of "scaring
the hell out of" Americans, as one Republican
senator advised, rather than educating citizens
about the postwar realities. Its unstated but
clear objective was to build support for a postwar
militarization based on an exaggerated threat
assessment of the Soviet Union.
At the
close of World War II, the government's most
influential hawks - including secretary of state
Dean Acheson and the department's director of
policy planning, Paul Nitze - nested not in the
War Department (renamed the Defense Department in
1947) but in the State Department. Although some
of these men had served in World War I, like those
hawks who would later come to power in the
administration of George W Bush, the hardliners of
this era were for the most part not military men.
Instead, they moved in and out of
government from their bases in investment banking,
international law firms, corporate America, major
foundations and elite universities.
In
1949, Nitze began formulating a new
national-security memorandum known as NSC-68. It
envisaged a heavily militarized containment
strategy that would guide US foreign and military
policy through the Vietnam War. Containing little
hard information, NSC-68 was an exercise in
hyperbole and alarmism, declaring that "a rapid
building up of strength in the free world is
necessary to support a firm policy intended to
check and roll back the Kremlin's drive for world
domination". It cautioned that "the integrity and
vitality of our system is in greater jeopardy than
ever before in our history".
NSC-68 warned
that one of the most serious threats to US
national security was internal: "Our fundamental
purpose is more likely to be defeated from lack of
will to maintain it." Foreseeing the difficulties
in generating sufficient congressional and public
support for their hawkish foreign policy, Acheson
and Nitze recognized that their new
national-security strategy document should be both
a propaganda tool and a Pentagon "policy guidance"
to shape postwar security policy.
In his
autobiography, Acheson said, "The purpose of
NSC-68" was "to so bludgeon the mass mind" that
"not only could the president make a decision but
that decision could be carried out." To
mobilize a constituency that would support a
massive increase in the US military budget and
extensive overseas troop deployment, the
government helped organize a committee of "worthy
citizens" who, after reviewing the NSC-68
proposals for remilitarization, "could then say to
the people: 'We are thoroughly advised, and you
can accept what we say.'"
A "Citizens'
Conference" was organized by seven university
presidents to preview the position supporting
NSC-68 and present it to the nation's leading
industrialists and financiers. Among those
attending were financier Bernard Baruch, Julius
Ochs Adler of the New York Times, John D
Rockefeller and Alfred Sloan of General Motors. At
the committee's first meeting, members decided
that there should be no public record of their
meetings, given that their purpose was to
manipulate public opinion and to win congressional
support for NSC-68.
On December 12, 1950,
a committee of high-profile business and academic
figures - many with close ties to Nitze and
Acheson - held its first press conference in the
Willard Hotel in downtown Washington. Three
well-known Republicans - James Conant, the Harvard
University president who helped convince president
Franklin D Roosevelt of the need to develop atomic
weapons; Tracy Voorhees, former under secretary of
the army; and Vannevar Bush, a prominent engineer
and early promoter of the Manhattan Project to
develop the bomb - became the first directors of
the committee, which warned of the "the present
danger" facing the United States from "the
aggressive designs of the Soviet Union".
The next day, Truman addressed
congressional leaders on the pressing need for
additional military spending to prepare for a war
with the Soviet Union. On the following day, the
president submitted to Congress his fourth
supplemental to the fiscal 1951 defense budget.
Echoing the language and demands of what the New
York Times described as a group of "distinguished
private citizens", the president declared that to
meet the "present danger" the US needed to
increase its armed forces to 3.5 million men,
greatly augment its production of weapons, and
provide the funds needed to integrate allied
forces in Europe.
Republican conservatives
in Congress were livid. In their view, the liberal
internationalists of the Democratic Party,
together with their allies among Republican Party
members of the much-maligned "Eastern
Establishment", were "selling us a bill of goods".
One senator rejected the fear-mongering of the
group of internationally minded Republicans and
some key Democrats. "The Committee on the Present
Danger," he said, is the "same old business, the
same old salesmanship, the same old determination
to put America on the road to disaster."
Congressman John T Wood threw down the
gauntlet: "It is time to think and talk and act
American and designate internationalists for what
they are - potential traitors to the United
States."
The CPD's media and educational
campaign proved critical to congressional
acceptance of NSC-68 - a document that would usher
out the isolationist sentiment of a country tired
of war and usher in a war to contain the Soviet
Union.
Not everyone in the administration
was pleased with NSC-68. The most prominent
dissident was George Kennan, former director of
policy planning at the State Department. Although
he was the author of the Cold War's containment
doctrine, Kennan's views were far more nuanced and
less militaristic than Nitze's.
Nitze
rejected Kennan's realpolitik views, and as a
result Kennan was shunted off to a foreign-policy
post in the backwaters of Latin America.
Commenting on his own role in fueling Cold War
policies, Kennan wrote in his 1967 memoirs that he
saw himself as "one who has inadvertently loosened
a large boulder from the top of a cliff and now
helplessly witnesses its path of destruction in
the valley below, shuddering and wincing at each
successive glimpse of disaster".
In the
end, the militarists and liberal internationalists
won the day. They succeeded in instilling
widespread fear among the US public that "the
Russians were coming". This proved key to
congressional acceptance of NSC-68 and the new
policy of military containment of the Soviet
Union.
The members of the first CPD -
together with their sponsors in government - were
clearly concerned about the need to improve US
military readiness. So, too, they were convinced
that a large dose of Keynesian government spending
in weapons procurement at home and military
deployment abroad was the best way to prevent a
postwar economic downturn. Increased defense
expenditures, which rose from less than 4% of
gross national product in 1947 to an average 8-10%
in the 1950s, kept billions of dollars flowing
into the economy.
Having succeeded in its
aims, the CPD disbanded in 1953. By vastly
exaggerating Soviet military capacity and
expansionist ambitions, the committee played a key
role in establishing anti-communism as the
mobilizing principle for a postwar foreign policy
that was at once internationalist, interventionist
and militaristic.
Among its other
achievements, the first CPD created a vast
military-industrial complex, defeated isolationist
tendencies on the home front and brought about the
permanent deployment of US forces in both East
Asia and Western Europe.
But the
fear-mongering and exaggerated assessments of the
Soviet threat had unintended consequences in the
ensuing decades that would drive a divisive wedge
into the political and public life of the United
States.
Heating up the Cold War
The second Committee on the Present
Danger, formed in 1976, was an outgrowth of the
Coalition for a Democratic Majority (CDM), which
was a group of Democratic Party hawks who objected
to the increasing influence of progressives and
anti-war activists within the party.
Most
of the Cold Warriors of the CDM, which was
established in 1972, were associates or allies of
senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson, who led the
congressional fights for higher military budgets,
increased aid to Israel and against arms control
agreements.
In a 1975 letter to Nitze, CDM
director Eugene Rostow proposed the formation of a
new citizen coalition to alert the public to the
"growing Soviet threat". After an initial
organizing meeting convened by Rostow in March
1976, the reconstituted CPD had its official
unveiling on November 11, 1976, three days after
the election of president Jimmy Carter.
The conservative Democrats of the CDM
contended that communism was a great evil and that
the US had a moral obligation to eradicate it and
foster democracy throughout the world. The 193
individual members of the revitalized CPD
comprised a who's who of the Democratic Party
establishment and a cross-section of Republican
leadership.
Eventually, 13 of the 18
members of the foreign0policy task force of the
CDM, led by Eugene Rostow, joined CPD II. Notable
among them were Jeane Kirkpatrick, Leon
Keyserling, Max Kampelman, Richard Shifter and
John P Roche.
CPD II broadened its base
considerably from the original group by including
in its ranks top labor officials, Jewish liberals,
and neo-conservative intellectuals. It managed
this feat by including in its ideology not only a
strong anti-Soviet policy, but also one that
promoted growth and expansion. The CPD presented
an alternative to the cooperative vision of empire
put forth by the trilateralists with an imperial,
unilateral philosophy of power retention through
military strength. Carter chose to follow the
philosophy of the trilateral commissions, but the
CPD and its cohorts became dominant with the
election of president Ronald Reagan.
Another source of influence and members
for the CPD II was the Team B Strategic Objectives
Panel, which was an independent panel established
to review the Central Intelligence Agency's
(CIA's) "threat assessments" of the Soviet Union.
Team B members included Richard Pipes and
William van Cleave, as well as General Daniel
Graham, whose "High Frontier" missile defense
proposal foreshadowed Reagan's Strategic Defense
Initiative (SDI), or "Star Wars".
The
team's advisory panel included Paul Wolfowitz,
Nitze and Seymour Weiss - all close associates of
Albert Wohlstetter. Although Richard Perle was not
a Team B member, he was instrumental in pulling
the team together.
It was Perle who had
introduced Pipes, a Polish immigrant who taught
Russian history at Harvard, to senator Henry
Jackson, catapulting Pipes into a clique of
fanatically anti-Soviet hawks. Pipes served as
Team B's chairman and chose Wolfowitz as his
principal adviser.
Team B leaked its
report to the media as an "October surprise",
attempting to derail Carter's 1976 presidential
bid. Team B argued that "Soviet leaders are first
and foremost offensively rather than defensively
minded". The team arrived at this conclusion from
an assessment of the USSR's capabilities.
In the process, it ignored important
evidence pointing to the opposite conclusion.
While it was true that the Soviets had been
expanding their military capacity in the early
1970s, the USSR's military production - along with
the Soviet economy in general - began to stagnate
by the mid-1970s.
Dismissing this new
trend, Team B accused the CIA of consistently
underestimating the "intensity, scope and implicit
threat" posed by the Soviet Union. By relying on
technical or "hard" data rather than
"contemplat[ing] Soviet strategic objectives",
charged the panel, the CIA was setting up the
United States for defeat in the Cold War.
In her investigative account of the Team B
affair, Anne Hessing Cahn notes, "Even at the time
of the affair, Team B had at its disposal
sufficient information to know that the Soviet
Union was in severe decline. As Soviet defectors
were telling us in anguished terms that the system
was collapsing, Team B looked at the quantity but
not the quality of missiles, tanks and planes, at
the quantity of Soviet men under arms, but not
their morale, leadership, alcoholism or training."
The 1975-76 Team B operation was a classic
case of threat escalation by hawks determined to
increase military budgets and step up the US
offensive in the Cold War. Concocted by right-wing
ideologues and militarists, Team B aimed to bury
the politics of detente and nuclear arms reduction
negotiations, which were supported by the
leadership of both political parties.
The
Team B report paved the way for CPD II, which
formed weeks after Team B had released its
findings. The committee's first major policy
statement, titled "What is the Soviet Union Up
To?", was written by Team B leader Pipes, who
along with other participants in the Team B
exercise - including Foy Kohler, Nitze and van
Cleave - were founding members of the CPD.
Although CPD II included conservative
hawks, politicians and corporate leaders, its
leadership and the majority of its 141 original
members were Democrats who rejected the
progressive "New Politics" of the party
leadership. Unlike CPD I, membership in the new
committee extended beyond the Eastern
Establishment to include a wide range of corporate
and investment-house executives, labor leaders,
right-wing militarists (Frank Barnett of the
National Strategy Information Center), right-wing
philanthropist Richard Scaife, neo-conservatives
from the Jackson camp, neo-con scholars (Nathan
Glazer and Seymour Martin Lipset), and leading
Jewish members of the Democratic Party who were
increasingly concerned that the party was not
sufficiently supportive of Israel.
The
political realignment advocated by these
neo-conservatives, hawks and other frustrated Cold
Warriors was supported by leading figures in
corporate America. David Packard, a former under
secretary of defense, provided the founding grant
to establish CPD II. Packard was a major owner in
defense contractor Hewlett-Packard and a member of
Boeing's board of directors.
In sum, the
141 founding directors of CPD II formed an
insidious web with links to 110 major
corporations. Leading CPD members included three
former treasury secretaries - Henry Fowler, C
Douglas Dillon and John Connelly - two former high
officials of the Export-Import Bank, numerous
private bankers, partners in leading New York
investment firms, the former president of Time
Inc, the chairman of Prudential Insurance, the
director of the Atlantic Council, Citibank's chief
international business adviser and many other
corporate figures whose interests reached beyond
military budget increases.
The CPD's
"threat assessment" battles with the CIA and other
government agencies, and its public-education
campaigns to pitch its "peace through strength"
message had bottom-line implications for
corporations that had been suffering declining
profits since the mid-1960s. CPD II was part of a
broader business mobilization in the late 1970s
that promoted a conservative agenda to bolster the
profits of weapons manufacturers and service
providers for the military-industrial complex.
CDM members of CPD II believed that the
liberal internationalism of the Democrats had run
its course and that a new "conservative
internationalism" would better serve the interests
of US corporations. First, a new internationalism
that stressed US global reach and hegemony would
provide more stability for foreign investors
concerned about leftist insurgencies, Third World
attempts to control commodity markets (especially
oil), and the rise of anti-American regimes, such
as the one in Iran.
Second, CPD believed
its version of internationalism would create
expanded investment and export trade opportunities
through its advocacy of the neo-liberal
restructuring of foreign economies.
US
corporate leaders represented in the CPD and in
new corporate associations such as the Business
Roundtable were calling for less government
regulation, an end to the "business-labor accord",
and a revamping of progressive tax policies at
home. The "center of gravity of American big
business" had shifted to the right during the
1970s, as the early enthusiasm for trilateralism
waned.
Business now believed that what was
needed in these times of economic stagnation and
social turmoil was a more assertive US foreign and
military policy.
Although Carter met with
a delegation from the CPD prior to his
inauguration, only one of its members was invited
to join the administration. Carter appointed Peter
Rosenblatt, who today serves on the advisory board
of the Jewish Institute for National Security
Affairs, as his special representative to
Micronesia.
But despite Carter's early
attempts to ignore the CPD and stay the course of
detente, his administration soon caved under the
barrage of op-eds, press releases and reports
produced by the committee and its cohorts.
As a candidate, Carter had advocated a
trilateralist position: "We must replace
balance-of-power with world-order politics. It is
likely in the near future that issues of war and
peace will be more a function of economic and
social problems than of the military-security
problems."
By his final State of the Union
address in January 1980, Carter had moved to a
more militaristic position. In what was later to
be called the Carter Doctrine, the president
declared that the US military would be used
whenever America's main national interest - the
free flow of oil from the Middle East - was
threatened. "An attempt by any outside force to
gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be
regarded as an assault on the vital interests of
the United States of America, and such an assault
will be repelled by any means necessary, including
military force," Carter declared.
The
relentless pressure and public-education campaigns
by the CPD had much to do with Carter's
about-face, late in his term, on military budget
issues and arms control negotiations with the
Soviet Union. Carter ended up supporting a 5%
increase in defense spending, largely abandoned
the arms-control negotiations with the Soviet
Union, ordered the creation of a Rapid Deployment
Force and backed the production of "stealth"
bombers, cruise missiles and the Trident
submarine.
CPD joins the Reagan
administration Within four years of the
founding of CPD II, 46 of its members had joined
president-elect Reagan's foreign-policy advisory
task force. Reagan himself was a member of CPD II.
By the end of Reagan's first term, 32 CPD members
had joined the administration, and by 1988 more
than 50 committee members had served in the high
reaches of the national-security apparatus. In
addition, Reagan invited four members of the
infamous Team B into the administration.
These neo-conservatives shaped the
ideological foundation and new directions of the
Reagan administration's foreign policy, including
its rollback strategies, anti-multilateralism,
tactical human-rights policies, democratization
programs, and the consolidation of the US-Israeli
strategic alliance through close ties with Likud
Party hardliners.
Among former members of
senator Jackson's staff to find positions in the
Reagan administration's foreign-policy team were
such neo-conservative operatives as Wolfowitz,
Perle, Elliott Abrams, Gaffney, Feith, Charles
Horner and Ben Wattenberg. Other Jackson Democrats
who secured appointments in the Reagan
administration included Jean Kirkpatrick, as
ambassador to the United Nations, and
neo-conservatives on her staff, such as Joshua
Muravchik, Steven Munson, Carl Gershman and
Kenneth Adelman.
Joining the Reagan
administration's national-security and "arms
control" team were several neo-conservatives who
had been associated in the 1970s with the
Coalition for a Democratic Majority, including
Eugene Rostow, Max Kampelman and Pipes - all of
whom were more inclined toward militarism than
arms control.
A year after Reagan's
election, CPD's president, Charles Tyroler,
formerly director of the Department of Defense's
manpower supply division and later a member of the
Reagan administration's Intelligence Oversight
Board, told the New York Times, "It happened so
fast that we're almost amazed ourselves." At the
State Department, career diplomats were also
stunned at how quickly hawks and neo-conservatives
assumed the reins of foreign and military policy.
"The administration seems to be espousing their
[CPD] views lock, stock and barrel," commented a
high official at the State Department.
The
success of CPD II was stunning, but for founding
committee members it came after four years of
frustration with the Carter administration's
reluctant evolution toward a more belligerent US
foreign policy. In achieving public and
policymaker consensus for a "peace through
strength" foreign policy, CPD II repeated the
success of its precursor in the early 1950s.
The difference was that the first
committee emerged as a strategy to build support
for a pre-established position by the governing
elite. In contrast, the second committee came
together as an outside effort to replace the
ruling faction of the foreign policy elite with a
dissident camp rooted in a diversified constituent
base of organized labor, the counter-establishment
network of think tanks and policy institutes and a
minority tendency in the Democratic Party.
Especially during his first term, Reagan
echoed the moral and military rearmament rhetoric
of the neo-conservatives, giving the nation what
he had promised - higher military budgets,
militant anti-communism, an end to arms control,
and a crusade against evil.
Relentless
pressure by the CPD together with militarist
citizen coalitions organized by right-wing groups
such as the American Security Council and the
National Strategy Information Center succeeded in
moving Carter away from his trilateralist
positions. Rising leftist insurgency in the Third
World, the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and
the populist coup that overthrew the shah of Iran
during the second half of Carter's presidency
shook the foundations of the post-Vietnam War
policies of detente, arms control, Third World
developmentalism and economic engagement with the
Soviet Union. Between 1981 and 1985, military tax
expenditures jumped 32% in real terms - making the
Reagan peacetime military buildup the largest in
US history.
Present danger time
again The Committee on the Present Danger
was resurrected in June 2004 by a largely
neo-conservative group of 41 members. The new
committee "is dedicated to protecting and
expanding democracy by supporting policies aimed
at winning the global war against terrorism and
the movements and ideologies that drive it".
According to CPD, "Our mission is to
educate free people everywhere about the threat
posed by global radical Islamist and fascist
terrorist movements; to counsel against
appeasement of terrorists; to support policies
that are part of a strategy of victory against
this menace to freedom; and to support policies
that encourage the development of civil society
and democracy in those regions from which the
terrorists emanate." CPD's slogan is "Fighting
Terrorism and the Ideologies that Drive It".
In keeping with the tradition of its
forerunner committees, the current CPD is neither
a policy institute nor a think-tank, but functions
as a front group that through occasional
statements, conferences and reports attempts to
bolster support for increased military spending
and a more aggressive global war against Islamic
militants, particularly in the Middle East. CPD
lists no physical location, and has only one
employee.
When CPD was founded, Max
Kampelman - a "Scoop" Jackson Democrat who joined
the Reagan administration's State Department and
was a founding member of the 1976 committee -
said: "I think the country is in present danger
today ... We've got to come up with a bipartisan
program to do something about influencing public
opinion in the rest of the world. It's an
unfortunate reality today that America does not
look good in the eyes of many people ... a total
inadequacy on the part of [the Bush]
administration."
Although CPD membership
has increased since mid-2004, it remains an
overwhelmingly Republican group with a handful of
hawkish Democrats and with a largely Jewish
membership.
Writing about the early
membership of CPD, Jim Lobe of Inter Press Service
observed, "A number of members of the new CPD,
including Kampelman, Jack Kemp, Kirkpatrick,
Muravchik, Gaffney and James Woolsey himself,
overlap with the membership of the advisory boards
of the Likud-oriented Jewish Institute for
National Security Affairs, the Middle East Forum,
or the US Committee for a Free Lebanon. In
addition, a husband-and-wife team who played key
roles in the evolution of neo-conservatism from
the late 1960s to the present and who also were
associated with both CDM and CPD II, former
Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz and his spouse,
Midge Decter (who co-chaired the Committee for the
Free World with Donald Rumsfeld during the Reagan
administration) have also joined the new CPD."
The third and current CPD has a narrower
political base than either of its predecessors
despite its best efforts to represent itself as
non-partisan. Although it has managed to
incorporate some major political figures - such as
George Shultz - this CPD has few connections to
Corporate America, the leadership of either party,
or such social sectors as labor, churches or
ethnic groups.
Nor can it be said that the
current CPD represents the whole of
neo-conservatism. It does include many
neo-conservatives, but the absence of such neo-con
luminaries as William Kristol, Robert Kagan and
Richard Perle is a conspicuous sign of the failure
of CPD to unify even the neo-conservatives.
Although its stated mission is to fight
terrorism, CPD in its publications and forums
embraces the more traditional concerns of the
hawks, such as North Atlantic Treaty Organization
(NATO) expansion and missile defense.
CPD
has published several reports, including
"Propaganda & Terrorism: Policy Options for
the War of Ideas", "NATO: An Alliance for Freedom,
Oil, and Security" (written by CPD co-chairs
George Shultz and James Woolsey), and "Missile
Defense for the 21st Century" (whose lead author
is Henry Cooper).
CPD directors and
members George Shultz and James Woolsey
are the co-chairs of the six-member board of
directors. Other members are neo-conservatives
Kenneth Adelman, Rachel Ehrenfeld (president of
the Israel-focused American Center for Democracy),
and Clifford May. William van Cleave, one of the
few members of the current CPD who was also a
member of the second CPD, is a right-wing hawk.
Senators Jon Kyl (a Republican from Arizona)
and Joseph Lieberman (a Democrat from Connecticut
) serve as CPD's honorary co-chairmen, giving the
CPD the appearance of being a bipartisan
initiative.
Like the second CPD, the
current committee is largely a grouping of
national security militarists and
neo-conservatives. Since its founding in mid-2004,
CPD has substantially increased its membership and
now includes an international wing. [1]
When asked about CPD's membership, Jeane
Kirkpatrick said the committee's members were
largely "friends of mine" and that "a number of
the people involved in it are also members of
Freedom House", a neo-con-led human-rights
organization on whose board of trustees
Kirkpatrick sits and of which James Woolsey is
chairman.
Several members of the current
CPD were also members of the second incarnation:
Max Kampelman, Midge Decter, Norm Podhoretz, Peter
Rosenblatt and William Van Cleave.
Nominally non-partisan, CPD III includes
several liberal hawks, notably Joseph Lieberman,
Stephen Solarz and Dave McCurdy, but is
overwhelmingly a committee of neo-conservatives,
former Republican officials, wealthy business
executives and military-industrial complex
figures.
Offshoot of the Foundation for
the Defense of Democracies Although CPD III
was officially launched on July 20, 2004, it was
listed by the Foundation for the Defense of
Democracies (FDD) as the co-sponsor of a June 16,
2004, symposium on "Iraq's Future and the War on
Terrorism". In its press release, FDD described
CPD as a "venerable Cold Warrior group, now in the
process of being recreated".
CPD is
closely interlinked with FDD. Clifford May, FDD's
president, directs CPD's policy committee. FDD's
three board members - Steve Forbes, Jack Kemp and
Jeane Kirkpatrick - are also CPD members. Three of
FDD's four "distinguished advisers" - James
Woolsey, Newt Gingrich and Joseph Lieberman - are
CPD members. Woolsey is CPD's co-chair, while
Lieberman is an honorary co-chair.
The two
groups with overlapping directors have cooperated
in hosting two other forums, but FDD apparently
provides all the financial and logistical support
for those meetings.
FDD and CPD
cosponsored a "World War IV: Why We Fight, Whom We
Fight, How We Fight" symposium on September 29,
2004. According to the FDD news release: "The Cold
War is now being called by some 'World War III'
because it was global, had an ideological basis,
involved both military and non-military actions,
required skill and the mobilization of extensive
resources, and lasted for years. Today's 'war on
terrorism' has the same elements, hence a broader
name, 'World War IV'." Speakers included prominent
neo-cons Norman Podhoretz, James Woolsey, Eliot
Cohen, Rachel Ehrenfeld and Paul Wolfowitz.
On January 13, 2005, FDD sponsored a
conference on "Propaganda & Terrorism: Policy
Options for the War of Ideas". FDD's release makes
no mention of CPD, but CPD includes in its list of
publications a report whose title is the name of
the FDD conference - although CPD says the report
is a product of its January 13, 2005, conference.
Shaky start Accompanying the
official launch of the CPD at a Washington, DC,
press conference on July 20, 2004, were three
full-page ads in the New York Times, the
Washington Post and the Washington Times, in
addition to a Washington Post op-ed jointly
authored by CPD's honorary co-chairs, senators
Lieberman and Kyl.
In "The present danger"
op-ed, Lieberman and Kyl likened the war against
terrorism to the Cold War: "The September 11,
2001, terrorist attacks awoke all Americans to the
capabilities and brutality of our new enemy, but
today 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 differed in some ways from the current
war against Islamist terrorism. But America's
freedom and security, which each has aimed to
undermine, are exactly the same."
Like the
previous CPDs, the current committee describes the
present danger as having both domestic and foreign
manifestations. Lieberman and Kyl, apparently
concerned about the rising anti-war movement and
the criticism of the war by the realists and
traditional conservatives, wrote: "The leaders of
the Democratic and Republican parties have so far
stood firm in their commitment to finish the job
in Iraq and to fight to victory the war on
terrorism. But that bipartisan consensus is coming
under growing public pressure and could fray in
the months ahead. Although the tide is turning in
the war on terrorism, a political undertow in this
country could wash out our recent gains. We must
not let this happen."
At the FDD-organized
and -financed forum a month earlier, Lieberman had
also indicated that the principal "present danger"
facing the country was the domestic backlash
against the war in Iraq. According to Lieberman,
"The terrorists can never defeat us militarily.
But they can divide us and defeat us politically
if the American people become disappointed and
disengaged, because they don't appreciate and
support the overriding principles that require us
to take military action. The same, of course, is
true for our allies in Europe, Asia and throughout
the Muslim world. They need to better understand
and embrace our purpose and what it means for
them."
At the official launch, former CIA
director Woolsey said that CPD aimed to combat
what he called "a totalitarian movement
masquerading as a religion". He said, "We
understand very well that this time, the danger
that we must address is a danger to the United
States but also a danger to democracy and civil
society throughout the world, and it is very much
our hope to be of support and assistance to those
who seek to bring democracy and civil society to
the part of the world, the Middle East extended,
to which this Islamist terror is now resonant in
and generated from."
Also speaking at the
press conference, Lieberman said CPD's objective
was "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".
Despite the
splashy media launch, CPD got off to a shaky
official start. On its second day, CPD managing
director Peter Hannaford was asked to resign from
the board after complaints by the Anti-Defamation
League and concerns by CPD members that Hannaford
was registered as a lobbyist for the nativist
Austrian Freedom Party, headed by the right-wing
nationalist Joerg Haider, who has spoken highly of
the orderly practices of the Third Reich.
Freelance journalist Laura Rozen, a close
observer of the neo-conservatives, published
information about Hannaford's international
lobbying work in her blog. Hannaford is a
communications specialist who runs his own
international PR firm and who was Reagan's top
communications official during his years as
governor of California and for his successful
presidential campaign in 1980.
Hannaford
stepped down as managing director, but stayed on
as CPD's senior counsel. He is well respected by
prominent neo-conservatives who are CPD members.
Midge Decter told the New York Sun that she had
the utmost respect for Hannaford. "I first came to
know him because he was a right-hand man of Ronald
Reagan," she said. "I cannot imagine Pete
Hannaford is anything but a firm and solid lover
of democracy." According to the Sun, R Emmett
Tyrell, the founding publisher of The American
Spectator and a member of CPD II, said that
Hannaford was a "great Reaganite" and a "wonderful
friend of freedom".
In January 2006, CPD
weighed in on Iran policy with a paper that called
for "regime change to be part of US policy".
According to CPD, "Most Americans would support
the United States joining with other countries to
initiate a limited military action to destroy
Iran's ability to make nuclear weapons." CPD based
this conclusion on a poll commissioned by the
Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.
At the press conference where the Iran
paper was released, CPD co-chair Woolsey said:
"The militant Islamists cannot be appeased; they
will wage war until they are stopped. We believe
that the US and international community should
energetically assist the millions of Iranians who
want a government that does not repress its own
people and threaten others." Also present at the
press conference were FDD's Clifford May, Senator
Jon Kyl, and Frank Gaffney of the Center for
Security Policy.
Countering the
'threat' of anti-war sentiment When CPD
announced its formation, Woolsey said: "The
committee intends to remain active until the
present danger is no longer a threat, however long
that takes."
If the present danger is
defined as increased criticism at home of the Bush
administration's "war on terrorism", then two
years after its formation, the present danger has
deepened. CPD has expanded its membership list,
but the number of policymakers and citizens
opposing the way the Bush administration has been
fighting the "war on terror" has risen
dramatically.
The "present danger" of
growing domestic dissent alarms CPD members. All
the more alarming to the neo-cons and the
pro-Israel hardliners in the CPD has been the
rising criticism that US policy in the Middle
East, including the escalating tensions with Iran,
has been driven by the US-based Israel lobby.
In this political context of mounting
criticism, the contemporary CPD faces more adverse
conditions in imposing its agenda. The first CPD
closed down in 1953 after the country was well on
its way to having a bipartisan foreign policy in
support of Cold War militarization, and the second
CPD defined the policies that would then become
the guidelines for the Reagan foreign-policy team.
Although apparently enjoying access to deep
funding pockets, the prospects of CPD III
achieving similar success appear dim.
Like
its two predecessors, the current CPD aims to
create widespread public and policy community
support for higher military budgets and expanded
troop deployment to meet the "present danger". By
raising fears that the Soviet Union represented an
imminent threat to national security, the previous
CPDs succeeded in isolating and impugning the
credibility of the political leaders and public
intellectuals who favored constructive engagement
with the Soviet Union rather than a Cold War of
global militarization. In both cases, the CPDs
discredited the less politicized, more objective
"threat assessments" prepared by the CIA, the
State Department and the Pentagon.
The
third CPD also aims to raise the level of fear
among Americans by declaring that the United
States is immersed in World War IV, but has not
yet committed adequate resources to the global
battle. But after five years of exaggerated threat
assessments from the neo-conservatives and the
Bush administration - many of which have already
been publicly exposed, such as the weapons of mass
destruction and Saddam Hussein-Osama bin Laden
ties that proved baseless in Iraq - the CPD faces
a major challenge in winning acceptance for its
call for the US government to expand its
misdirected "war on terrorism" and its missionary
crusade to spread "freedom and liberty".
The new Committee on the Present Danger
may be the first CPD that is unable to sell its
alarmist version of the "present danger".
Note 1. Among the most
well-known members, besides its board members,
are: Morris Amitay, William Brock (former
secretary of labor), Elliot Cohen, Henry Cooper,
Midge Decter, Steve Forbes, Frank Gaffney, Jeffrey
Gedmin, Newt Gingrich, Bruce Jackson, Max
Kampelman, Phyllis Kaminsky, Jack Kemp, Jeane
Kirkpatrick, Charles Kupperman, Clifford May,
Robert McFarlane (former national security
adviser), Edwin Meese (former US attorney
general), Joshua Muravchik, Laurent Murawiec,
Michael Novak, Daniel Pipes, Norman Podhoretz,
Peter Rosenblatt, Nina Shea, Stephen Solarz, Ben
Wattenberg, Elie Wiesel (chairman of US Holocaust
Memorial) and Dov Zakheim.
Other members
include: Roland Arnall (chairman of Ameriquest
Capital Corp), Mark Benson (president of APCO
Insight), Walter Berns (American Enterprise
Institute scholar), Bradford Belzak (private
liaison to Homeland Security Department), Ilan
Berman (vice president for policy of American
Foreign Policy Council), Barry Blechman (chairman
of Henry L Stimson Center), Peter Brookes
(Heritage Foundation), Jacquelyn Davis (president
of National Security Planning Associates), Candace
de Russey (Hudson Institute), Viola Herms Drath
(National Committee on American Foreign Policy),
Richard Fairbanks (Center for Strategic and
International Studies), John Fonte (Center for
American Common Culture), Joseph diGenova (former
US attorney), Alvin Felsenberg (Institute of
Politics at Harvard University), Benjamin Gilman
(former chairman of House Committee on
International Relations), Lawrence Haas (former
vice presidential communications director),
Jeffrey Gayner (chairman of Council for America),
Farid Ghadry (Reform Party of Syria), Victor Davis
Hanson (Hoover Institution) and Jerome Hauer.
The list continues: Amoretta Hoeber
(defense consultant), Michael Horowitz (Hudson
Institute), Peter Huessy (National Defense
University Foundation), Kenneth Jensen (American
Committee on Foreign Relations, executive
director), John Joyce (International Construction
Institute, president), John Kester (former special
assistant to defense secretary), Robert Kogod
(Hartman Institute, Jerusalem), Anne Korin
(Institute for the Analysis of Global Security),
Robert Lieber (Georgetown University), Gal Luft
(Institute for Analysis of Global Security),
Barton Marcois (former principal deputy secretary
for policy at Department of Defense), Dana
Marshall (former international economic affairs
adviser to vice president), Dave McCurdy (former
chairman of House Intelligence Committee), Brett
McGurk (former attorney for Coalition Provisional
Authority), Philip Merrill (chairman of
Capital-Gazette Communications), Hedieh Mirahmadi,
Khaleel Mohammed (San Diego State University),
John Norton Moore (former chairman of US Institute
for Peace), Powell Moore (former assistant
secretary of defense for legislative affairs),
Laurie Mylroie (American Enterprise Institute),
Chet Nagle (intelligence consultant), Kamal Nawash
(Free Muslim Coalition Against Terrorism,
president), Mark Palmer (former deputy assistant
secretary of state), Robert Pfaltzgraff (Fletcher
School of Law and Diplomacy) and James Phillips
(Heritage Foundation).
And more ... Bruce
Ramer (former president of American Jewish
Committee), Samantha Ravich (Long Term Strategy
Project), Nina Rosenwald (chairman of Middle East
Media Research Institute), Lieutenant-General
Edward Rowny (Iran Policy Committee), Sol Sanders
(former international editor of Newsweek), George
Sawyer (J F Lehman), Pedro Sanjuan (former
assistant secretary of the interior for
international affairs), Richard Shifter (former
assistant secretary of state), Peter Schweizer
(Hoover Institution), John Shenefield (former
associate US attorney general), Ron Silver (film
director, producer), Max Singer (Hudson
Institute), Rob Sobhani (international energy
specialist), Jeffrey Stein (Peyton Investments),
James Strock (Pacific Research Institute),
Victoria Toensing (former deputy assistant
attorney general), Robert Turner (Center for
National Law), Charles Walker (former deputy
secretary of the treasury), John Whitehead
(chairman emeritus of Brookings), Michael Wildes,
George Whitman (former chairman of National
Institute for Public Policy) and Francisco
Wong-Diaz.
CPD's international members
are: Jose Maria Aznar (former prime minister of
Spain), Edmond Aphandery (chairman of Caisse
Nationale de Prevoyance), Vaclav Havel (former
president of the Czech Republic), Akbar Atri
(member of the central committee of Takhim Vahdat,
described by CPD as "Iran's largest student
democratic organization"), Saad al-Din Ibrahim
(chairman of Egypt's Center for Development),
Enrique Krauze (Mexican historian), Helen Szamuely
(British political scientist), and David
Pryce-Jones (senior editor of National Review).
Tom Barry is policy director of
the International Relations Center and is the
author or editor of numerous books on US foreign
policy.
