Phil Taylor's papers
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BACK TO : PROPAGANDA AND THE GWOT Year 3 - 2004 (mainly Iraq)
Cold warriors return for war on terrorism by James Kirchick 
The Hill, June 30, 2004 Cold warriors return for war on terrorism By James Kirchick Cold War hawks are resurrecting a decades-old group to lobby for a harder line against terrorist organizations and rogue states. The Committee on the Present Danger (CPD), a coalition of foreign- and defense-policy experts originally organized in 1950 and re-formed in 1976, will soon undergo its third incarnation under the leadership of Peter Hannaford, a communications consultant and adviser to President Ronald Reagan's presidential campaigns. Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.) will serve as one of the committee's honorary co-chairmen, and addressed a conference on Iraq that the committee co-sponsored two weeks ago. Former Director of Central Intelligence James Woolsey will also be a member. "We saw a parallel" between the threats posed by the former Soviet Union and terrorism, Hannaford said. Aside from Lieberman and his yet to be announced co-chair, the membership will be comprised of people who are "not actively in government," Hannaford said. The CPD plans to officially announce its re-creation in the coming weeks. However, it remains unclear how the bipartisan group will mesh in the escalating partisan environment surrounding anti-terrorism efforts and whether it will advocate preemptive strikes against nations that have ties to terrorist organizations. The new committee will certainly bear the hawkish credentials of its predecessors. Many of its members were strong supporters of the Iraq War, most notably Lieberman and Woolsey. Sources indicate that the new CPD will support intensifying U.S. public diplomacy that extols the virtues of the West combined with a harder line towards anti-American dictators and terrorist groups. Hannaford said that the committee, through symposia, media campaigns and lobbying efforts, will espouse the doctrine that "the war on terror needs to be won." Asked if this mission is already being handled by conservative think tanks, Hannaford said, "I don't know any group that exclusively has that [mission] as its charge." He said the committee will again serve its historical function as "an advocacy organization," and has applied for 501(c)(4) tax status, allowing it to lobby Congress. John Gaddis, a Cold War scholar and professor at Yale University, questioned whether the Cold War mentality could be applied to the war on terror, saying, "It's going to depend on whom their target is, because the target was always clear [in the Cold War]. Are these guys supporting the neoconservative agenda of trying to promote democracy throughout the Middle East? If so, some of our own allies are the targets." Christopher Preble, director of foreign policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute and a founding member of the Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy, said, "The nature of the threat we are facing today is so dramatically different from what we faced in the Cold War&Osama bin Laden is not deterred by nuclear weapons." Cliff May, a former Republican strategist and president of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, said that what will distinguish the CPD from his group and other similar institutions is that it can lobby and "express [its] ideas in specific ways." Max Kampelman, a Democrat who worked for the State Department in the Reagan administration and was a founding member of the 1976 committee, has agreed to participate in the new group, but says that "the formulation of some form of a platform or program has not yet materialized." Jeane Kirkpatrick, who was Reagan's ambassador to the United Nations and who was also a member of the 1976 committee, said that the CPD's mission would become clearer "as events develop over the next months. Unfortunately, I think a significant number of those events are likely to concern terrorism. But they will also concern democracy-building." Kampelman added, "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." Kirkpatrick said the new committee is composed largely of "friends of mine," and that "a number of the people involved in it are also members of Freedom House," a bipartisan human-rights organization on whose board of trustees Kirkpatrick sits and of which Woolsey is chairman. Gary Schmitt, executive director of the Project for the New American Century, a neoconservative think-tank whose stated mission is to "promote American global leadership," was unaware of the CPD's reincarnation but said, "Certainly it would help put pressure on any administration to make sure they are thoughtful about carrying out what they say they are going to do and maintain public support in times of difficulty." The CPD has a long and fabled history, steming from the issuance of NSC 68 in 1950. That policy directive called on Congress to triple the defense budget in order to counter Soviet expansion. The second Committee on the Present Danger was formed in 1976 by hawks from both parties who believed that "détente [had] lulled everybody into complacency," according to Gaddis. The members were the original "neoconservatives," those former liberals who became disillusioned with the Democratic Party and advocated that the United States initiate an arms buildup during the Carter administration. Ronald Reagan was an original member of the committee, and brought many of his CPD colleagues into his administration. The committee included business and civic leaders as well as union heads like Lane Kirkland, then head of the AFL-CIO and Albert Shanker, then president of the American Federation of Teachers. "The one thing that these people have in common is a lasting concern with foreign affairs and U.S. involvement in the world," Kirkpatrick said of the committee's members. "None of us is an isolationist or ever has been." |