[Peace-discuss] New Islamist is but Old Communist writ Large...

[C. G. Estabrook]

[...an example of what a friend of mine calls "quoting from memory."
Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour...  --CGE]

	Neocons Revive Cold War Group 
	by Jim Lobe <Antiwar.com> 
	July 21, 2004

<http://www.antiwar.com/lobe/?articleid>=3075

A bipartisan group of 41 mainly neoconservative 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 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 senators Joseph Lieberman, a neoconservative
Democrat who was former Vice President Al Gore's running mate in 2000, and
Jon Kyl, a Republican from Arizona with strong connections to the
Christian Right.

In a joint column published 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 reestablishing 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 neoconservatives 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 (CSP), include CSP
President Frank Gaffney, Charles Kupperman, William Van Cleave, and Dov
Zakheim, who just stepped down as an undersecretary of defense under
Rumsfeld.

Board members or fellows of several other right-wing or mainly
neoconservative 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 former 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 U.S. military supremacy.

CPD-2, which was officially launched immediately after the election of
President Jimmy Carter (1977-81), was created as a coalition of
neoconservatives - 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 (1969-1974) and Gerald Ford (1974-77).

During the Carter administration, CPD-2 essentially 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 less
than 46 CPD members advised his transition team, and most of them were
absorbed into his administration, many at senior foreign-policy-making
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 antiwar 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 CDP-2 were also staunchly pro-Israeli at a
time when the Jewish state found itself increasingly isolated on the world
state.

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 U.S. Committee for a Free
Lebanon.

In addition, a husband-and-wife team that played a key role in the
evolution of neoconservatism from the late 1960s to the present and was
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-Sept. 11 foreign policy, called Present Dangers.

(Inter Press Service)