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The US is rife with War mongering power brokers turning a deaf ear to the people who pay the bills and loan their children to radical causes. Wake up America, take names, and vote these depraved, immoral butchers out of office come November.
The new CPD is led by honorary co-chairs Senator Joseph Lieberman, one of the few prominent neoconservatives in the Democratic Party,
and Republican Senator Jon Kyl, who has strong ties to right-wing evangelical organizations. In a July 20 article in the Washington Post introducing the group, Lieberman and Kyl wrote that the CPD was formed because the "bipartisan consensus is coming under growing public pressure and could fray in the months ahead."
The formation of the new CPD seems to confirm that neoconservatives are recognizing the crisis of credibility they have suffered due to the severe difficulties facing the occupation in Iraq, and have prepared a broad-based organization to advocate from outside the corridors of power. The very real prospect of a John Kerry presidency, in which neoconservatives are unlikely to occupy important positions, has combined with the sense that President George W.Bush has largely abandoned the unilateral and hyper-aggressive approach that characterized the build-up to the invasion of Iraq.
The addition of Senator Lieberman as a Democratic patron for the group is a crucial indicator of the need many neoconservatives now feel to expand beyond their home in the Republican camp. This is in fact the third incarnation of a "Committee on the Present Danger," the first being aimed at militarizing the confrontation with the Soviet Union in the 1950s, and the second taking an even more aggressive line on the cold war in the 1970s, led by hawkish Democratic Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson. By its very name, the new CPD recalls the original home of many neoconservatives in the Jackson camp of the Democratic Party.
Another CPD member, Laurie Mylroie of the American Enterprise Institute, has blamed the former Saddam Hussein regime not only for the attacks of September 11, 2001, but also for the first World Trade Center Bombing of 1993 and the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City by Timothy McVeigh in 1995. Old Washington hands recall, however, that until the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990, Mylroie was chiding the United States for not providing Iraq with sufficient military aid, and arguing it was in American interests that all power in Iraq be concentrated in Saddam Hussein's hands.
Not that the rest of CPD's membership, as represented on the organization's website, could be accused of understatement. The threat is "a unprecedented challenge to international peace and stability" (Peter Brookes) and "as potent a threat to our freedom as? communism" (Henry Cooper). The foe is "every bit as dangerous as a Hitler, Mussolini, Tojo, or Stalin" (Victor Hanson), "the greatest threat to the US homeland in nearly two centuries" (Ed Meese), and "the greatest threat this country has ever faced in its entire history" (Norman Podhoretz). Moreover, it is "an unconditional and existential threat not only to America and Israel, but also to Judeo-Christian culture" (William Van Cleave), and "what is at stake? is the survival of our civilization " (Stephen Solarz).
The CPD mission statement refers to "a global Islamist terror movement," but gives no clear definition of who or what is included in this beyond Al-Qaeda and its allies. The definition of "the threat" on CPD's website evinces further confusion, claiming that, "In the Middle East, Sunni extremists in Lebanon, the West Bank and the Gaza strip have organized into Asbat al-Ansar and the more widely known Hamas and Hezballah..." The last group, of course, is a Lebanese Shiite political organization, again raising the question of how little expertise and even basic knowledge will be informing CPD's efforts to "educate the American people about the threat posed by a global Islamist terror movement."
Perhaps even more ominously, CPD's statements continuously refer to "regimes that support" the terrorist movement, without mentioning any by name. The Daily Star invited CPD's communications director Geoff Freeman to identify these regimes, and he declined to do so, saying, "at this point the committee has not identified those regimes." "It's perfect for these guys," the leading Bush supporter told the Daily Star, "with formulations this vague it could be anyone, anywhere, anytime."
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