Presenting... the present danger
Slipping quietly into the policy mix last week was a resurrected Committee on the Present Danger. This was a name that goes back before my time. Initially it comes from the McCarthy era. The group founded itself to declare the communist red peril to the citizens of our free land. Wake up America, there are bolsheviks under your bed. This Committee is actually the third to hold that name, call it CPD version iii. There is a legacy of wing nut-ism holding them all together. Why let a good name with such cachet go to waste. Media Transparency picked up on this and provide a link to a brief history of this group through its i and ii versions
IRC | RightWeb | Group Watch: Committee on the Present Danger , describing the origins of the second incarnation this site clams: revitalization of the CPD grew out of an independent group called Team B. Team B was authorized in 1976 by President Gerald Ford and organized by then-CIA chief, George Bush. The purpose of Team B was to develop an independent judgment of Soviet capabilities and intentions. . Its worth noting that Paul D. Wolfowitz was part of the B Team who were dedicated to proving the Soviet Union was on the very threshold of world domination.
With this third incarnation it's worth asking what this group does that American Enterprise Inst., or Bill Kristol's favored group the Project for the New American Century doesn't do. A recent piece in the American Prospect answers this by perceiving a split among the neocons due to fallout over the Iraq affair and relative assessments of Bremmer, the adminstration, Mr. Chalabi, and other principles
Matthew Yglesias, "Present Dangers", The American Prospect Online, Jul 27, 2004. After reading through that I went back and reread David Brooks' Op-ed in the NYT from last week that left me shaking my head at the time War of Ideology He thinks he sees something in the 9/11 commission's report that he can get behind:
It seems like a small distinction - emphasizing ideology instead of terror - but it makes all the difference, because if you don't define your problem correctly, you can't contemplate a strategy for victory.
When you see that our enemies are primarily an intellectual movement, not a terrorist army, you see why they are in no hurry. With their extensive indoctrination infrastructure of madrassas and mosques, they're still building strength, laying the groundwork for decades of struggle... As an ideological movement rather than a national or military one, they can play by different rules. There is no territory they must protect. They never have to win a battle but can instead profit in the realm of public opinion from the glorious martyrdom entailed in their defeats.
Brooks longs for the 'x' factor - referring to George Keneens post world war ii declaration of a generations long multi faceted battle that he saw opening against the steely implacible ideology of international communism. the bigger fight is with a hostile belief system that can't be reasoned with but can only be "destroyed or utterly isolated. The commissioners don't say it, but the implication is clear... scholars who really know the Islamic world are often blind to its pathologies. They are so obsessed with the sins of the West, they are incapable of grappling with threats to the West...We also need to mount our own ideological counteroffensive...We need to set up the sort of intellectual mobilization we had during the cold war
A statement one actually finds in the 9/11 report - Vague goals match an amorphous picture of the enemy. Al Qaeda and other
groups are popularly described as being all over the world, adaptable, resilient,
needing little higher-level organization, and capable of anything. It is an image
of an omnipotent hydra of destruction.That image lowers expectations of government effectiveness.
It lowers them too far. Our report shows a determined and capable group of
plotters.Yet the group was fragile and occasionally left vulnerable by the marginal,
unstable people often attracted to such causes.The enemy made mistakes.
The U.S. government was not able to capitalize on them. (p. 17 911 report executive summary)
This notion that a call to arms has been sounded that a new war is being brought forth. An existential ideologic conflict to give us direction and purpose. An enemy to disperse all our unbeliefs upon especially those we fear to see in ourselves. It seems to be a willful stretch of the situation . There was an article in the Washington Post's Sunday Opinion pages a couple of months ago - itself a reprint from the Boston Review Endgame: Conservatives after the cold war. In this article Corey Robins interviewed elder members of the neoconservative guard, (William Buckley, Irving Kristol), and found them dissatisfied with the nineties and the self-absorbed petty pleasures of the business and consuming class. Yearning for the frisson of empire, acquiring it, keeping it. To save themselves from boredom and listless slumber. It is a perfect characture of the possiblities of human life driven by a ghastly and false view of history .
Another article by Stefen Halper and Jonathan Clarke Neoconservativism and the American Future (also at Alternet as Axis of Disorder) looks at the Neoconservativism and see a movement larger and more powerful than a single affair. From this view it is likely it will adjust and cleave this failure from itself and continue to dominate the dialogue of America's foreign dealings. This article draws on a recent book by Walter Russell Mead Power, Terror, Peace, and War: America's Grand Strategy in a World at Risk
which examines in detail the historical demographic and intellectual roots of the missionary zeal the Wilsonian idealists that are the neoconservative vanguard express (I read a few chapters of this book when it came to the library last month). The authors of the Open Democracy piece, conservatives, regard this as a problematic cyclical tendency of American foreign policy.
This opens the possiblity that the revived Committee on the Present Danger may represent a pragmatic adjustment to neo-conservativism, which while not incompatible with a vehicle to continue the call for regime change across the axis of evil, may be more inclined to choose courses that are as amicable to America's interests in result, as they are in intent. Which cannot be said of the war in Iraq
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