The Present Danger Is Neoconservative

July 23, 2004

President Bush’s neoconservatives have announced that they are relaunching the Committee on the Present Danger. The new CPD will be totally different from the original.

I was a member of the Committee on the Present Danger. It was a bipartisan private organization consisting largely of former presidential appointees who distrusted navet about Soviet intentions. One concern was that the US government, feeling pressured to reduce nuclear arms, would be outmaneuvered by the Soviets, who didn’t have similar pressures, with a strategic advantage for the Soviets being the result.

The members were patriots committed to liberty, not warmongers. Some of the neoconservative members talked about "rolling back" Soviet gains, but the majority of the members rejected this as a romantic impulse not worthy of discussion.

The committee’s main concern was that US capabilities not be rolled back more than, or in advance of, Soviet ones.

The relaunched CPD consists of neoconservatives who are, in effect, an unregistered lobby group for Israel’s Likud Party and its foreign policy. The purpose of the new CPD is to foment war against Islam.

Myself and others who sought to maintain a balanced perspective will not be included in the new committee. With its goal of wider war in the Middle East, the neocon CPD is itself the present danger.

The Best of Paul Craig Roberts

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration, associate editor and columnist for the Wall Street Journal, Business Week’s first outside columnist, columnist for the Scripps Howard News Service, contributor to the editorial page of the Los Angeles Times, and columnist for the main French and Italian newspapers, and for Creators Syndicate in Los Angeles. He served in numerous academic appointments in US universities and was  appointed to the William E. Simon Chair for Political Economy at Georgetown University’s Center for Strategic and International Studies where his colleagues were Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, James R. Schlesinger (one of his former professors), and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Thomas Moorer. His article, “How the Law Was Lost,” was published in the January 1999 Cardozo Law Review.