The War Party Gets Organized

A group of well-placed Republican activists are planning to launch a new organization to rally popular support for a war on Iraq. But a closer look at the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq reveals it to be just the latest addition to an incestuous web of rightwing front-organizations staffed and funded by a small but well-organized segment of the foreign-policy elite.

According to the mission statement, the new organization "will engage in educational and advocacy efforts to mobilize U.S. and international support for policies aimed at ending the aggression of Saddam Hussein and freeing the Iraqi people from tyranny." It also promises to "work beyond the liberation of Iraq to the reconstruction of its economy and the establishment of political pluralism, democratic institutions, and the rule of law."

An Echo Chamber of Hawks

The new Committee appears to be a spin-off of the Project for the New American Century, (PNAC) an umbrella group that consists mainly of neo-conservative Jews associated with the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and leaders of the Christian and Catholic Right, including former Education Secretary and moralist William Bennett and erstwhile presidential candidate Gary Bauer.

The president of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq is Randy Scheunemann, House Majority leader Trent Lott's former chief national-security aide who also worked as an adviser to Donald Rumsfeld on Iraq last year. And its chairman, Bruce P. Jackson, is a former vice president of Lockheed Martin who headed the Republican Party Platform subcommittee for National Security and Foreign Policy when Bush ran for president in 2000.

While both Scheunemann and Jackson previously worked with PNAC, another Committee member, Gary Schmitt, has served as its executive director since it was founded by two prominent neo-conservatives, William Kristol and Robert Kagan, in 1997.

PNAC's formidable reputation is based on its extraordinary influence over the Bush foreign policy. The group's recommendations, issued in the form of a series of open letters to Bush since Sept. 20, 2001, have anticipated to a remarkable degree how this administration's policy, especially with respect to Iraq and Israeli-Palestinian Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in the Middle East, has evolved over the past 14 months.

The source of PNAC's power is hardly a secret. Its charter members included: Dick Cheney and his top national-security assistant, I. Lewis Libby; Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and four of his chief aides, including Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. Founding members also included half a dozen other rightwing political appointees in senior policy positions, such as Elliot Abrams and Under Secretary for Arms Control and International Security John Bolton. Richard Perle, the controversial chairman of Rumsfeld's Defense Policy Board (DPB) whose main base of operations is the conservative think-tank American Enterprise Insitute (AEI), is also closely associated with PNAC -- along with Lynne Cheney. It's a small world when you are a neo-con.

A Long History of Warmongering

This proliferation -- not to say duplication and redundancy -- of committees, projects and coalitions is a tried and true tactic of the neo-cons and their more traditional Republican fellow travelers, at least since the 1970s. The tactic appears largely to persuade public opinion that their hawkish policies are supported by a large section of the population when, in fact, these groups represent very specific interests and its views are held by a small, highly organized and well-disciplined elite.

In the 70s, many of the same people (or their fathers or fathers-in-law in Kristol's and Abrams' case) formed the Coalition for a Democratic Majority in opposition to the George McGovern wing of the Democratic Party. The same group later formed the more bipartisan Committee on the Present Danger (CPD), which campaigned against detente and arms control treaties during the Carter administration.