Dangers Present

COMMENT
DANGERS PRESENT
Issue of 2004-08-23, The New Yorker

With a trumpet blare of martial rhetoric, the Committee on the Present 
Danger has reconstituted itself again. The original Committee, founded 
in 1950, was made up of Cold Warriors who felt that the country was 
insufficiently alert to the dangers of Soviet Communism. The second 
version, founded in 1976, had the same purpose, but in retrospect it was 
most important as an early gathering of the foreign-policy wing of the 
intellectual movement that was becoming known as neoconservatism. The 
new Committee is also neoconservative, but its present danger is a 
different one. It is aimed, as its chief political sponsors, Senators 
Joseph Lieberman, of Connecticut, and Jon Kyl, of Arizona, put it in an 
op-ed piece in the Washington Post,at “international terrorism from 
Islamic extremists and the outlaw states that either harbor or support 
them.” The Senators went on to declare that “the world war against 
Islamic terrorism is the test of our time.”

The new Committee got off to a bumpy start when, on its second day of 
business, its managing director, the old Reagan hand Peter Hannaford, 
resigned after Laura Rozen’s blog, “War and Piece,” reported that he had 
been a paid Washington lobbyist for the Nazi-friendly Austrian Freedom 
Party. (Other former public officeholders on the Committee include Newt 
Gingrich, Jeane Kirkpatrick, and James Woolsey.) Nevertheless, the mere 
fact of the new Committee’s existence draws attention to a question 
that, under the strange bylaws of Presidential campaigns, will not be 
discussed between now and November, at which point it will abruptly 
become the most important question in the world: What happens next in 
the American war on terror? The formation of the new Committee, which 
shares a number of members with its predecessor, can be taken as a sign 
that the wider hawk community, which has dominated the foreign-policy 
debates of the past three years, isn’t about to disband. If George W. 
Bush loses, the hawks will be pre-positioned to offer vigorous 
opposition to a Kerry Administration. If Bush wins, they will rightly 
perceive the first few months after the election as a crucial 
opportunity to push, hard, for a post-Iraq series of foreign-policy 
moves. Bush has already publicly called, in effect, for regime change in 
Iran (the hawks’ new No. 1 target) and in the Palestinian Authority. 
Installed for a second time, he will surely give the hawks and their 
agenda a full hearing.

The first Committee on the Present Danger is so far back in time that 
nobody remembers it accurately, which is too bad, because it has a 
resonant and instructive history. Its chairman was James B. Conant, then 
the president of Harvard. Conant unquestionably wanted to alert the 
country as joltingly as possible to the Soviet threat. He was also 
trying to take anti-Communism out of the exclusive control of people 
like Senator Joseph McCarthy, who had begun his rampage a few months 
earlier. But the institutional life of the original Committee on the 
Present Danger turned on another issue entirely: Conant’s crusade for 
two years of required military service for all eighteen-year-old 
American males, with no exceptions.

Conant dreamed of an enormous standing Army of three to four million, 
stationed mainly in Germany, and he called for large tax increases to 
pay for it. The American troops would keep the Soviets’ westward 
expansionist impulses in check and decrease the importance of the 
nuclear option in American strategy, and universal service would knit 
the country together as it went through its grand struggle. Conant did 
not lose many battles in his long career as an eminent 
establishmentarian, but he lost this one: President Truman and the 
Pentagon, initially supporters of universal service, backed down at the 
crucial moment; the military draft that Congress created was nowhere 
near universal and had many exemptions; and the Committee on the Present 
Danger faded away.

The United States hasn’t had a full-dress national debate over who 
should serve in the military in the half century since, but the issue 
keeps resurfacing in unexpected ways. The reason John Kerry seems French 
to some people is that his father went to work for Conant in 1954, when 
the spirit of the Committee on the Present Danger was still strong 
enough to propel him to the post of the American high commissioner in 
Germany, and the ten-year-old future Democratic Presidential candidate’s 
parents packed him off to a Swiss boarding school, away from the front 
lines of the Cold War in West Berlin. Conant’s defeat in the battle over 
military service meant that by the time of the Vietnam War it was easy 
for well-connected people to avoid combat in the world struggle with 
Communism, which is why Kerry’s service was so unusual, and why 
President Bush, like most politicians of his and Kerry’s generation, was 
able to avoid it. In the packaging of both Presidential candidates—the 
unceasing references to Kerry’s combat duty in Vietnam, and Bush’s 
stagy, relentless emphasizing of his role as Commander-in-Chief—the 
absence of an all-inclusive draft is ever-present in the background. But 
it’s Kerry, who chose to fight, not Bush, who chose not to, who embodies 
the spirit of service of the original Committee, and it can’t be just 
coincidence that he has a personal connection to its chairman.

The ground force of the United States military is now tied up (in fact, 
overextended), mostly in Iraq. Nobody else seems to be willing to send 
forces to relieve the American soldiers. So, when the war on terror 
enters its next phase, who is going to fight it, and where is the money 
going to come from? The original Committee on the Present Danger 
candidly answered those questions about the Cold War, in the name of 
keeping the country unified in a time of crisis. Present-day American 
hawks, before the invasion of Iraq, chose instead to present the 
sacrifices of war as minimal: no conscription, no taxation, and 
(prospectively) very little price to be paid, even by Iraqis. That made 
the war an easier sell than it should have been and the postwar period 
more contentious than it had to be, not just in Iraq but also at home, 
where the mood is angry and mistrustful and military families in 
particular are feeling ill-used. So far, the new Committee on the 
Present Danger has said only that it doesn’t want the United States to 
retreat. It really ought to emulate its original predecessor by 
forthrightly stating the costs—human, financial, and diplomatic—of the 
aggressive actions it is going to be advocating, and to say who should 
bear them. If hawks continue to argue for a maximal foreign policy while 
implying that it will have a minimal price, and they win the argument, 
then the bitterness of today’s political atmosphere will soon seem like 
a distant Elysium of national harmony.

— Nicholas Lemann

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