Welcome back to the fight

Tuesday’s Capitol Hill press conference announcing that the Committee on the Present Danger (CPD) is back is great news. This is especially so for all who recall the historic commitment that organization made to the Nation’s past death-struggle against a hostile ideology with global ambitions – Soviet communism – and who understand that we currently confront a no-less-dangerous ideology in Islamofascism.

First in the 1950s, and then again in the 1970s, the CPD helped promote public appreciation of the danger posed by the USSR’s ambitions and military capabilities. During the second of these incarnations, it played a decisive role in shaping the national security platform and policies that would be adopted first by Candidate and then by President Ronald Reagan.

The Center for Security Policy is particularly pleased that so many of its colleagues and associates are playing prominent roles in the new CPD. The Honorary Co-chairmen of its National Security Advisory Council (NSAC) – Senator Jon Kyl (R-AZ) and former Director of Central Intelligence R. James Woolsey – are respectively an Honorary Co-chair (together with Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-CT)) and Chairman of the now-resuscitated Committee on the Present Danger. In addition, many members of the Center’s NSAC, including the Center’s President Frank J. Gaffney, Jr., are among the founding members of this incarnation of the CPD.

Particularly heartening is the prospect that the Committee on the Present Danger will, once again, serve as a vehicle for engaging sober-minded Democrats like Senator Lieberman, Director Woolsey and former Rep. Steven Solarz (D-NY), in the bipartisan advocacy of robust national security policies. This role is in the tradition of that played several decades ago by the late, great Senator Henry M. "Scoop" Jackson (D-WA), who was a driving force behind the CPD and its work.

The staff and associates of the Center for Security Policy – a team we call the "Special Forces in the War of Ideas" – look forward to working with the "big guns" of the Committee on the Present Danger and to helping to bring them effectively to bear in today’s fight to the death against terrorists animated by radical Islam.