Clear and present danger: the hawks relaunch a Cold-War relic.

• Author: Singh, Jaideep
• Position: 10 Miles Square

James Woolsey, the former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, is leaning over a speakerphone at the front of a small, ornate ballroom in Washington's Mayflower Hotel. "Hi George. It's Jim Woolsey." On the other end is George P. Schultz, former secretary of state under Ronald Reagan. Woolsey leans into the phone, speaking loudly and slowly, as people do when they're speaking to foreign tourists. "We've just gotten underway here at the Mayflower here in Washington," he tells Schultz, in a crowd of some four dozen think tank scholars, graduate students, interns, and journalists. "I've just announced that you've kindly agreed to serve as co-chairman of the Committee on the Present Danger ... I thought I'd see if you'd like to share any thoughts that you might have."

The disembodied voice of Schultz pipes in from California, where it's around 6 in the morning. "I welcome the reemergence of the CPD," says Schultz, sounding half-asleep. "In the early days, what the people [on the Committee] thought and said made a big difference." There is scattered applause.

It is a somewhat awkward beginning for "World War IV," as organizers have dubbed the first public gathering of the re-reformed CPD. The first Committee on the Present Danger was formed in 1950 by Cold War liberals who favored a policy of containment vis-a-vis the Soviet Union; the second installment came after Vietnam, launched by hawkish Democrats who felt their party had gone soft on the Reds, and who during the Reagan years had become active in Republican foreign-policy circles. Today, the latter group are known as neoconservatives. And like a graying '60s rock hand reuniting for one last tour, they've decided that the old hits still have some life in them.

The committee relaunched (again) last summer, heralding its return with full-page advertisements in The New York Times and The Washington Post, a 30,000 word essay by Norman Podhoretz in the neocon flagship journal Commentary,, and a public statement of purpose signed by more than 40 mostly right-leaning foreign-policy luminaries, among them some of the leading proponents of the Iraq war. Their mission? To "educate free people everywhere about the threat posed by global radical Islamist and fascist terrorist movements; to counsel against appeasement of terrorists; and build support for a strategy of victory against this menace to freedom."

But even as the new present danger neatly replaces the old one, it's obvious there have...