Center for Security Policy

Center for Security Policy is a Washington-based organization set up by the hardline neoconservative Frank Gaffney, who worked in the defence department during the Ronald Reagan era. According to Jim Lobe, it is a "a small think tank funded mainly by U.S. defence contractors, far-right foundations, and right-wing Zionists".^[1] It operates with the tagline 'promoting peace through strength', by which they appear to mean that global US dominance is the route to peace.

The Center states its mission as follows:

To identify challenges and opportunities likely to affect American security, broadly defined, and to act promptly and creatively to ensure that they are the subject of focused national examination and effective action.^[2]

The Center has run campaigns and research on the subjects of nuclear deterrents, the war of ideas, weapons in space, Islamism and terror, among others.^[3] Indeed Frank J. Gaffney Jnr describes his Center for Security Policy as "the special forces in the war of ideas"^[4], stating that it has the advantage over a think tank of not being "slow and unwieldy" and being "able to turn around a product in a matter of hours".^[5]

History

1976-1988

Important in itself, the Committee on the Present Danger’s (CPD) second incarnation in the 1970s and early 1980s was an extremely important predecessor to the Center for Security Policy. Set up as an independent and not-for-profit organisation, it was to assess the Soviet Union’s capabilities and threat to the United States in a non-partisan way. The group was originally called ‘Team B’ in opposition to the ‘Team A’ which did this job for the CIA, and had a political base through the Coalition for a Democratic Majority which was founded to try and fight back against any concessions made by the Democrats to the Soviet Union with regards to Foreign Policy. In 1976, this group helped set up the Committee for Present Danger to put pressure on Democrat President Jimmy Carter. The parallels with groups such as the Center for Security Policy can be shown by looking at who have been members of both – Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and even Ronald Reagan in 1979.

1988-1992

In 1987, Frank Gaffney broke with the Reagan administration over its decision to pursue treaties that aimed for nuclear arms reduction in cooperation with the Soviet Union. Gaffney argued against this policy and continued to push for a hard-line, anti-Soviet rhetoric and the continued buildup of nuclear weapons. The following year he founded the Center for Security Policy, basing it loosely on the Committee on the Present Danger, which had taken up the same aggressive opposition to nuclear arms reduction. Gaffney and his colleagues were quick to criticise the Republican President for moving towards liberal governance and preferred to push claims about the level of threat posed to the United States by the Red Menace and the need to possess a much larger nuclear arsenal than that of their rival.

1992-2000

During the Carter and Clinton administrations, the group who formed the basis for the Center for Security Policy, the neoconservatives, found themselves in opposition to a Democratic administration with different foreign policy aims and methodologies. Along with the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), the CSP became the main bedrock of shadow defence policy during the 1990s,^[6] a time when the group helped to bring the militarisation of space from the realm of science fiction to almost reality. One of their elaborate claims throughout the 1990s resulted in support for the newly created Project for a New American Century, in which a letter was signed by several prominent CSP members, among others, and sent to President Clinton to urge him to attack Iraq due to the “scourge of Saddam and the weapons of mass destruction that he refuses to relinquish.” ^[7] Gaffney was also proud of his group’s involvement in both the Rumsfeld Missile Commission and the Rumsfeld Space Commission which both suggested that the United States was under far more of a threat than previously suggested and, of course, than it realistically was. Gaffney has been known to describe his baby, the CSP, as the “Dominos Pizza of the policy business”^[8] due to its speed at being responding to any situation with a demand and suggestion for policy, usually of a hard-line, neoconservative nature.

2000-present

When George W. Bush, himself a hard-line neoconservative, was elected in the year 2000, members of the Center for Security Policy gained important positions in the administration. Frank Gaffney, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and John Bolton are all names that have become synonymous with the neoconservative agenda and aggressive "War on Terror" foreign policy that has been a feature of the world in the past 8 years, providing much work and profit to companies such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin. The events of September 11, 2001 gave the Center for Security Policy a new impetus to push both its war of ideas and its idea of “America the vulnerable”, building on its "educational video" of 1998 with the same name,^[9] and through Gaffney and the CSP’s network of members throughout the administration. Indeed, when Donald Rumsfeld addressed the ‘Keeper of the Flame’ banquet in November 2001 he said of Gaffney, "If there was any doubt about the power of your ideas, one only has to look at the number of Center associates who people this administration — and particularly the Department of Defense — to dispel them."^[10] He made this statement in front of a banner proclaiming CSP’s ominous motto of “Peace Through Strength”, suggesting that the CSP was influential in the early stages of the supposed “War on Terror”.