Wednesday, January 2, 2008
- LPR Session Speaker
Frank Gaffney, a former Reagan administration official who got his start working under Richard Perle on the staff of Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson (D-WA) in the 1970s, is a prominent neoconservative hardliner whose Center for Security Policy (CSP) serves as a clearinghouse for information and analyses that promote controversial weapons programs, a Likudnik line on Mideast peace issues, and an expansive "war on terror" targeting "Islamofascists" (a popular Gaffney term) throughout the Middle East.
Despite his often extremist views, Gaffney is frequently cited in the press as an "expert" on U.S. foreign policy, appearing regularly on the BBC and other radio and TV broadcasts. He is also a prolific writer, having published in most major media outlets and opinion journals, including the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The New Republic, Washington Post, New York Times, Christian Science Monitor, Los Angeles Times, National Review, Newsday, and Commentary magazine.
Gaffney has also supported a long line of rightist and neoconservative advocacy groups and research institutes. He was a founding member of the Project for the New American Century, a neocon-led letterhead group formed in 1997 by William Kristol and Robert Kagan to champion a "Reaganite" foreign policy based on military strength and an interventionist overseas agenda. Gaffney is also a contributing expert for the Israel-based Ariel Center, which maintains a number of close links to rightist pro-Israel groups in the United States, and is a member of the Committee on the Present Danger (CPD), the hawkish anti-communist Cold War-era group that was revived after the 9/11 terrorist attacks to champion the war on terror. He is an adviser for the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, created after 9/11 with the purported mission of "promoting pluralism, defending democratic values, and fighting the ideologies that drive terrorism," and was an adviser to the now largely defunct Americans for Victory over Terrorism, created in 2002 by a William Bennett-led group of hardliners and neoconservatives.
Gaffney's views on U.S. foreign policy were shaped during the formative years of the neoconservative political faction in the early 1970s, when some disaffected liberals rallied around Sen. "Scoop" Jackson, a hardline Democrat known for his combative support of Israel and sharp anti-communism. When Jackson failed to garner support for his presidential election campaign in the mid-1970s, many of his disaffected liberal followers (who were derisively tagged as "neoconservatives" by left-leaning political figures) joined the Republican Party.
After the presidential victory of Ronald Reagan, Gaffney joined the Pentagon, where he served as an aide to then-Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle. Because of his pugnacity, especially toward State Department officials, Gaffney earned the moniker "Perle's Bulldog." After Perle resigned in 1987, Gaffney was nudged out of the Pentagon by Perle's replacement Frank Carlucci. Gaffney subsequently created the Center for Security Policy, which counts among its advisers an impressive list of retired military brass and elite public policy figures.
Two months prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Gaffney predicted during an interview for "Four Corners," an investigative TV news program of Australian Broadcasting Network, "I believe that when you find, as you will I hope shortly, that the Iraqi people welcome the end of this horrible regime, even if it comes at some further expense to themselves, knowing as they do that the alternative is more of the horror that they've lived under for the past two or three decades. Ah you'll see I think an outpouring of appreciation for their liberation that will make what we saw in Afghanistan recently pale by comparison. You'll see, moreover, evidence in the files and the bunkers that become available to our military, evidence not only of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction programs and his future ambitions for their use perhaps and for aggression against his neighbors, but also, I would be willing to bet, evidence of his past complicity with acts of terror against the West, perhaps more generally but certainly against the United States which in turn I think will further vindicate the course of action that this president is courageously embarked upon" ("Interview with Frank Gaffney," Four Corners, February 20, 2003).
Gaffney has frequently invoked the notorious Team B exercise of the mid-1970s—during which a team of outside analysts reinterpreted CIA intelligence regarding the Soviet threat to the United States—as a model for future threat assessment efforts. Ignoring the fact that most experts agree that Team B misrepresented the Soviet threat, Gaffney has repeatedly called for establishing a new Team B, most famously in 1990 after the Soviet threat had all but vanished.
Gaffney was the lead author of War Footing: Ten Steps America Must Take to Survive and Prevail in the War for the Free World. Among the other authors included in this 2005 book published by the Naval Institute Press are James Woolsey, General Tom McInerney, General Paul Vallely, Alex Alexiev, Andrew McCarthy, Claudia Rosett, Michael Rubin, Daniel Gouré, and two CSP scholars, Caroline Glick and Michael Waller.