Missing Link: How Right-Wing Neo-Cons
Created `Democratic Leadership Council'

Democrats may be still suffering under the delusion that the Democratic Leadership Council—which brags that the "top four" Democratic Presidential candidates are "Blair Democrats" who supported the Iraq War—is something other than a right-wing Trojan Horse and protection racket for Vice President Dick Cheney, as Democratic Presidential pre-candidate Lyndon LaRouche has exposed. Some even think that the DLC wants to win the Presidency in 2004.

Au contraire! An ongoing investigation by EIR into the roots of the DLC, points to the evidence that it is out to destroy the Democratic Party of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The DLC is following the footsteps of its neo-conservative, war-mongering predecessor organizations of the 1970s: the Coalition for a Democratic Majority (CDM), founded in 1972 by the likes of Richard Perle, Midge Decter, Norman Podhoretz, Irving Kristol, and Jeane Kirkpatrick, among others; the Committee on the Present Danger (CPD), founded in 1976 by Richard Perle, Midge Decter, Norman Podhoretz, Irving Kristol, and Jeane Kirkpatrick, et al.; and the Committee for the Free World (CFW), founded in 1981 by exactly the same crew. Rounding out the picture, CFW's chairman was Dick Cheney's Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld.

Nowadays, the CDM/CPD/CFW are associated with the Republican Party—particularly with those neo-conservative devotees of Leo Strauss around the Cheney/Rumsfeld cabal. But these organizations are the direct antecedents to the Democratic Leadership Council, and CDM's veterans maintain close coordination with the DLC to ensure that the Democratic Party does nothing effectively to stop the imperial policy of pre-emptive war—even pre-emptive nuclear war—that the Cheney/Rumsfeld gang has laid out. The DLC, and its affiliates—the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) and the New Democratic Network (NDN)—are on a full-scale campaign to destroy every other faction in the Democratic Party, and silence criticism of the Iraq War.

The "missing link" between the "Democratic" DLC and the now-"Republican" CDM/CPD/CFW neo-cons, is the notorious Social Democrats-USA, (SDUSA), whose chairman, Penn Kemble, was the Executive Director of the Coalition for a Democratic Majority in 1972, until he brought in Richard Perle's underling Stephen Bryen to take his place. Bryen, who created the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) in the early 1980s, when he served as Perle's aide at the Department of Defense, is another leading member of the neo-conservative gang that wants to go to war against the entire Arab world in the name of anti-terrorism. Providing daily coordination between Perle and Bryen would be Joshua Muravchik, a fixture at nearly every American Enterprise Institute event—but also a leader of SDUSA since its creation.

Staying Behind as 'Democrats'

For his part, Kemble has been a neo-con insider since the 1960s, but in 1978-79, he worked directly with Cheney's Iraq warriors—Abram Shulsky of the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans, Elliott Abrams of the National Security Council, and Gary Schmitt of the Project for a New American Century—when they were all on the staff of Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.) By the 1980s, Kemble was deeply involved in the Project Democracy operations of Ollie North, and the Iran-Contra network that ran a covert gun- and drug-running operation out of the White House.

Kemble never joined the Republicans, but remained an executive with SDUSA, the perch from which he founded and managed a vast network of Project Democracy organizations, including the Institute for Religion and Democracy, Freedom House, the Foundation for Democratic Education, the Committee for the Free World, and Prodemca (Friends of the Democratic Center in Central America), which received funds from Ollie North. Kemble has also been on the boards of the League for Industrial Democracy (LID) and the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI), which is the Democratic Party's conduit for funding from the governmental National Endowment for Democracy (NED). The last is run by another SDUSA hand, Carl Gershman, who has also headed NDI since its creation in 1982.

The DLC and SDUSA both maintain extremely close links to Tony Blair's British "New Labour" party faction, and in parallel, are out to recreate a new version of the Coalition for a Democratic Majority in time for the 2004 elections. The battle cry for this effort is to follow the "strong defense" lead of the original CDM's heroes: the late Senators Henry "Scoop" Jackson (D-Wash.), and Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

In this, the DLC is a protection racket for the impeachable Dick Cheney, as LaRouche has charged; it is doing his dirty work in pressuring the Democratic Party to shut up about Cheney's role in foisting phony intelligence about Iraq in order to get the Iraq War.

The DLC has every reason to insist that the war was justified—they use the same phony intelligence sources that led to the scandals rocking London and Washington today (see National lead and International section).

The DLC and the Chicken-Hawks

In the Dec. 2, 2002 issue of Blueprint, the magazine of the DLC/PPI, Dr. Barry Rubin was brought in to "sell" the Iraq War to the Democrats and neutralize their opposition, with an article called "Why Saddam Should Go First." The article was used to reinforce the lie that Democrats had been crushed in the 2002 Congressional and Senate elections because of their questioning of the Iraq War policy in the October Congressional debate. In the same issue, Al From, DLC's Chief Executive Officer, raved against Democrats who opposed the war: "Democrats need to get the big things right. That means national security.... The President's first responsibility is as commander-in-chief.... Our nominee in 2004 must convince voters that he'll keep them safe. If he doesn't, nothing else will matter."

Who is Dr. Barry Rubin? He is one of the leading chicken-hawks at the center of the scandal in London over forged and plagiarized information used by Blair to start the war, and a close collaborator of Richard Perle and other Pentagon operatives who "cooked" the Iraq intelligence on the American side.

Rubin came to public light in February 2003, when Blair's press spokesman, Alastair Campbell, released a ridiculously "sexed-up" dossier warning of an imminent threat from Saddam Hussein's arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. The dossier turned out to be cooked up at a right-wing think-tank complex run by Rubin, an American-born Israeli and radical Likudnik with links to the office of Vice President Cheney. EIR reported then ("Iraq Dossier Hoax Was Cooked in Israel," EIR, Feb. 21): "Two days before Powell's UN appearance, 10 Downing Street issued a 16-page paper, 'Iraq: Its Infrastructure of Concealment, Deception, and Intimidation,' purportedly based on high-level British intelligence data. In fact, at least 11 of the 16 pages were lifted, verbatim, from an Israeli journal, Middle East Review of International Affairs, whose sole proprietor is Barry Rubin. The 11 pages were drawn from two articles, by Ibrahim al-Marashi and Robert Rabil, that appeared in the September 2002 edition of that journal.

"Al-Marashi's article, a profile of Iraqi intelligence, was drawn, largely, from Iraqi government documents confiscated during the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Al-Marashi, in turn, heavily footnoted his article to other, earlier stories published in Rubin's obscure online journal, by Amazia Baram, the journal's deputy editor. This was no bit of grammar school plagiarism. The public relations team that put together the Blair and Powell propaganda drivel were themselves linked to Rubin ... through Ahmed Chalabi's discredited and corrupt Iraqi National Congress (INC).

"Rubin issued a statement following the Downing Street dossier flap, taking full credit for the cooked intelligence report. His only complaint was that while the Blair government apologized to al-Marashi, they did not issue a similar public statement of regret to him and his journal."

EIR revealed that Rubin writes a regular column for the Jerusalem Post owned by neo-con financier, Lord Conrad Black, and that his Israeli-based think-tank is financed by leading Likud party "angels"—American Ronald Lauder, and the organized crime-linked financier Marc Rich, whose attorney for 15 years was Lewis "Scooter" Libby, now Cheney's chief of staff.

Rubin is also closely tied to the disinformation unit in the Pentagon, known officially as the Office of Special Plans (OSP), headed by former Moynihan aide, and familiarly as the "Chicken-hawk Intelligence Agency." On Feb. 4, after the British dossier that used his tainted information came out, Rubin joined his fellow chicken-hawks as a speaker at a Willard Hotel luncheon in Washington sponsored by Eleana Benador Associates, a New York City public relations firm that counts among its clients the neo-con Iraq War propaganda team. Other speakers were also Benador clients: then-Chairman of the Defense Policy Board Richard Perle (who worked with Deputy Defense Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and Undersecretary of Defense Doug Feith to create the OSP); Michael Ledeen; Frank Gaffney; Iraq-hater Laurie Mylroie; former UN weapons inspector Richard Spertzel; and former Iraqi weapons scientist Khidhir Hamza. The speakers demanded an early war against Iraq.

By Feb. 25, knowing that massive opposition was growing internationally against the war, the neo-cons went into action. Key to success was preventing an opposition—especially from Congressional Democrats—from taking steps. The DLC and SDUSA linked up to push the Iraq War to the Democrats, with a letter to President Bush. It was signed by Will Marshall, President of the DLC's Progressive Policy Institute; SDUSA's Penn Kemble; and the worst of the neo-conservative war-mongers, including the Defense Policy Board's James Woolsey; and American Enterprise Institute luminaries Max Kampelman, Michael Novak, Joshua Muravchik. Though the letter paid lip-service to winning "allies," it said, "We share the view that it is essential to bring Saddam Hussein's dictatorship in Iraq to an early end.... We must act alone if that proves necessary." Once again, the DLC, backed by its leading member, Sen. Joe Lieberman, was there to keep the opposition silent.

'What Would Scoop Do?'

In a May 21, 2003 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, Donna Brazile, the former campaign manager of the 2000 Gore-Lieberman campaign, and co-author Timothy Bergreen blasted the Democratic Presidential candidates for questioning the Iraq War "victory." Brazile, who based her op-ed on a speech she had delivered to the SDUSA conference, told Democrats, "We are AWOL on national security." To correct that, she maintained, Democrats must adopt the policies of "Sen. Scoop Jackson—the Democratic mentor of some of today's most prominent Republican hawks."

As EIR reported on July 4, Brazile—a member of the Democratic National Committee, which ostensibly makes all the major decisions about funding, policy, and program for Democratic candidates—has already forged a marriage with the Republican neo-cons at the think-tank called the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. Her colleagues there include the hard-core advocates of a "World War IV," such as James Woolsey and Newt Gingrich, both members of the Defense Policy Board.

Brazile's line was also pushed in a May 1 Washington Post op-ed called "The Blair Democrats: Ready for Battle," by DLC leader Will Marshall. He wrote, "The U.S.-led coalition's stunning success in liberating Iraq is undoubtedly a triumph for President Bush. But Karl Rove shouldn't get too giddy.... After all, four of the leading Democratic Presidential contenders—Rep. Dick Gephardt and Sens. Joseph Lieberman, John Kerry and John Edwards—not only voted to support the war but also joined British Prime Minister Tony Blair in demanding that Bush challenge the United Nations to live up to its responsibilities to disarm Iraq.... Like Bush, these Democrats did not shrink from the use of force to end Hussein's reign of terror. Like Blair, they saw the Iraq crisis as a test of Western resolve."

Few better exemplars exist to show that the DLC's "New Democrats" are "a second Republican Party." Brazile, Al From, Will Marshall, and the other DLC types who push the line that "after 9/11, security matters above all," are showing their roots—as hard-core neo-cons.

Jackson and Moynihan: The Missing Links

To show exactly what the DLC's and Brazile's invoking the legacy of Scoop Jackson means, a brief look at the 1970s, when the neo-conservatives in the Democratic Party grouped themselves into the Coalition for a Democratic Majority (CDM), is necessary. The CDM's two leading lights in Congress were the Democratic Senators Jackson and Moynihan. The Cold Warrior and fanatically pro-Israel Jackson remains the model for the DLC crowd today. The DLC's former President, Sen. Joe Lieberman declares he is proud to be identified as a " 'Scoop' Jackson Democrat." It was these two Senators' offices that housed the Leo Straussian "Children of Satan" behind the no-exit Iraq War.

From Jackson's staff came:

• Paul Wolfowitz, now Deputy Secretary of Defense and a leading Straussian chicken-hawk;
  
  
• Richard Perle (on Jackson's staff from 1969 until going into the Defense Department in 1981), and until his recent forced resignation, chairman of Rumsfeld's Defense Policy Board. It is reported that Perle maintains Democratic Party membership to this day, out of fealty to Scoop. Perle later brought along Doug Feith, now Rumsfeld's Undersecretary for Policy, who has been a Perle "groupie" since the late 1970s, largely due to Feith's family background deep in the terrorist movement founded by Zionist fascist Vladimir Jabotinsky. In the 1980s, Feith financed Perle through the International Advisers Inc., a firm in which Feith was the only stockholder;
  
  
• Frank Gaffney, who heads the Center for Security Policy, a "private" neo-con group which cheerleads for imperial wars and brutally anti-Palestinian policies;

From Moynihan's office came:

• Elliott Abrams, an Iran/Contra convict who now tries to shape Administration Middle East policy from the National Security Council staff;
  
  
• Abram Shulsky, who heads the Office of Special Plans under Feith in the Pentagon, which concocted fraudulent intelligence estimates used by the Administration to justify the Iraq War;
  
  
• Gary Schmitt, the head of the empire-promoting Project for a New American Century and a close collaborator of Shulsky. Schmitt worked under Roy Godson of the National Strategy Information Center in the early 1980s. Anti-LaRouche operative Godson was active in the CDM in the 1970s, narrowly escaped prosecution in the Iran-Contra scandals of the 1980s, and now is a consultant to Feith and Shulsky's Office of Special Plans.

Other leaders in the CDM were:

• Stephen Bryen, who became Executive Director of CDM and then of JINSA, after being kicked off the staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for passing classified Pentagon documents to Israeli officials.
  
  
• Penn Kemble, the first Executive Director of CDM, who paved the way for Bryen to take the job over.

In 1999, Norman Podhoretz, known as the "father" of neo-conservatism, wrote that the CDM was created to destroy the policies of 1972 Democratic Presidential nominee George McGovern in the Democratic Party, especially because of McGovern's opposition to the Vietnam War. Podhoretz even admitted that the CDM was a flop that "never got off the ground."

When Scoop Jackson failed to get 1976 Democratic nomination for President, the CDM neo-cons created the Committee on the Present Danger (CPD), a wildly right-wing operation that called for pre-emptive war against the Soviet Union, according to a lead article in an October 1976 issue of the LaRouche movement newspaper New Solidarity. The CPD leaders, including the same gang that had created the CDM, began to make their moves into the Republican Party, which was badly damaged after the Nixon Watergate disaster. From the CDM/CPD nexus, the group threw its weight behind Republican candidate Ronald Reagan, believing he could be controlled by a "neo-con" agenda. In January 1981, more than 30 members of the CPD—most of them Scoop Jackson Democrats—were given positions in the Reagan Administration. The New York Times said that the neo-cons of the CPD had succeeded in carrying out "a virtual takeover of the nation's national security."

To try to keep Reagan in line, move towards pre-emptive action against the Soviet Union, and foster the real neo-conservative agenda of turning America into an imperial force, the CDM creators spawned another, even more atrocious organization, known as the Committee for a Free World, headed by Podhoretz's wife, Midge Decter. In her founding speech, delivered at Leeds Castle, in England, Decter gave a version of the "end of history" and "purgative violence" ideas of French-based Straussian Alexandre Kojève.

Decter railed that military buildup was the only cure for a Soviet takeover being facilitated by "the self-deception of the West." To explain this, Decter said, "Why should men wish to be deceived? Because men are afraid. Because men are slothful. Because they grow arrogant, and in their arrogance, careless. Because they are subject to the forces of inertia." So taken with this dark vision was Sen. Patrick Moynihan that he had the Leeds Castle ravings entered into the Congressional Record for Nov. 4, 1981. The best way to avoid war, said Decter, "is non-appeasement." Irving Kristol, the "co-father" of the neo-cons, and a co-founder of CFW, similarly noted, "our Marines are not just for parades."

The Committee for a Free World should be understood as the umbrella that gathers all of the sections of the coalition that comes under the definition of the fascist world movement known as Synarchism. Included in the "400 scholars" of the CFW are all of the neo-conservatives of both the Democrats and Republicans, including the founders and leaders of the Coalition for a Democratic Majority, and the Committee on the Present Danger. It also includes all of the leading political Straussians of the United States, Britain, and France. The CFW's head was France's Raymond Aron, Kojève's leading disciple. In addition, there are the two leading authors of the war against Islam, and the doctrine of the Clash of Civilizations, Samuel H. Huntington and Bernard Lewis. The Social Democratic left and its trade union apparatus was not missing, including SDUSA's Penn Kemble, the late Tom Kahn, Carl Gershman, Arch Puddington, and Seymour Martin Lipset—the neo-cons' resident "Senior Scholar" at the DLC.

The End of the DLC?

The Nietzschean description of man as a wretch, espoused by Decter, did not carry the day with Reagan Administration. There was another influence on Reagan—Lyndon LaRouche, who became a back channel for discussions between Reagan's White House and Moscow, over the adoption of the proposal LaRouche had authored for a space-based missile defense system, based on new physical principles of laser development. Most importantly, LaRouche's plan was for the joint, cooperative development of this defense system by the U.S.A and the U.S.S.R.; it was adopted by Reagan under the name of the Strategic Defense Initiative on March 23, 1983. It was the last thing that the neo-cons wanted to hear, and they worked unceasingly to kill the SDI program.

In a 1999 article about Clinton and the DLC, Norman Podhoretz said that the DLC was created as "a rebellion not unlike the old Coalition for a Democratic Majority." But it is no rebellion, but rather a Trojan Horse, as was the CDM. The DLC's own words prove LaRouche's assertion that the group—financed by right-wing foundations like the Lynne and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Kansas based Koch family, and organized crime-linked financier Michael Steinhardt is a protection racket for Cheney.

LaRouche has escalated against the DLC, with a mass campaign leaflet issued July 8, called, "LaRouche Was Right: Vice President Cheney Can Be Removed From Office Now!"

International observers are asking whether it is Cheney or Blair who will be the first to be toppled in the scandal over how the forged and phony intelligence on the Iraqi threat was foisted on a manipulable President and gullible public, and passed through Congress. The scandal can also bring down a third horse in the troika, the "Democratic" Leadership Council.