DANGERS PRESENT.(The Talk of the Town)

With a trumpet blare of martial rhetoric, the Committee on the Present Danger has reconstituted itself again. The original Committee, founded in 1950, was made up of Cold Warriors who felt that the country was insufficiently alert to the dangers of Soviet Communism. The second version, founded in 1976, had the same purpose, but in retrospect it was most important as an early gathering of the foreign-policy wing of the intellectual movement that was becoming known as neoconservatism. The new Committee is also neoconservative, but its present danger is a different one. It is aimed, as its chief political sponsors, Senators Joseph Lieberman, of Connecticut, and Jon Kyl, of Arizona, put it in an op-ed piece in the Washington Post, at "international terrorism from Islamic extremists and the outlaw states that either harbor or support them." The Senators went on to declare that "the world war against Islamic terrorism is the test of our time."

The new Committee got off to a bumpy start when, on its second day of business, its managing director, the old Reagan hand Peter Hannaford, resigned after Laura Rozen's blog, "War and Piece," reported that he had been a paid Washington lobbyist for the Nazi-friendly Austrian Freedom Party. (Other former public officeholders on the Committee include Newt Gingrich, Jeane Kirkpatrick, and James Woolsey.) Nevertheless, the mere fact of the new Committee's existence draws attention to a question that, under the strange bylaws of Presidential campaigns, will not be discussed between now and November, at which point it will abruptly become the most important question in the world: What happens next in the American war on terror? The formation of the new Committee, which shares a number of members with its predecessor, can be taken as a sign that the wider hawk community, which has dominated the foreign-policy debates of the past three years, isn't about to disband. If George W. Bush loses, the hawks will be pre-positioned to offer vigorous opposition to a Kerry Administration. If Bush wins, they will rightly perceive the first few months after the election as a crucial opportunity to push, hard, for a post-Iraq series of foreign-policy moves. Bush has already publicly called, in effect, for regime change in Iran (the hawks' new No. 1 target) and in the Palestinian Authority. Installed for a second time, he will surely give the hawks and their agenda a full hearing.

The first Committee on the Present Danger is so far back in time that nobody remembers it accurately, which is too bad, because it has a resonant and instructive history. Its chairman was James B. Conant, then the president of Harvard. Conant unquestionably wanted to alert the country as joltingly as possible to the Soviet threat. He was also trying to take anti-Communism out of the exclusive control of people like Senator Joseph McCarthy, who had begun his rampage a few months earlier. But the institutional life of the original Committee on the Present Danger turned on another issue entirely: Conant's crusade for two years of required military service for all eighteen-year-old American males, with no exceptions.

Conant dreamed of an enormous standing Army of three to four million, stationed mainly in Germany, and he called for large tax increases to pay for it. The American troops would keep the Soviets' westward expansionist impulses in check and decrease the importance ...