WASHINGTON: As soon as the results of Tuesday’s mid-term elections are known, a small group of influential right- wing hawks with close ties to the offices of Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney will launch a new political campaign to rally public support for the invasion of Iraq.

The task may not be easy: public support for invading Iraq has fallen from highs of close to 80 per cent earlier this year to between 52 and 60 per cent, and less than one-half of those respondents oppose taking unilateral action if US allies are not on board.

The Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, which is setting up its office on Capitol Hill this week, plans to announce its formal launch next week, according to its president, Randy Scheunemann, a veteran Republican Senate foreign-policy staffer who until recently worked as a consultant to Rumsfeld on Iraq policy.

The Committee appears to be a spin-off of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), a front group consisting mainly of neo-conservative Jews and heavy-hitters from the Christian Right, whose public recommendations on fighting the “war against terrorism” and US backing for Israel in the conflict in the occupied territories have anticipated to a remarkable degree the administration’s own policy course.

Scheunemann, who is best known for drafting the 1998 Iraq Liberation Act that authorized $98 million for the Iraqi National Congress (INC), a loose coalition of Iraqi dissidents that is widely distrusted by the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), said he was still putting together the group’s board of advisers.

So far, Bruce P. Jackson, a vice president at arms maker Lockheed Martin who chaired the Republican Party Platform’s subcommittee for National Security and Foreign Policy when Bush ran for president in 2000, has signed on as chairman.

Other officers include Gary Schmitt, PNAC’s executive director, and Julie Finley, a prominent Republican fund-raiser who worked with Jackson when he served as president of the US Committee to Expand NATO, as well as former secretary of state George Shultz, who strongly supports ousting Iraqi President Saddam Hussein through US unilateral action, if necessary.

Former Democratic Sen. Bob Kerrey and ret. General Wayne Downing, a former INC lobbyist who worked on Bush’s National Security Council as its top counter-terrorism official until abruptly resigning last summer, have also agreed to serve as advisers.

Aside from its close association with PNAC (whose website is one of only two links featured on its website — www.liberationiraq.org), the new Committee appears to be based on a model that came to prominence before the last Gulf War in 1991.

The Committee for Peace and Security in the Gulf (CPSG), whose membership was drawn from a similar mix of prominent neo- conservatives and other right-wing hawks, worked closely with both Bush Sr.’s administration and a second group financed by the Kuwaiti monarchy, called Citizens for a Free Kuwait (CFK).

CPSG received a large grant from the Wisconsin-based Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, a major funder of both PNAC and the closely related American Enterprise Institute (AEI).

As recently as 1998, the CPSG called in an open letter to then president Bill Clinton for Washington to adopt a “comprehensive political and military strategy for bringing down Saddam and his regime”, centred on support for the INC and US air power.

That 1998 letter was signed by many of the charter members of PNAC, including Rumsfeld, and four of his top deputies at the Pentagon, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Dov Zakheim, and Peter Rodman.

Other signatories included the current ultra-unilateralist undersecretary of state for arms control and international strategy, John Bolton, Schmitt and several AEI “scholars”, including the current chairman of the Defence Policy Board, Richard Perle.

PNAC’s two co-founders, William Kristol, editor of Rupert Murdoch’s The Weekly Standard, and neo-con commentator Robert Kagan, also signed the letter.

In 1999, many of the same figures also created the Balkan Action Committee (BAC) in support of NATO’s Kosovo campaign against Serbia. Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld and Perle all served on BAC’s executive committee which, like CPSG, published open letters to the president and took out ads in newspapers.

The new Committee, according to its Mission Statement, “was formed to promote regional peace, political freedom and international security by replacing the Saddam Hussein regime with a democratic government that respects the rights of the Iraqi people and ceases to threaten the community of nations”.

It “will engage in educational advocacy efforts to mobilize US and international support for policies aimed at ending the aggression of Saddam Hussein and freeing the Iraqi people from tyranny”.

Scheunemann told IPS the group will concentrate its efforts on the media “both in the US and in Europe”.—Dawn/The InterPress News Service.