Neoconservatives: The Moby Dick of the Left

One of the things that has struck me over the last seven years is the constant assertion that the Bush foreign policy was being driven by a cabal of neoconservatives, most notably in the case of the Iraq War.

In fact, I would say that the original meaning of "neoconservative" is now dead and has been replaced with whoever opponents of the Iraq War do not like. So if you worked for the Bush administration you are a "neocon" whether you're Robert Gates, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, etc.

Waht reminded me of this was a recent post at the Atlantic by Douthat which asserted that the GOP's extroverted wing was primarily composed of "Wilsonian" neoconservatives while the Dems extroverted "Hamiltonian" wing was more realist in nature. He says:

"At the moment, then, the Hamiltonian shift toward the Democrats leaves the GOP dominated by two factions that both tend to err on the side of hawkishness in any given foreign-policy controversy - and this strikes me as a profoundly unhealthy development... There is, however, plenty of life in the Hamiltonian tendency - despite the fact that many of its practitioners, starting with the buffoonish Chuck Hagel, did not exactly distinguish themselves during the debates over the Iraq War - and the exodus of the Scowcroftians to Obamaland notwithstanding, I still think that the congruence between the Jacksonian views of the GOP base and a Hamiltonian take on the world offers fertile ground for a right-realist revival. It probably won't come from the Hagels and Scowcrofts and their peers, but I'm optimistic that you'll see it in the next right-of-center generation - the twentysomething and thirtysomething conservatives for whom the Iraq War was a formative (and chastening) experience. "

I disagree. The idea that the Iraq War only came about only because of neoconservatives is quite frankly a blantant re-writing of history.

As early as 1991-2 the "realist" the George H.W. Bush administration sought to bring about the end of Saddam Hussein's regime via a military uprising or covert action.

And in 1998 the Senate unanimously approved of the Iraq Liberation Act which stated that the U.S. goal in Iraq was regime change. Later that year Bill Clinton bombed Iraq and stated that the U.S. had no choice but to replace Saddam Hussein's government with one that would abide by international law.

So by 2003 there were in fact many liberal and conservative realists who sincerely believed that military force was the least bad option left. That's why Chuck Hagel, John Kerry, and Hillary Clinton agreed to the war in the first place, only to shamefully turn their backs on it when the going got tough.

The only difference between the policies of George W. Bush and Bill Clinton on Iraq was that Bush used ground troops and Clinton didn't.