Neocons; Were They Really So Wrong?

By Jonathan Tobin, JWR

Neocon ideas are believed to have sunk Bush, but are the alternatives realistic?

As George W. Bush heads into his last, lame-duck year as president, the postmortems have already begun. And in the eyes of most of the pundits who have already begun shoveling dirt on the legacy of the 43rd president, there’s little doubt about the chief culprits for the disasters of the last years: the neoconservatives.

Regardless of its origins, the term is now an all-purpose term of art to describe a group of advocates of an aggressive policy against Islamist terrorism and support for the State of Israel. Their supposedly nefarious influence on the Bush administration is an article of faith for those who see them as authors of all that is wrong about American foreign policy.

Indeed, the dust jacket of Jacob Heilbrunn’s recent book on them, “They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons”, screams that they are “the most feared and reviled intellectual movement in American history” and a “tight-knit cabal that ensnared the Bush administration.”

The text of Heilbrunn’s scathing tome doesn’t quite live up to that level of hysteria, but the fact that the publishers felt free to throw such words around show how widely reviled anyone who can be labeled a “neocon” is these days. CONTINUE