Do the Neocons Matter?

There were moments in the wake of the 2003 invasion of Iraq when you couldn’t open a newspaper or turn on a television without hearing about neoconservatives. Stories about the Bush Administration’s foreign policy would trace its intellectual origins to City College Trotskyism or Chicago Straussianism, drawing a straight line to bellicose organizations like Project for the New American Century, the neocon letterhead group that publicly lobbied for war, or the Office of Special Plans, the Pentagon intelligence shop that furnished much of the bogus information about Saddam Hussein’s WMDs. For Democrats, the obsession with neoconservatism provided a convenient alibi: if the nation had been whisked to war against its will by a conspiracy of Israel nuts, then liberal war supporters from Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to Thomas Friedman and Michael Ignatieff were off the hook.