Neocons

The term "neoconservative" started out as an insult, and it is still used that way. When people say that the selection of Paul Wolfowitz to head the World Bank marks the triumph of neocons in Bush administration foreign policy, they are generally not indicating pleasure. Some cynics even say the "neocon" label is anti-Semitic: Doesn't it just refer to a Jewish intellectual you disagree with? That's way too harsh. But what does neoconservative actually mean?

Neoconservatism is finished. According to the conventional wisdom, the Pentagon's top neocons, like Paul D. Wolfowitz, Douglas J. Feith and William J. Luti, have been discredited by the insurgency in Iraq, by Abu Ghraib and by growing public discontent with the war. The United Nations has been invited back -- begged, really -- while the organization's chief opponent, Richard Perle, has been marginalized.

"The world must be made safe for democracy," Woodrow Wilson declared in 1917. Ever since (and arguably before), that imperative has occupied a central place in U.S. foreign policy. Democratic and Republican presidents alike have seen the need to spread liberty abroad to protect liberty at home. Yet, because of the difficulties we are encountering in Iraq, the democratization imperative is under attack today from both left and right.

As U.S. tanks surrounded Baghdad 14 months ago, an ardent group of war supporters in Washington toasted the success of an invasion they had done much to inspire, as commentators spoke of their virtual takeover of the Bush administration's foreign policy. Today, that same group, the neoconservatives, is itself under siege. Many fellow conservatives have joined liberals in criticizing their case for the war. Rivals in the State Department and the Pentagon have taken charge of the U.S.

NEWSPAPERS AND magazines have been filled with talk of a conservative foreign policy schism. The Republican Party comes off sounding a lot like ... well, Iraq: its charismatic leader deposed, long-suppressed feuds have bubbled up into a bloody and seemingly intractable feud. I don't think that's quite right. The conservatives are more like a married couple bickering over how to break the news to their kids that they've gone broke and have to sell the house and move to a poorer neighborhood.

The longer the U.S. struggles to impose order in postwar Iraq, the harsher the indictments of the Bush administration's foreign policy are becoming. "Acquiring additional burdens by engaging in new wars of liberation is the last thing the United States needs," declared one Bush critic in a recent issue of Foreign Affairs.

With President Bush elected to a second term, and the neoconservative architects of the Iraq war firmly in the driver's seat of U.S. foreign policy, Iranian Americans are contemplating a stark choice similar to that faced by Iraqi Americans a few years ago -- whether they want to work with Washington to liberate their home country.

DON'T LOOK now, but neoconservatism is making a comeback -- and not among the Republicans who have made it famous but in the Democratic Party. A host of pundits and young national security experts associated with the party are calling for a return to the Cold War precepts of President Truman to wage a war against terror that New Republic Editor Peter Beinart, in the title of his provocative new book, calls "The Good Fight."

As prominent conservatives -- diplomats, retired generals, commentators such as George Will -- are breaking with the Bush administration over the military, constitutional and budgetary consequences of its foreign policy, two of them have published a solemn remonstrance assailing President Bush's capitulation to a "small group of neoconservative policy makers," whom they accuse of driving our national misadventures in regime change and nation-building even at the price of endless war and the