The Neocon Soul

Harold Myerson, bless his pen, devotes his WaPo column today to decrying the myopia of the neoconservative architects of the Debacle in Iraq, but misses a crucial point. In describing the roots of neoconservative discontent in the failures of postwar domestic policy, and thus locating neocon foreign policy as a more recent development, Myerson gives the neocon soul too much credit. Perpetual war as foreign policy has been and always will be the root of the neoconservative agenda. They, in fact, could care less about domestic policy; their obsession has always been with preserving America's role as a "benevelent global hegemon" (read the highly influential 1996 call to arms by Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan for this idea's first and fullest expression).

As ever more evidence piles up that war in Iraq was an obsession for the neo-cons and the Bush administration long before 9/11, their hatred of Bill Clinton starts to make more sense. Their fear of another Clinton presidency is precisely because America was too peaceful during the Clinton years (Kristol and Kagan describe 1992-1996 a "tepid time" for US foreign policy.). They were hammering on Clinton to invade Iraq at least as far back as 1998. And whatever happened to China's imminent invasion of Taiwan, predicted in August of 1999 by these two to happen within "a few weeks"?