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It’s get to the point that when I hear the word ‘neoconservative’ I just stop listening because I know its another conspiracy theory about how evil Bush and the Jews are and how America has changed its direction (yeah, we’ve never fought a war to keep people free before....).

Anybody debating neoconservatism (which is always debated from the left) is just looking for a justification because their ‘war for oil’ ‘revenge for daddy’ ‘occupying the Middle East’ ‘imperialist expansion’ motives were laughed at.

Where, for instance, did the idea of promoting democracy come from?

Here's a hint:

When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

Seems to me that the argument could be made that Natural Law, God's gift of our human, "unalienable" rights gives us the responsibility to share that divine gift that our ancestors earned for us, with those who have not yet achieved it. Where much is given, much is required. From that perspective, would it not be the height of selfishness to do otherwise?

Well, perhaps not alien to American foreign policy traditions but allien to American foreign policy traditions of true conservatives. Neo-conservatives are of the left and not true conservatives. It's obvious when you see the readiness with which they're willing to innovate on everything, the timeless hallmark of the true-believing leftist.

We go to war when it is in American interest to do so. Freeing a people subjugated by a dictator and his control of arms in the region is often a compelling American interest as it makes the world freer for Americans to do business in and live in.

(Of course formerly American and now “multinational” companies with no allegiance to any nation do violence to this whole concept.)

Is this right? Is it true that moralism, idealism, exceptionalism, militarism, and global ambition—as well as imprudent excesses in the exercise of all of these—are alien to American foreign policy traditions? The question must seem absurd to anyone with even a passing knowledge of American history. But then, perhaps, it is also very American to forget the past so willfully.

It's the mix. Americans have always been idealistic and concerned about virtue. Some of them went in for an idea of American exceptionalism.

There were also security- and defense-oriented statesmen. And there were expansionists as well. But not all of those idealists were defense-oriented or expansionist. Not all of those who wanted a strong military were idealists. Some of them were realists. Not all of them were expansionists either. The expansionists were idealists, but of a very different sort than we'd admire today.

Now add to the mix the global ambitions. That's something we didn't have in the 18th or 19th century. Or if we did have them they were dreamlike -- let our example be felt around the world, let hundreds of democracies follow our lead -- and not to be achieved by the force of our arms.

So yes, you can find the pieces lying around in the American past, but the mix is different from what we had then. For starters, you needed to wed Hamiltonian emphasis on the military with Jeffersonian idealism about democracy. And you had to get away from the idea of an undoubted realist/idealist, John Quincy Adams:

But [America] goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.