Citizen Smash discusses Realists vs. NeoconsAnyone who uses "neocon" critically may as well be saying "yid". From Victor Davis Hanson in the National Review: "face the ugly fact: "Neocon" is now a slur for "Jew."
The neocons are no more aggressive than JFK was in his anticommunist stance. Reagan was right in calling the USSR an Evil Empire (ask any Soviet gulag member or Eastern European under the age of 45).
Best case is that GWB chases the WMDs into Baathist Syria where I predict they've been since Russia/France/Germany stalled for time to hide their Food-for-Oil perfidy which enriched Kofi Annan's son.
Santayana said that those who don't learn from history are condemned to repeat it. This is the late 1930's, replayed, and neither isolationism (Pat Buchanan as his nazi-sympathizing father before him) nor patiently waiting for another deadly blow will work. Imagine if we had smashed Germany after they had taken Poland and Czechoslovakia instead of waiting to join the war after they were much stronger at the end of 1941.
Diplomacy (an invention of French aristocrats) and the Saudi-bribed gone-native State Department are history's villains, not its heroes.
And re W's "mistakes", I'm certain you could play the videotape of D-Day and ANY OTHER MAJOR CAMPAIGN and see an equal or greater number of mistakes. While one can aim a shotgun at a target and predicting the target's demise, it is impossible to predict the trajectory of each pellet. Clear aim does not equal perfect precision for a complex war. More Hanson:
"How weird is our way of war! When we embrace Clintonian bombing — in Kosovo, Serbia, or in Iraq — and kill thousands, America sleeps: few of our guys killed, so who cares how many of theirs? Out of sight, out of mind. Yet when we take the trouble to sort out the messy moral calculus and go in on the ground shooting and getting shot, then suddenly the Left cries war crimes and worse — so strong is this Western disease of wishing to be perfect rather than merely good. Such is the self-induced burden for all those who would be gods rather than mere mortals."
You cannot like Reagan's foreign policy and not like neocons... unless you are an antisemite. I don't toss around that epithet lightly but I've clearly established that disproportionate criticism is a clear indicator of prejudice.
Go listen to Buchanan.
William F. Buckley's credentials as a conservative are unimpeachable and he couldn't defend Buchanan from the charge of antisemite.
America's pre-eminent military historian, Victor Davis Hanson, is pretty clear on this, as reported earlier here on Free Republic:
Neoconservatives? Let us be frank. This appellation is no longer a descriptive term of so-called "new conservatives," those members of the eastern intelligentsia who were rather liberal on some domestic hot-button issues (tolerant of open borders, quiet about abortion, indifferent to gay marriage, etc.), but promoted a proactive neo-Wilsonian idealism in foreign policy (whether in the Balkans in taking out Milosevic or in trying to replace Saddam Hussein with democracy rather than a Shah-like proconsul). Instead, face the ugly fact: "Neocon" is now a slur for "Jew." General Zinni (who once boasted that 600 to 2,000 Iraqis were eliminated from the air in his Operation Desert Fox bombing campaign) is now ubiquitous on television hawking his new book, criticizing the war (on Memorial Day, no less), and being praised in the Arab news as he talks about "Perle, Wolfowitz, and Feith" and all those who purportedly got us into Iraq. "Cabal" and "Nazi-like" are also used by others and with increasing frequency to promote the old idea of crafty, sneaky people pulling the wool over honest naifs (no doubt aw-shucks, unsophisticated folks such as Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, and Rice). A shameful Senator Hollings has no apologies for claiming that our policy was misdirected for Israel's sake. Even a saucer-eyed Al Gore got into the spirit of things. Recently he screamed out the names of those who must walk his plank, and went into an exorcist-like trance when his vein-bulging, spinning-head got to spitting out the name "Woolfwoootizzzzz." If there was advice from a "bloc" of so-called neoconservatives, it has not "failed," but is in fact already working even as we caricature it: We've taken out Saddam; we are on the eve of a transition to an autonomous reform government; and we are shooting the enemy 7,000 miles away, rather than being murdered at Ground Zero. And, by any historical standard, we are fighting in both an economical and humane fashion.