March 18, 2004
Twilight for the Neo-cons?
Is the Republican Party becoming even more fractured than in the days when issues like abortion produced those tell-tail hairline cracks? Along one axis, we now have fiscal conservatives red in the face about budget deficits. The administration's hypocrisy (vis-a-vis when it criticizes tax-and-spend liberals) can't help. But (along a different axis) perhaps we can infer something from a piece by (interestingly enough) Pat Buchanan in The American Conservative that predicts that the days of U.S. imperialism we now kindly refer to as neo-con-dominated foreign policy may be drawing to a close.
BTW, for those interested in analyzing the emergence of neocon influence, I found Neoconservative Ideas and Foreign Policy in the Administration of George W. Bush: A German View, a paper by Patricia Greve, to be pretty interesting.
At the heart of the neocon outlook seems to be the idea that stable democracy will arise fairly easily from dictatorships once the tyrants are deposed. I recall some pre-war predictions out of the DOD that we could scale back to 30K troops within a few months after the invasion, and that Iraq's reconstruction would pay for itself with oil revenue.
I think that the neocons have already been discredited politically in the sense that this Iraq adventure has not helped Bush's re-election prospects much at all, which is the bottom line with most politicians.
Posted by: Mike Jones at March 18, 2004 01:20 PM