Analyzing "neoconservatism"

This article is from 3 1/2 years ago but I don't recall coming across it before now: A Tragedy of Errors by Michael Lind The Nation 02/23/04 issue. Near the end, Lind - who counts himself as a former neoconservative - recalls the connection between the neocons' unrealistic and aggressive hawkishness toward the Soviet Union with their current threat inflation of just about everything:

Unfortunately for them, a political ideology can fail in the real world only so many times before being completely discredited. For at least two decades, in foreign policy the neocons have been wrong about everything. When the Soviet Union was on the verge of collapse, the hawks of Team B and the Committee on the Present Danger declared that it was on the verge of world domination. In the 1990s they exaggerated the power and threat of China, once again putting ideology ahead of the sober analysis of career military and intelligence experts. The neocons were so obsessed with Saddam Hussein and Yasir Arafat that they missed the growing threat of Al Qaeda. After 9/11 they pushed the irrelevant panaceas of preventive war and missile defense as solutions to the problems of hijackers and suicide bombers.

They said Saddam had WMDs. He didn't. They said he was in league with Osama bin Laden. He wasn't. They predicted that no major postwar insurgency in Iraq would occur. It did. They said there would be a wave of pro-Americanism in the Middle East and the world if the United States acted boldly and unilaterally. Instead, there was a regional and global wave of anti-Americanism.

David Brooks and his colleagues in the neocon press are half right. There is no neocon network of scheming masterminds - only a network of scheming blunderers. As a result of their own amateurism and incompetence, the neoconservatives have humiliated themselves. (my emphasis)

Tags: michael lind, neoconservatives