Then, with many Americans believing that Saddam Hussein possessed stockpiles of WMD and was sharing them with al-Qaeda, Bush and the neocons found it easy to stampede the Congress into passing a use-of-force resolution. The few people who did speak up against the rush to war were either ignored or ridiculed in venues like the Washington Post.
Bush launched the Iraq invasion on March 19, 2003, and the neocons were thrilled when the U.S. military was able to defeat the Iraqi army in only three weeks. Cable pundit Chris Matthews spoke for many Washington insiders when he declared in awestruck tones, "we're all neocons now.
With their confidence unbridled, the neocons chose to make the ancient land of Iraq a test tube for free-market nation-building. The neocons rejected plans for a quick election, favoring instead a U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council and a long U.S. military stay.
Through their chosen viceroy, Paul Bremer, the neocons also cashiered the Iraqi army and fired government bureaucrats who had belonged to Saddam Hussein's Baath Party. Young American neocons arrived to lecture Iraqis on how to form a new government.
But the occupation didn't go as smoothly as the neocons had expected. Before long, Iraq was torn by a bloody insurgency and was split along bitter sectarian lines.
The ultimate cost of the neocon folly has been more than 4,300 U.S. soldiers dead, along with estimates of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed, and $1 trillion or so of taxpayer money squandered.
Because of the Iraq calamity, other elements of the neocon vision of remaking the Middle East were put on hold, though the neocons enthusiastically supported Israel's military assaults on Hezbollah inside Lebanon in 2006 and on Hamas-ruled Gaza in late 2008. The neocons also haven't yet given up on the idea of a military strike against Iran.
Yet, looking back at the failures of the Bush administration's Middle East policies, two troubling characteristics about the neocons stand out " a lack of empathy for people not like them (i.e. the Iraqis, Afghanis, etc.) and a stunning lack of realism.
Like classic armchair warriors, they act as if their theoretical constructs don't have to be measured against empirical evidence, nor tempered by practicality, nor moderated by concerns about the loss of human life.
This also was a characteristic of the neocons who first emerged as important players during the Reagan administration's brush-fire wars in Central America. In those conflicts, tens of thousands of Salvadorans, Guatemalans, Nicaraguans and others perished at the hands of U.S.-backed military forces.
Some of those same neocons, like Elliott Abrams and Robert Kagan, reemerged two decades later to guide or advise Bush's Middle East policies.
The neocon detachment from reality continues to pervade their wishful thinking about a successful counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan, the nation they persuaded Bush to put on the back burner so they could advance their grandiose vision of Middle East victories.
The Comeback
But what is perhaps most remarkable about this story is how the neocons have used their prominence in the Washington news media and the think-tank community to rehabilitate themselves as "experts on the Middle East.
Most importantly, the neocons exploited the superficial impression in 2007-2008 that Bush's "surge of about 20,000 additional U.S. troops in Iraq was what brought about a decline in violence there.
Though the neocons sold the "surge myth to Washington insiders, many military analysts considered the troop increase as only one element " and possibly only a minor one " compared to the buying off of Sunni insurgents in 2006, the de facto ethnic cleansing of many Iraqi neighborhoods, and the unilateral decision by anti-American Shiite leader Muqtada al-Sadr to demobilize his militia. [See Consortiumnews.com's "The Rising Cost of the Iraq Surge. ]
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