Joining these restless spirits are some of the philosophy’s key architects. Accompanying Wolfowitz (who many consider PNAC’s ideological primogenitor), Perle and Rumsfeld, are other prominent neo-cons including Francis Fukuyama, Zalmay Khalizad, Norman Podhoretz, Jeb Bush and Elliott Abrams (Bush's Mid-East democracy-spreading point man), all of whom, by the way, are signatories to a brash letter, dispatched to President Clinton by PNAC in 1998, which all but demanded that he essentially advance their neo-con agenda by embarking upon regime change in Iraq through military force.
Today however, Perle and Fukuyama, an influential professor of International Studies at Johns Hopkins, are among key movement figures who have turned against the PNAC/Bush Doctrine’s neo-con agenda. Late in 2006, for example, Fukuyama made his renouncement known in an article in which his support for the movement was categorically disavowed.
“The so-called Bush Doctrine that set the framework for the administration’s first term is now in shambles,” he wrote. “Neo-conservatism, as both a political symbol and a body of thought, has evolved into something I can no longer support.”
Similarly harsh assessments were made by former Defense Policy Board member Kenneth Adelman, famous for his pre-war assessments of an impending “cakewalk” for the U.S. military and for his dead-on assertions that large stockpiles of WMD would be found in the war’s aftermath.
“They (Bush administration neo-cons) turned out to be among the most incompetent teams in the postwar era,” Adelman has recently stated. “Not only did each of them, individually, have enormous flaws, but together they were deadly dysfunctional.”
Perle has also blamed the current state of the neo-con movement on “dysfunction” within the Bush administration. “At the end of the day, you have to hold the president responsible,” Perle observed in a Vanity Fair article. “I just presumed that what I considered to be the most competent national security team since Truman was indeed going to be competent.”
Of course there remain the prior mentioned core of hard-liners, steadfast to the point of clear-cut delusion in their refusal to honestly evaluate the state of their philosophy and the practicality of its goals. More chagrined than chastened, they refuse to accept, much less reluctantly acknowledge the clearly emerging status quo which has pushed both they and their product into a capacious receptacle for discredited believers and their beliefs. They are led, of course, by the self-described “War President,” his bizarre vice-President and augmented by the likes of Rumsfeld, Podhorezt and Abrams. Then, of course, there’s Kristol, who would have us believe that the turn of events was wholly predictable.
“Every intellectual group, every political group, goes through a period of mini crackup and reassembles in slightly different ways,” averred Kristol in the Newsweek article. “For a group that’s discredited, an awful lot of people are spending an awful lot of time discrediting us.” Kristol seems undaunted in his belief that, despite the changed political climate, Bush will continue pushing the neo-con agenda noting, “I think Bush is the last neo-con in power.”
“Who Am I? Why Am I Here?”
Not quite, perhaps, but he’s getting close. The loosening of the neo-conservative spell on the American public’s psyche has driven, or nearly driven from congress, any number of staunch neo-cons or their enablers including Republican ex-Senators Rick Santorum driven by voters out of office last November, and former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, who declined to seek re-election. It nearly drove out Sen. Joe Lieberman, whose marital-like embrace of so many positions neo-con had set him up as a sort of auxiliary Republican just long enough for those stances to force him to seek reelection as an independent. Although Lieberman was, in fact reelected, his refusal to relinquish his grasp on the paramount neo-con issue, blind support for the war, nearly cost him his seat and did cost him his Democratic Party affiliation.
Lieberman, Santorum and Frist are but three of the many elected neo-con foot soldiers who helped send real soldiers off to Iraq to smite any culprit that got in the way of the philosophy’s goals, even if, for example, that culprit was an inanimate --- and if properly nurtured, perpetual --- state of being like “terror.”
Perhaps typically, the blustery Santorum was among the movement’s followers whose trip to neo-con irrelevancy was carried out in the kicking and screaming mode (even after his defeat for example, Santorum continued to maintain that WMD had been found in post-invasion Iraq, a belief even Adelman has dropped).
Among all those in denial, however, one certainly cannot overlook Sen. John McCain, the previously-formidable former 2008 Republican presidential front-runner, who seems overwhelmed by the parallel descent into irrelevancy his political career has taken aboard his once-celebrated “straight talk express.”
So much so, in fact, that he fails to make the connection between its descent and the fallow emptiness of neo-con philosophy he chose as its fuel.
McCain, whose continued iron-clad support of the war renders him as suitable a representative of the philosophy’s “dead-enders” as Bush, Cheney, Santorum and all the rest are, is left to roam the country in a languid pursuit of the presidency, displaying not innocent nescience, but an obdurate refusal to acknowledge his fellow Americans’ changed sentiments about the war. For the 70-year-old former Viet Nam vet who underwent torture as a POW, it’s a sad display of cognitive dissonance for which the campaign experience of another former tortured POW --- Ross Perot running mate James Stockdale’s sadly bewildering “Who am I; Why am I here?” moment during a 1992 vice-presidential debate --- serves as an apt metaphor.
“Every nation has a faction zealous for national glory and horrified by decadence and dishonor,” noted Bramwell in his American Conservative essay. “In the United States, a famously idealistic country, that faction emphasizes the blessings that American power confers upon all mankind. Today, we call them neo-conservatives, but in some sense they have always existed.”
