SOUR GRAPES OF WRATH:

Never Mind the ‘Neo’: a review of U.S. VS. THEM: How a Half Century of Conservatism Has Undermined America’s Security By J. Peter Scoblic (NICHOLAS CONFESSORE, NY Times Book Review)

As the occupation of Iraq grinds through its sixth year, many who view American involvement there as a disaster are content to blame the neoconservatives, those operatives and intellectuals inside and outside the Bush administration who once believed they could democratize the Middle East at the point of a gun. Even some right-leaning critics have declared that the neoconservative project in Iraq was both utopian and imprudent, and therefore at odds with basic conservative principles.

Not so fast, says J. Peter Scoblic. In “U.S. vs. Them,” Scoblic, the executive editor of The New Republic, argues persuasively that neoconservatism isn’t the problem — plain old conservatism is. For Scoblic, the Bush administration’s habits of foreign affairs — its distrust of international institutions, its conviction that “good” and “evil” nations cannot coexist in the world — are part of an inglorious tradition of bad ideas that dates to the years of the cold war, when Barry Goldwater lobbied against building a Moscow-Washington hot line.

While it's a truism that neoconservatism is a quite trivial influence on George W. Bush, particularly as compared to classic theoconservatism, the notion that American loathing for internationalism and evil regimes is a recent Cold War innovation is historical ignorance on a massive scale. Ask Woodrow Wilson whether we should tolerate evil or whether Americans used to embrace international institutions.

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 24, 2008 2:09 PM