By Douglas Murray, the author of 'Neoconservatism: Why We Need It' (THE GUARDIAN, 31/10/06):
'The good ship neocon is going down," announced Matthew Parris recently in the Times. And as that gleeful cry arose, deja vu returned. Such allegations of decline are one of the constants that neoconservatives live by.In Foreign Policy magazine the conservative writer Jay Winik wrote: "America is witnessing the end ... of the neoconservatives." That was in 1988. Some neocons even elegised themselves. It was "a generational phenomenon", suggested Irving Kristol in 1995. "Neoconservatism is dead," declaimed Norman Podhoretz a year later. Yet it continues.
Neoconservatism is not what people think it is. It is not a party or a group. Many people popularly seen as neocons - Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld - are no such thing. Most neoconservatives reject the term. And those who accept it generally don't know each other, and certainly don't act as the cabal that conspiracy-lovers imagine. Put two neocons in a room and they're as likely to disagree as agree on everything but the basics.
But the fundamental beliefs of what is called "neoconservatism" are important, and are held by many who have never read Plato or Leo Strauss. They include scorn for relativism, disdain for anti-democratic movements, and the belief that freedom in the state, from the state, is the prerequisite for individual happiness. As an instinct or tendency rather than a manifesto, neoconservatism is both idealist and realist.
Now, it is being alleged, this much-misrepresented instinct is foundering on the rock of Iraq. Not only is this untrue - it is the fate of the rock that is at stake. The liberation of Iraq was supported, but not run, by neocons. And even if neocons had been behind the invasion, blaming them for Iraq's current problems is just historically incorrect. These did not originate because we "kicked the door in" in 2003. That door had been kicked in for years. Terrorists such as Abu Nidal, Abu Abbas and Abdul Rahman Yasin were already enjoying Iraqi hospitality. Many UN resolutions had condemned Saddam Hussein. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was already there.
Nevertheless, once we climbed over the kicked-in door we were accused of killing hundreds of thousands of people. Just as when we weren't there we were accused of killing hundreds of thousands through sanctions. But we should at least look at who is really doing the killing. Even the activist Lancet has acknowledged that the vast majority of deaths in Iraq have been caused not by our military, but by "unknowns" and "others" - what those of us less keen on euphemism call terrorists, fundamentalists, sadists and fascists.
For a conservative realist, the presence of all those jihadists in one place, with thousands of our troops there too, presents an opportunity to cut the number of terrorists a bit. For a conservative idealist, the chance to pull apart the jihad in Iraq not only improves our own security situation (unless zero attacks on the American homeland since 9/11 is some kind of miracle), it also helps Iraq recover from decades of brutality.
This is where the enemies of neoconservatism veer from the kooky into the wicked. They actually want the neocons to fail more than they want Iraq to succeed. Between the relativists, who claim there are no terrorists, and the conservatives such as Parris, who says there were "no 'good' Iraqis to hand over to", our good allies in Iraq - secular and religious - would be right to feel aggrieved and abandoned. Their struggle has been derided by the Foreign Office's Arabists, and turned into a proxy war against neocons by self-identified "progressives".
If Iraq fails it will be Iraq that suffers. Neoconservatism will survive the bad wishes. But will Iraq?