In World Affairs Journal, Robert Kagan writes:

“The Iraq War will always be linked with the term ‘neoconservative,’” George Packer wrote in his book on the war, and he is probably right. The conventional wisdom today, likely to be the approved version in the history books, is that a small group of neoconservatives seized the occasion of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, to steer the nation into a war that would never have been fought had not this group of ideologues managed somehow to gain control of national policy.

This version of events implicitly rejects another and arguably simpler interpretation…

Kagan points out the historical background of neoconservatism, and argues that it’s nothing new; the impulse to empire has been competing with the American ideal of freedom from the very beginning.

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