A man in the arena

Wouldn’t it be nice if people just dropped the word Neo-con from their vocabulary? It is a word used by people who don’t know what it means and don’t have the intellectual depth to understand what it means.

The Neo-cons were the Left’s idealistic anti-communists of the sixties and seventies. They (Irving Kristol, Bill Kristol, Daniel Patrick Moynihan etc.) demanded that pushing democracy on the world and emphasizing human rights should be the centerpieces of US foreign policy. And the simple fact is that the Neo-Cons supported all of Clinton’s interventions (Bosnia, Kosovo, etc.). And somehow no one on the Left complained.

The real question that should be answered is should the United States use military force to push a democratic and human rights agenda? That is the important debate that is not happening.

We have done it before. We have gone to war for idealistic reasons and without UN approval. Lucky for us we fought it from 20,000 feet and it was for us relatively bloodless. Iraq has been a messy. However the agenda is the same. If you supported the Kosovo intervention then you can still disagree with the tactics used in Iraq, but you cannot coherently disagree with the strategy.

P.S. Interestingly the best critiques of neo-conservatism have come from the right and are a few decades old. Russell Kirk was not a fan.

# posted by D. W. Eifert @ 9:26 PM