5 Myths About Those Nefarious Neocons

4 The neocons are bloodthirsty ideologues, trying to impose a militant Wilsonianism on the United States that is alien to our foreign policy traditions.

Militant? Sure. But alien? Baloney. In fact, the neocons' worldview melds both of the major strands of traditional U.S. foreign policy thinking -- realism and idealism -- in a highly opportunistic fashion. This is why liberal hawks such as author Paul Berman, Washington Post columnist Peter Beinart and the editors of the New Republic signed on to the neocon crusade at the outset of the Iraq war, while the true realists, such as former national security advisers Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski, blanched in horror.

5 The Iraq debacle has discredited the neocons.

This could be the biggest whopper of them all. Now that the "surge" in Iraq has brought levels of violence down somewhat, the neocons are already claiming vindication. As Iraq fades from the front pages, the neocons' hero, Arizona Sen. John McCain, is poised to become the Republican standard-bearer in 2008. (The neocons also would have happily flocked around Rudolph W. Giuliani, who recruited Norman "World War IV" Podhoretz as a senior adviser.)

The truth is that the neocons have been repeatedly declared dead before -- and, to the chagrin of their enemies on the left and the right, bounced back. At the end of the Cold War, the arch-realist George H.W. Bush relegated them to the sidelines; then the triangulating Bill Clinton seemed to deprive them of their biggest foreign and domestic policy issues. If they came back from that, they can come back from anything. Now that Robert Kagan, William Kristol (who seems not to be discredited in the eyes of the New York Times, which just made him a columnist) and a host of other neocons have hitched their fortunes to McCain, the neocons are poised for a fresh comeback. If they make a hash of foreign policy by 2011, perhaps the familiar cycle of public scorn and rebirth might even start all over again.

jheilbrunn@nationalinterest.org

Jacob Heilbrunn, a senior editor at the National Interest, is the author of "They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons."