BTW, Weiss, the definition of a neo-con is a liberal who is hawkish on war in the Middle-East. So you an be both a socialist and a neo-con.

Sorry, you can't be. I could write 10 more essays on trying to uncover the essence of neoconservatism, but your definition isn't even close. For starters, as a school of political philosophy, it was consolidated long before regime change in the Middle East was a consideration. Recall that Jeanne Kirkpatrick's "Dictatorships and Double Standards," which suggested that right-wing dictatorships -- in Iran and Latin America, mainly -- were more "stable" and preferable to U.S. interests than leftist revolutionary regimes, was the rosetta stone of neoconservatism up until 1986. What happened then? Paul Wolfowitz and Eliott Abrams and George Schultz convinced the Reagan administration to allow democracy to take hold in the Philippines. It was Ferdinand Marcos, meanwhile, who was feting Kirkpatrick and citing back to her from memory whole passages of her notorious Commentary essay! The crisis in the Balkans was the fitting sequel in which the interventionist neocons gained credibility. For a good, readable history, check out James Mann's Rise of the Vulcans, a collective biography of Bush's war cabinet.

Anyway, it's hard to pin down an ideological outcropping broad enough to encompass both Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Norman Podhoretz. Liberals "mugged by reality" was Irving Kirstol's famous definition, or as I would allegorize it: picture Bellow's Augie March slowly becoming Moses Herzog and there you go.

Whether you try to locate the germ of neoconservatism in the Schachtmanite line of American Trotskyism, Scoop Jackson cold war liberalism, Straussianism, or some Frankenstein hybrid of all three, the Middle East is only a very recent factor effecting neoconservatism's modern transformation. (It is true that Wolfowitz commissioned a study when he was in the Carter administration that predicted Saddam Hussein would invade a neighboring country, and that the Soviet Union would likely avert its hegemonic gaze from Europe to the Middle East. What an idiot, I know. But it took a while for his groupuscule's verdict to bubble to the surface at the American Enterprise Institute and the Defense Policy Review Board.)

Most of today's banner neocons are not even liberals, let alone socialists. That's actually my major complaint with the movement and why I'd only describe myself as a wary fellow traveler, up to a point. My reasons for supporting the war were, like Cohen's and Joey's, humanitarian wedded to the larger strategy of altering, for the better, U.S. policy in the Middle East. Also, I do think Saddam posed both an active and latent threat to the region and to the West, as I've tried to evidence in the blog and elsewhere. (I'm rarely challenged on these points, by the way. It's enough to just expectorate the n-word -- "neocon," that is -- and have done with it.)

I feel a greater moral responsibility, and thus a greater impinging shame, for my position than I'd expect those who opposed the war to feel. But I stress the importance of not confusing a noble cause with the incompetent realization of it. It's like watching a doctor commit malpractice and then deny he's at fault, to watch the spite and arrogance with which the current administration defends its war policies.

My only problem with segments of the antiwar crowd was and continues to be their apparent lack of concern for what happens to Iraq going forward. I'll entertain any debate about troop withdrawal, benchmarks, whether or not the surge is working, etc. (For instance, I got more out of Peter Galbraith's latest essay in the New York Review of Books than I did out of any hawkish white paper in recent memory.) But I haven't got patience for those who couldn't care less about the democratic and secular elements trying to repair a broken country. If you approach the subject this way because you're a committed isolationalist, sorry, beg to differ. If you approach it because you're covertly rooting for fascists and head-chopping religious fanatics to win, sorry, go to hell. Many on the left show their hands by rendering a catastrophic bombing or a particularly bloody day in Baghdad in terms of a dip in the president's approval rating. Go to hell. Sincerely, from the left.

As I tried to argue above, Iraq is much more important that a semi-literate scion who, through some macabre accident of history, found himself in the position of most important human being alive.

A new motto: Any Argument But Bush. Like it or not, it's on its way.