Why I think we are at war

[The Duke]

First, lets establish who the neocons are in the administration.  Cheney isn't one, he is a paleocon and a realist (boy, the realists hit the jackpot when they picked that name for their school of thought on foreignpolicy!), who hates big government.  Rumsfeld is not either, he is another paleocon and realist.  Powell and Rice are not neocons, but realists from the Bush I admin who cut their foreign policy teeth before there was an internet for PNAC to put a website on.  Buhs is nothing, he has no foreign policy ideology.  Who are the neocons then?

Some would point to the second level poeple, the deputy secretaries.  Well, that would be people like Robert Zoellick, John Bolton, John Negroponte, and Richard Armitage, all of whom are regular old conservatives.  A case could be made for Bolton as a neocon in his heritage, but certainly his behavior in making policy towards Korea is not hawkish, and his PSI (Proliferation Security Initiative) is the only policy he took part in making that really bears any resemblence to neocon philosophy.  PSI avoids the international institutions that neocons view as a hinderance to freedom of action.  But even this marginally neocon policy still is very multilateral, just not in a formal sense.  There goes the case even for Bolton.

There are a few people at DoD who qualify as neocons.  Dick Perle (he served on the Defense Policy Board) is one, but he was fired almost a year ago for a conflict of interest issue.  Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith come to mind.  But to say that US foreign policy is driven by neocon ideology when the only place in the Administration you can find a neocon is at DoD, and even there only on a secondary level, is a little shaky.

What people often are never told about neocons is what they actually are.  People should look into the history of these guys, how they became Republicans, what they believe on domestic policy, and the like.  I am not sure if I think that most people have a good grasp of what these guys are.  They are basically big government Republicans, and their foreign policy isn't that different from traditional Republican foreign policy.