Neo-conspiracy theories.

• Author: Baker, Gerard
• Position: Book Review

James Mann, The Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet (New York: Penguin, 2004), 426 pp., $16.

Patrick Buchanan, Where the Right Went Wrong: How Neoconservatives Subverted the Reagan Revolution and Hijacked the Bush Presidency (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2004), 272 pp., $24.95.

Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke, America Alone: The Neoconservatives and the Global Order (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 382 pp., $28.

A FEW DAYS before the U.S. presidential election, the BBC, a once renowned television network dedicated to the enlightenment of the uninformed around the world, aired a documentary called "The Power of Nightmares." The program's central thesis was that the notion of a global threat from Islamist terrorism was largely a chimera, dreamed up by the powers-that-be to scare people into supporting wars of oppression by America and its dwindling band of allies. This illusion, the documentary said, was the work of a tightly knit group of conspirators in Washington known by now to all as "the neoconservatives"--a group of warmongering fanatics morally equivalent to the Islamic fundamentalists they claim to be fighting. As the producers noted, both are organized groups of religious bigots who use deception and terror to engender fear in credulous peoples in the hope of furthering their own goals of global domination. What was most remarkable about this steadily ascending fantasy of calumnies was in the end how unremarkable it was. For the neocons, such allegations are now merely routine.

Few groups of otherwise inconspicuous individuals can have been more maligned, loathed, feared and ridiculed than America's neoconservatives. In academia, in the media and in the steadily growing piles of political polemics that stack bookstore shelves, they have been demonized as, at very best, naifs espousing a dangerously unrealistic fantasy of American foreign policy as a mission civilatrice--or at worst as neo-fascists, consumed by a Dr. Strangelove-like fixation on the transformative effect of American military power.

The standard critical narrative of the last four years runs as follows: An intellectually lightweight and suggestible president, unschooled in foreign affairs, was led by a highly motivated cabal of foreign policy advisors and mysteriously connected outsiders into an embrace of their controversial doctrines. These revolutionaries held a number of core beliefs way beyond the bounds of the mainstream of America's foreign policy debate. They are committed to an explicit policy of eliminating regimes they don't like, especially in the Middle East, and to their replacement with governments friendly to America and Israel. Their faith in America's moral superiority and military supremacy is so great that they see it as the country's responsibility to wage something like permanent war, both pre-emptively and unilaterally.

These views would obviously never pass muster with public opinion, so like all coups d'etat, this one was achieved through deception, opportunism and manipulation. The neocons exploited the September 11 attacks to leverage their narrow worldview into the official national security strategy of the United States. They lied about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq to justify their longed-for invasion of the country.

THIS IMMORALITY tale has come mostly from the Left, especially overseas. But many of the neocons' political enemies, especially those at home, are on the Right. Many who consider themselves true conservatives are, if anything, even more aghast at what they see as the usurpation of their governing philosophy for such nefarious ends. Patrick Buchanan, the paleoconservative polemicist, and Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke, who describe themselves as firm believers in Reaganite foreign policy, are in this conservative vanguard in the struggle against the neocons. Their critiques of the neocons, though divergent in important respects, share many central allegations.

The main substantive objection is that the apparently one-dimensional neoconservative approach to foreign policy is deeply inadequate to the challenges of a complex world. They believe their adversaries are not only a radical departure from traditional conservative...