What “Neoconservative Agenda”?
Neocons are the newly fashionable targets of media derision.

By Neil Seeman, a senior policy analyst at the Fraser Institute, a Canadian think tank.
March 6, 2002 9:10 a.m.

he Left has been slinging around the "neoconservative agenda" epithet for years. Nothing new here. It's one of those gems you might find littered in fascinating periodicals with names like the Journal of Canadian Studies.

Before 9/11, anti-GMO terrorists (and surly assistant professors at Canadian universities) loved to rile free-marketeers with the neocon slam — as in, "Your tall skinny latté's got 'neoconservative agenda' written all over it, man."

After 9/11, terms like "neoconservative agenda" and "neoconservative" have acquired a new frisson in the anti-war lexicon.

As is his wont, Pat Buchanan fired the first fusillade. In an op-ed for USA Today entitled, "Whose War is This?," he let fly at the "neoconservative media," the "neoconservative line," and the "neoconservative movement":

The war Netanyahu and the neocons want, with the United States and Israel fighting all of the radical Islamic states, is the war bin Laden wants, the war his murderers hoped to ignite when they sent those airliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

As the possibility that President Bush might expand the war on terrorism gains momentum, so too does the histrionics of the anti-war anti-neocons. Herewith Hardball's Chris Matthews, writing in the San Francisco Chronicle:

Who's writing this script? Who hijacked our war?
The answer: a coterie of "neo-conservative" thinkers led by Weekly Standard publisher William Kristol and deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz.
Out of the ashes of Sept. 11, they and their rightist associates have found what they've long wanted: an American government heading toward war in the Middle East. They have diverted the hunt for bin Laden much as the Crusades of a millennium ago were diverted from saving the Holy Land to idiotic conquests of Belgrade, Constantinople and any number of targets along the way.Kristol and Wolfowitz have wanted this for a long time.

Odd that. Chris Matthews and Pat Buchanan. Two peas in a pod.

Neocons are the newly fashionable targets of media derision. Middle East News Online calls neoconservatives "consistent: they always opt for war, the bigger the better." The St. Louis Post-Dispatch says they "believe America as a righteous country ought to impose its will on rogue nations throughout the world." Columnist Don Feder says they're prone to "anti-Islamic triumphalist warmongering." For neoconservatives, opined the International Herald Tribune "acts of undeclared war are what win respect for the United States and demonstrate its 'credibility.'"

And yet, statistically, the notion that a cabal of neoconservative, fiercely pro-Israel ideologists is singly driving the war's expansion doesn't compute.

An International Herald Tribune/Pew Research Center poll of U.S. opinion leaders in politics, media, business, culture, and government reports that 50 percent would support a U.S. attack against regimes, such as Iraq or Somalia, if they were found to support terrorism. That's a quantum leap beyond the combined staff at every right-leaning periodical and every Reaganite think tank.

Sorry folks: There's no vast right-wing conspiracy here.

Curiously, though, the anti-war, anti-neocon cant continues. Neocons are "Washington's War Party"; the neocons are implacable and blood thirsty; and so on and so forth.

Not so long ago, neoconservatives were a few estranged liberals, mugged by reality. Now they're everywhere, mugging America's entire political agenda? I don't think so.