Free Republic

WASHINGTON -- It was, as the hero tells it, his Road to Damascus moment. There he is, in a hall of 1,500 people he has long considered to be his allies, hearing the speaker treat the Iraq War, nearing the end of its first year, as ``a virtually unqualified success.'' He gasps as the audience enthusiastically applauds. Aghast to discover himself in a sea of comrades so deluded by ideology as to have lost touch with reality, he decides he can no longer be one of them.And thus did Francis Fukuyama become the world's most celebrated ex-neoconservative, a well-timed metamorphosis...

Francis Fukuyama's America at the Crossroads argues that the United States made the mistake of going into Iraq without preparing for a hostile occupation because of the flawed foreign-policy thinking of a small group of people called neoconservatives. ...[snip] While he remains sympathetic to the democracy-spreading mission, Fukuyama castigates the unilateral and militaristic turns that gave us such concepts as "preventive war," "benevolent hegemony," and "regime change." Neoconservatives, he contends, have abandoned their fundamental political insight, namely that ambitious schemes to remake societies are doomed to disappointment, failure, and unintended consequences. "Opposition to utopian social engineering," Fukuyama writes "… is...

Remembering Milton Himmelfarb Milton Himmelfarb died earlier this month at age 87, and chances are you never heard of him if, like most Americans, you tend not to be a devotee of intellectual and political journals. But Milton Himmelfarb — Mendy, as he was known to his family — was, by virtue of temperament, history and family, a seminal figure in the development of neoconservatism as one of the country’s most influential political forces. Serving in various capacities at the American Jewish Committee for better than 40 years, Himmelfarb was the longtime editor of the AJC’s American Jewish Yearbook and...

Editor's Note: In this section we entertain letters from the critics. Some readers are angry, some are not so angry, and others merely frustrated. January 1, 2006 Angry Reader:You, sadly, like many other conservative columnists, seem to have abandoned Conservatism for liberal Republicanism because you see no other choice under the current leadership.Conservatism, true conservatism, is hurting because so many people like you have turned their backs in favor of worshiping false idols.You want to portray this as some right-left American controversy based upon varying degrees of patriotism when what you're really perpetrating is the sellout of conservatism, while throwing...

...Then the Weekly Standard arrived in 1995, and Washington was suddenly a two-magazine town. William Kristol, Fred Barnes and John Podhoretz came up with the idea and Rupert Murdoch came up with the money.... Ever since, the Standard has proudly flown the banner of conservatism from Washington each week, sometimes conservatism of the "neo" sort.... "The Weekly Standard: A Reader" offers an impressive sampling from the magazine's first 10 years. Irving Kristol, William's father, defines neoconservatism, insofar as it can be defined -- he calls it a "persuasion," not a movement or ideology. Andrew Ferguson, tired of hearing Edward R....

MEMORANDUM TO: OPINION LEADERSFROM: William Kristol & Gary SchmittSUBJECT: Bring The Troops Home?Yesterday’s front page of the Washington Post carried a story about a classified memo from Britain’s defense minister to Prime Minister Tony Blair detailing “emerging U.S. plans” to reduce by half the number of soldiers in Iraq by next summer. This would leave American troop levels at around 66,000. The Pentagon has denied there are any fixed plans as yet and reductions will depend on conditions in Iraq.Although the Pentagon is surely accurate in saying that no final determination to reduce troop levels has been made, it is...

Christopher Hitchens Christopher Hitchens, the British writer who has fallen in love with American neoconservatives, recently said this about people of faith: "I can't stand anyone who believes in God, who invokes the divinity, or who is a person of faith. I mean, that to me is a horrible, repulsive thing." Well, it doesn't really matter what the old-left, born-again neoconservatives think. I cite the quotation, from a radio interview in the United Kingdom, to set the stage for the point that atheism and Darwinism are matters of faith, not scientific fact. They are rationalizations for another form of secular...

Back in 1965, in New York, my old friend Daniel Bell, then a professor of sociology at Columbia University, and I, then vice-president of the publishing firm Basic Books, were deeply troubled. The source of our discomfort was the mode of thought that was beginning to dominate political and social discourse in and outside of academia-an ideological mode that made nonsense of the existential reality of American life. One of the most egregious examples of this ideological nonsense, popular among sociologists and dramatized by the press, was the idea that the way for the poor to escape from poverty was...

IT WAS ONLY 7:15 a.m. on October 26, 2003, and Paul Wolfowitz was already thinking about Saddam Hussein. The deputy secretary of defense had been awake for just over an hour when he and two civilian Pentagon advisers walked into a large office for a briefing on electricity.Wolfowitz wasn't happy. The office was in one of Saddam's opulent palaces. Six months after the fall of Baghdad, there were still three-story busts of the former Iraqi leader perched atop the four corners of the massive structure. Virtually all of the images of the deposed dictator throughout Iraq had been defaced or...

Conservative Americans who consider George W. Bush a champion of national sovereignty have been shocked to learn that the president seeks Senate ratification of the UN's Convention on the Law of the Sea Treaty (LOST). Despite the Senate's refusal thus far to ratify the treaty, it went into effect in 1995, and elements of the vast regulatory apparatus it outlines are already in operation. When fully implemented, LOST would consummate the largest act of territorial conquest in history, turning seven-tenths of the Earth's surface over to the jurisdiction of the United Nations. It would create a mammoth bureaucracy to regulate...

We’ve seen versions of the neoconservative slur before.Neo- is a prefix that derives from the Greek adjective veos — "new" or "fresh" — and in theory it is used inexactly for those conservatives who once were not — or for those who have reinterpreted conservatism in terms of a more idealistic foreign policy that eschewed both Cold War realpolitik and the hallowed traditions of American republican isolationism. But the accepted definition has given way in practice to refer to the more particular proponents of the use of military action to remove threatening governments, and to replace them with democratic systems...

Neoconservatives Gain Strength in New Bush Team Wed Nov 17, 2:31 PM ET By Alan Elsner WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Neoconservatives, seen as the ideological architects of the U.S. invasion of Iraq (news - web sites), appear to be gaining strength in President Bush (news - web sites)'s second administration, foreign policy analysts said on Wednesday. The "neocons," as they are known in Washington seemed in ideological retreat a year ago after the U.S. occupation of Iraq was shaken by a bloody insurrection. Led by Vice President Dick Cheney (news - web sites), they argued that U.S. interests and values in...

WASHINGTON - Donald Rumsfeld is likely to remain at the Pentagon until the spring, enabling him to to stay in the administration through the Iraqi elections and advance his plans for transforming the American military, despite strong pressure from key White House political advisers for him to leave sooner. According to well-placed Pentagon sources, Vice President Cheney has argued the case for Mr. Rumsfeld to remain as defense secretary until at least the spring, and Mr. Cheney would prefer that Mr. Rumsfeld stayed longer. Karl Rove and other White House advisers, however, have maintained that Mr. Rumsfeld has become a...

RARELY HAVE THE HOLDERS of any set of political views and policy preferences been so thoroughly caricatured as the "neoconservatives" of the Bush years. To critics, this group of policymakers (preeminently, in the Defense Department and the Office of the Vice President), along with their allies on the outside (preeminently, in the pages of THE WEEKLY STANDARD), is responsible for a kind of hijacking of U.S. foreign policy in the wake of 9/11. Intoxicated by American power and blinded by a utopian vision, the neoconservatives (in the critics' telling) set the country on a disastrous and unnecessary attempt to remake...

First, don't tell me that "neoconservative" isn't a legitimate term. Andrew Sullivan, a supporter of the Iraq invasion from day 1, still calls himself a neoconservative.Is Sullivan the only neocon who is now moving toward finding Kerry a palatable choice? Apparently not. Max Boot (former WSJ editorial guy) and Robert Kagan (frequent co-author with Bill Kristol) are quoted by Sullivan in the passage below. Also, Marshall Wittman, former McCain lieutenant, has now become an official, according to the LA Times, with what the Times calls "the centrist Democratic Leadership Council.". Here's the passage from Andrew Sullivan: ""FORCING THE DEMS INTO...

8:38PM CT The first report from St. Louis is in - and presidential candidates Michael Badnarik (Libertarian) and David Cobb (Green Party) were just arrested. Badnarik was carrying an Order to Show Cause, which he intended to serve the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD). Earlier today, Libertarians attempted to serve these same papers at the Washington, D.C. headquarters of the CPD - but were stopped from approaching the CPD office by security guards.

What Happened to Conservatives? The so-called conservative movement of the last 20 years, starting with the Reagan revolution of the 1980s, followed by the 1994 Gingrich takeover of the House, and culminating in the early 2000s with Republican control of both Congress and the White House, seems a terrible failure today. Republicans have failed utterly to shrink the size of government; instead it is bigger and costlier than ever before. Federal spending spirals out of control, new Great Society social welfare programs have been created, and the national debt is rising by more than a half-trillion dollars per year. Whatever...

As citizens of the Euro-Atlantic community of democracies, we wish to express our sympathy and solidarity with the people of the Russian Federation in their struggle against terrorism. The mass murderers who seized School No. 1 in Beslan committed a heinous act of terrorism for which there can be no rationale or excuse. While other mass murderers have killed children and unarmed civilians, the calculated targeting of so many innocent children at school is an unprecedented act of barbarism that violates the values and norms of our community and which all civilized nations must condemn.At the same time, we are...

I have not even mentioned the innumerable “conservative” politicos and commentators who cheated on their wives and/or dumped them for younger women: Phil Gramm, Dan Crane, Bob Dole, George Will, Newt Gingrich, Deal Hudson, Rush Limbaugh, and Bob Tyrell, though Tyrell’s swinging has not prevented him from commenting on the problems caused by divorce. The King of Swing may have been the former president of Hillsdale College, but the less said about him the better. What is repulsive about conservatives is not so much their peccadilloes—errare est humanum—as their smarmy pretense to be the vanguard of a moral revolution. The...

WHY A PATRIOT MUST SUPPORT ISRAEL - DON FEDER SEPT. 9, 2004 http://www.donfeder.com/ I recently did a column exposing the Israel bashing in Patrick J. Buchanan’s new book, “Where The Right Went Wrong: How Neoconservatives Subverted the Reagan Revolution and Hijacked the Bush Presidency” – the Michael Moore Book Club’s selection of the month. Fortunately, only a small segment of the right has been infected with Buchanan’s neo-isolationism and anti-Zionism. Still, Pat’s fulminations spur the following reflections on why I support Israel as an American patriot. First, a bit of personal history – not to boast, but to let you...