I understand the French people are rather frantic now that they’re discovering just how much real damage they’ve done. One almost gets the sense that many of them didn’t take this situation seriously and thought they could get away with playing low-ante brinksmanship. Unfortunately, there was more in the kitty than they realized.

well my dear fellow,
You seem all to be blinded by our lying and low intellect president who has spent billions of dollars on the invasion of Iraq which up to this day is not justufied as no WMD has been found. He focused too much on Saddam instead of fighting terrorism as Richard Clark just said while under oath!!
Let me just tell that this president has created so much hatred in this world against Americans by attacking unilaterally Iraq without the U.N approval that it will cost this country many years to recover its credibility here. I am glad that the French, Getrman, Russion and several other nations tried to counterbalance Bush arrogant plan of democratizing the world through force… Look at the colonization it has truned into a disaster and has only brought chaos and misery… Irag will end up in the same mess.

Remember the French in 1991 fought with the US to oust Saddam’s troops from Koweit because there was a clear violation of territory. I do not call this a betrayal but conscious call of a nation that saw the need to send troops along to the Us to Koweit. This time however there was no evidence that WMD were in Iraq for going to war which is what drove hawkish Bush to hastily go to war to set a foothold in the middlee east in order to control the second biggest oil supply in the world.

Open your eyes you bunch of neos.

I see on soluation the election of Kerry to appease all that hatred the world has against the US because of this cowboy Texan dude

Phil should answer this question:

If France and the other countries on the Security Council were so dead set against _any_ war on Iraq, then why did they unanimously vote for Resolution 1441, which in unambiguous terms said that Iraq must immediately reveal all WMD stocks and activities, or face “serious consequences,” i.e., war?

The idea that the U.S. went against international opinion is a lie. The U.S. did everything it could to get international opinion on its side, and apparently had succeeded. The unanimous vote for 1441 was acknowledged even by Bush critics as a great diplomatic victory.

So what happened? It was a set-up. France, Germany, Russia didn’t mean what they had said. They were being quintessential Europeans, just like America’s own quintessential European, Sen. Kerry. That is, as far as _they_ were concerned, the ultimatum of 1441 was not _really_ an ultimatum, but merely an invitation to a continuing diplomatic dance. But, because Bush actually meant the language of 1441, and was not playing games, international opinion then proceeded to stab Bush in the back and attack him as an outlaw for just doing what they had plainly given him the authority to do.

Similarly, Kerry told the whopper that when he voted to give Bush the authority to go to war, he was _really_ only giving Bush the authority to make threats! So therefore when Bush actually acted on the authority that Kerry had given him, Bush, according to Kerry, was betraying Kerry! Are we actually supposed to take Kerry’s transparently dishonest anger seriously? In the same way, are we actually supposed to take seriously the rage of the international community?

The supposedly high-minded international community that Phil represents here are among the most dishonorable, dishonest people that ever were. They are amoral bureaucrat-types who would reduce language to meaningless mush, and reduce nation states to collections of subhuman Eloi. The fact that these “high-minded” internationalists HATE the U.S. for doing the right thing and overthrowing the monstrous Hussein regime damns the haters, not the U.S.

Another lie told by Phil and the international community to which he owed his true allegiance is that “there was no evidence” of WMDs in Iraq. The truth, of course, is that at the time of this great debate in 2002 and early 2003 NO ONE doubted the existence of these weapons. ALL the critics of Bush accepted the existence of these weapons. Their argument was not that the weapons didn’t exist, their argument was that endless inspections and negotiations were the best way to deal with the weapons.

The above considerations lead to another question. If a certain party to a debate, in this case the international community and its advocates, keeps depending on such whopping lies to make its case, does it not also seem likely that that party is wrong on the main issue as well?

In any case, in the final analysis, the decision of a country to go to war when it perceives its vital interests are at stake is a decision to be made by that country, not by anyone else.

“[T]he decision of a country to go to war when it perceives its vital interests are at stake is a decision to be made by that country, not by anyone else.” -Mr.Auster

Amen! It is vital that American sovereignty be retrieved and defended. This necessitates an defence and affirmation of the general idea of national sovereignty, which has been attacked and greatly eroded since the Great War.

Bush’s diplomatic pursuit of formal endorsement of the Iraq War by the U.N. Security Counsil was a blunder. In “going to the U.N.”, Bush conceded, or appeared to concede the necessity of U.N. “approval” for the legitimacay of the the war. U.S. policy was complicated by the armistice of the first Iraq War which was unwisely written so as to place the inspection of Iraq’s required disarmament of certain baned weapons and delivery systems, namely WMDs (nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons) and certain types of missles. Iraq did not willingly disarm. It did all it could to hide banned weapons systems and to obstruct the U.N. inspectors. In the aftermath of the first Iraq war, inspectors obtained many documents from Iraqi ministries detailing the extent of the Iraqi WMD programs the amount of such weapons that Iraq posessed. Inspite of active of obstruction by the Iraqi regime - oppostion which was the direct and total reverse of its agreeing in the ceasefire agreement to undertake, under the supervision of U.N., to abandon WMDs and long-range missles- inspectors were able to locate, with the assistance of U.S. intelligence, and destroy a sizable portion of the amount of Iraqi WMD documented to have existed. But there remained a large balance of banned weapons unacounted for, when in 1997, Iraq expelled U.N. weapons inspectors. This, it should be needless to say, was a gross and total breech of the first Iraq War armistice. It was necessary in 2002 only to request that the Security Counsil authorize the resuption of inspections in Iraq should Iraq agree thereto. The U.S. did not need a resolution threatening “serious consequences” in the event of Iraq’s failure to readmit inspectors or of its refusal to fully cooperate with the inspectors; the U.S. could have demanded both on pain of war based upon the 1991 armistice and previous U.N. Security Counsil resolutions passed pursuant thereto. But if the administration felt that it, for whatever reasons, needed the “cover” of a Security Counsil resolution to go to war, Resolution 1441 was sufficent. The administration ought to have observed that the demand for a second resolution, after Hans Blix reported to the Security Counsil that Iraq had failed to cooperate with the inspectors, was an attempt by France, Germany, and Russia to undermine the plain meaning of 1441; to humiliate the United States; and to prevent war on Iraq by the U.S. and the U.K. By asking for a second resolution the U.S. appreared to tacitly recognize the correctness of Fance, Germany, and Russia’s view that 1441 did not authorize war in the event of Iraqi noncompliance, depite the plain meaning of the Resolution. When the U.S. went to war with Iraq, inspite of the Security Counsil’s rejection of the second resolution, many foreigners percieved it as a illegal act because they believed that by its actions the U.S. had tacitly admitted to the necessity of a U.N. resolution in order to “legally” go to war and to the correctness of the view that 1441 had not authorized or provided for a war or military action or “police action” in regards to Iraq.

I agree with pretty much everything Joshua has said. When Bush decided to go to the U.N., he turned our policy into a hopelessly incoherent thing. Were we acting in our own defense and based on our own previous ceasefire agreement with Iraq, or were we acting as the enforcer of UN resolutions? Were we a sovereign nation or a mere agent of a trans-sovereign power? Were we seeking UN support to take action against Iraq, or had we ALREADY decided to take action, and merely going through the motions with the UN? These ambiguities created an impression of insincerity on our part which our adversaries were able to exploit in order to humiliate us. By contrast, if we had avoided the U.N., we could have simply sought a “coalition of the willing,” without that coalition seeming like a hypocritical substitute for the “real” legitimacy of further UN resolutions.

Ultimately, sovereign power, the power to act, cannot be divided. Either it exists in one place, or it doesn’t exist. The old Articles of Confederation couldn’t survive because it hopelessly confused the issue of sovereignty. The 1787 Constitution could survive, because it located sovereignty squarely in the national government. Sovereign power is a fundamental aspect of political reality, and attempts to get around that fact (e.g., through various “power-sharing” arrangements, or through the pretence that the EU, even as it gains new sovereign powers, is not taking away the sovereignty of its member states) always fail.

Mr. Auster hits the nail on the head as usual. America must protect itself whatever fair weather friends might think.

At one time, America could have driven Muslims from around Israel and behind geographic barriers and have repopulated the area with Americans, who could have enjoyed a Mediterranean climate. Proactive is always the best way to go. Now that America has been fractured due to mass immigration, this is crazy talk

To clarify my previous comment, I don’t mean that sovereignty must be located in one place, but that sovereign _power_, the power to act in the name of the polity, must be located in one place. Sovereignty itself is broadly distributed in our branches of government, but the power to act is located in the Presidency.

We could understand this by seeing the United States as consisting of three levels of sovereignty, from the most widely distributed to the most concentrated. The base and repository of sovereignty is the consent of the people. Through elections, sovereignty then takes concrete form in the representative institutions of government, where, in our system of divided powers and checks and balances, it is distributed between the national government and the state governments and among several power centers within the national government. But ultimately, when the state acts as a state in relation to other states or foreign powers, whether in diplomatic relations or in war, it has a single center of action and power, which is the presidency.

The U.S. Constitution is a thing of beauty. Or, at least, it used to be.

I can’t resist critiquing Phil on this minor issue. He said, “Open your eyes you bunch of neos.” He should read the secondary headline on the banner at the top of the screen, which reads, “The passing scene and what it’s about viewed from the traditionalist politically incorrect Right.”

To follow up on my previous post: Phil really should try to understand differances in political philosophy. Some policy positions are rather closely correlated with differant political philosophies and world views. For example support for “gay marriage” is closely associated with left-liberalism and is inconsistant with any conservatism that seeks to preserve the traditional morality of Western Civilization in particular and of Christianity in general. On the Iraq war it is not possible to ideologically categorize someone on the basis of his support or opposition thereof. For example Pat Buchanan opposed the war because of his opposition to “foreign entaglements”; while John Kerry opposed the war, even though he voted for it, because he is a committed multilateralist and, because France, Germany, Russia, and the U.N. Secretary General disapproved of the war, we lacked a “true coalition” and the war lacked “legitimacy”. Others opposed the war because they thought that it would be very difficult, perhaps impossible, to establish a functioning, democratic government in a land riven by sectarian, ethnic, and tribal divisions, not to mention ideological divisions! On the other hand, some supported the war because of a desire to spread freedom, democracy, and equal rights around the world, by force of American arms if necessary. (The former is a belief characteristic of neoconservatism and is a belief for which President Bush has much sympathy.) Others supported the war based upon many foreign policy conserns. To name a few:

1) The perceived unsustainability of the Iraq containment policy, which necessitated the basing of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia. The sanctions regime was breaking down in the late 1990s and the inspectors had been expelled. U.S.-Saudi relations had deteriorated in the late 90s and became rather sour after the 9/11 attacks.

2) Consern regarding Saddam’s WMNs and WMD programs. A comparison between the amount of WMD which Iraq possessed in the early 1990s according to confiscated internal Iraqi documents and the amount of weapons the inspectors destoyed gave a large and troubling balance.

3) Consern over and anger at Iraq’s support for Islamic terrorism. Iraq ostentatiously offered sizable bounties to the families of Palistinian-Arab suiside bombers. Iraq also supported the Islamic terrorist/militant goup Al-Ansar Islam, a goup symapathetic to and connected with Al Quaeda.

Supporting the Iraq War does not necessarily make one a neoconservative, nor does opposing it necessarily make one a multilateralist liberal.

That’s a useful summary by Joshua of the various reasons various people have to be for or against the war. To the ideological paleocon mindset, however, support for the war makes one a neocon, period.

Joshua and Mr. Auster have hit things on the head. I would add the addendum that the reasons why people oppose the war are probably more important, and more revealing, in the long run, than whether they are simply for or against it. This was also true in some cases in the past, e.g, Indochina. Those who opposed the war on strategic grounds, objecting that the region was a poor place to oppose our enemies and that not much was at stake strategically — that is, arguing against the domino theory — could reasonably claim to have been vindicated. Those who argued that it was a war of aggression by the United States, a crime, etc were not only wrong but permanently poisoned and confused political discussion in our country.

The insane “neo”-hatred continues. In the latest issue of The American Conservative, there’s an article by William Lind about the impossibility of democratizing Haiti. That’s the rational part of the article. The irrational part is that Lind blames everything we’ve done in Haiti on unnamed, generic “neocons” and their policy of spreading democracy to the world. But of course, it wasn’t “neocons” who sent the Marines to Haiti in the early ’90s, it was President Clinton; and he didn’t do it in order to nation-build, he did it in order to restore the democratically elected leader Aristide who had been overthrown and to stabilize the chaotic situation there so as to stop the flood of Haitian refugees to the U.S. Of course, there was some “save-democracy,” nation-building rhetoric thrown in (since no American leader, whether Democrat or Republican, goes to the bathroom without saying that he’s doing it for the sake of democracy), but the immediate cause of our intervention was an emergency that had to be dealt with. For similar reasons, the U.S. had intervened in Haiti numerous times before, going back to 1915, long before there was such a thing as neoconservatives. Furthermore, Lind does not adduce a single quote or position from any individual neoconservative about Haiti, he just keeps ritualistically repeating the word “neocons,” attributing to them everything America has done wrong with regard to Haiti. “Neocons” are simply an all-purpose demon in Lind’s mind.

Thus Lind mixes up the valid part of his argument about the impossibility of exporting democracy to the whole world, with a crazed obsession with neocons that would disgust and repel any impartial informed reader who doesn’t share Lind’s obsession. And that, in a nutshell, describes The American Conservative as a whole, as well as the paleoconservative movement as a whole.

I myself tend to define any idea that says we need to spread democracy by force as neoconservative. I think that that is what was going on with Mr. Lind. The fact that we were trying to “protect democracy” in Haiti in his mind automatically makes the pro-Haitian invasion people neoconservative, or at least neoconservative on this issue.

By the way, an important point here is that the universality of the “spread democracy” among both mainstream political parties is part of the reason that the democrats cannot form a coherent case against the war. Since everyone accepts the idea that we need to bring democracy to Iraq (I saw Howard Dean on Bill Maher, and he never spoke against “bringing democracy to Iraq” as a goal of the occupation), they can at best respond with “the ends don’t justify the means” arguments.

Mr. Jose writes:

“I myself tend to define any idea that says we need to spread democracy by force as neoconservative…. The fact that we were trying to ‘protect democracy’ in Haiti in his mind automatically makes the pro-Haitian invasion people neoconservative,”

Wrong on both historical fact and definition of terms. In Clinton’s action, we were not “spreading democracy,” we were helping restore an existing government that we supported that had been overthrown, in a country in which we have repeatedly intervened to maintained order, in a part of the world where over the last 200 years we have intervened scores or hundreds of times, to maintain order. Clinton’s and Bush 43’s actions in Haiti should be understood in that light, not in light of the neocons’ “spread democracy to the whole world” ideology.

Second, according to Mr. Jose’s wildly expansive definition of neoconservative, America was pursuing a “neoconservative” policy in Cuba in 1898 by freeing Cuba from Spain; in Europe in 1917-18 by helping the Western democracies, freeing subject nations, and imposing a democratic republic on Germany; in 1941-45 by once again rescuing the Western democracies from Nazism; and in 1945-1991 by waging the Cold War. To call all this “neoconservative” is a ridiculously sloppy and irresponsible use of language. It is even more so when we remember that Lind and other paleocons use “neocon” as a hate-word. (Note: I do not say that neocon is inherently a hate-word, I say that many paleocons USE it as a hate-word, that is, as a word used to invoke negative feelings rather than to convey information.)

I’ll admit, I haven’t studied the Haitian issue much, but it looks like your general point there is right, so yes, Mr. Lind (and myself) are incorrect on that point.

However, I think my expansive definition on neocon is fairly accurate. Actually, in many ways, yes, the war against Cuba was a neoconservative war. In fact, in some ways that war closely parallels the war with Iraq, including the fact that much of the intelligence leading to the war has come into question.

World War I, where we intervened in a European conflict that I do not think concerned us much, was in many ways a neocon war. I don’t see a tremendous difference between Wilsonian liberalism and neoconservatism, at least in regards to foreign policy. Even Wilson’s desire to use international institutions is not dissimilar to the neoconservatives. The main neocon objection to the UN is not that international institutions are flawed, but that it includes non-democratic countries. Plenty of neocons would love to start a new UN if the membership were more restircted.

As for World War II, while the war itself was not neoconservative, the post-war reconstruction was neoconservative in many ways. As I understand it, our goal in Germany, at least, was to create a democracy and to try to take away the sense of German nationalism and replace it with a more universalistic ideology. We even made peace with the welfare state, just as we are doing, I believe, in Iraq (as I recall, the new constitution guarantees health care as a right).

The Cold War is complicated and I’ll have to think about it before responding.

Reading the original posting on top, a thought immediately comes to mind.
I find ti interesting that people are concentrating on all of the ulterior motives for countries such as Turkey and France to be aginast the Iraq War, but no one is considering the fact that in most major countries, the population is against the war, sometimes overwhelmingly so.
Apparently we should be upset at the leaders of these countries for not forcing their populations into wars that they clearly do not wish to join.
Perhaps there are ulterior motives for the French and Turkish goverments not supporting us. But the election in Spain showed us that one reason may be that these people are afraid that the populace of their countries will vote them out of office if they choose to join a war that is unpopular.
None of this is to say that we ought to let the opinions of people in other countries determine our policy. But I also don’t think that we should expect the leaders of other countries to go against the wishes of their people, at least not in ones where the anti-war sentiment is over 80%.
I guess what I’m saying is that one can support the war while respecting other country’s decisions to stay out.

I respect many of Mr. Jose’s comments at VFR, but some of his statements in this thread are off base. His defense of William Lind’s expansive and dishonest use of “neocon” is one. His statements about the war are another. The reason Americans felt that France and other countries had betrayed them on the war was not simply that France “disagreed” with America on the war; it was that Frances AGREED with America on the war, supporting Resolution 1441, which gave America the go-ahead to make war on Iraq if—as expected—Hussein failed to comply. Acting on that basis, we began our build-up to war. But when Hussein failed to comply, France turned around and acted as if 1441 was nothing but a meaningless collection of words designed to prolong negotiations and inspections indefinitely. Then France went further, actively lobbying among nations to stir up opposition to the U.S. and treating America like an enemy country, trying to isolate and humiliate the U.S. at the very moment when we had counted on France’s support. THAT is why Americans are angry at France, not simply because France “disagreed” with us. There is no excuse for a participant in a discussion about the war not to know these things, concerning, as they do, a recent public event that we all lived through and all saw unfold before our eyes. To say that Americans are angry with France merely because France “disagreed” with America on the war is like saying that the administration is furious at Richard Clarke merely because he “disagrees” with the administration on the war. It’s like saying that people regard Joseph Sobran as an anti-Semite merely because he “disagrees” with Israeli policy on the settlements.

Woodrow Wilson redefined as a neocon is certainly an interesting twist. I think that if we group all foreign interventionists into a single group, and all anti-interventionists into another group, we are losing a lot of precision in our speech. Washington and Monroe would have restricted our interventions to our own backyard and avoided European wars; this became formulated as the Monroe Doctrine. Yet, when we intervene in Cuba and Haiti, it is now labeled a neocon war. I think that the distinction between our own hemisphere and elsewhere runs deep in American thought, and you will find rather broad support for Western hemisphere interventions among those who are otherwise anti-interventionists.

Labeling all anti-interventionists “isolationists” or “paleocons” would be the flip side of this kind of imprecise talk. Was Monroe a paleocon?

The religious, ethnic, and political backgrounds of those who supported World War I were very different from the neocons of today. ISI Books has an interesting new book about the transformation of mainline Protestant denominations from various forms of pacifism into pro-World War I crusaders. You can see a description of the book and a sample chapter at http://www.isi.org/books/bookdetail.aspx?id=61e3f381-6b7d-410f-89aa-31bff2e246e9

It is absurd to use the word neocon to describe anything or anyone before the 1970s, when neocons split off from liberals as the latter raced leftward — or perhaps the other way around, the liberals split off from them. (I do not mean to say that present-day neocons are simply Cold War era liberals preserved in ice; they have evolved, or devolved, since then.) The issues of intervention or nonintervention before Pearl Harbor differed from period to period, Between the world wars and up to Pearl Harbor fights over intervention cut right across the DOMESTIC issues that traditionally defined “liberal” and “conservative,” so you had both liberal and conservative interventionists and liberal and conservative isolationists. This fact has been obscured over the last 30-odd years by liberal writers who would like to pretend that everyone on the left was a noble antifascist and conservatives were all isolationists (if not pro-Nazi.) As for the conduct of the war and the postwar occupation: The intent of the US government and people (no difference here) was to TRY to turn Japan and Germany into good little democracies because noone thought of any alternative. (Was there any?) As it was, however, there was actually no great optimism that this aim would be achieved. The mood in which the occupations was undertaken was quite different from the swaggering overconfidence of the neocons…

I should add that I agree on one point with Michael Jose: the neocons abuse of countries that are usually friendly to us but disagreed with us on Iraq is stupid. I have in mind Joshua Goldberg’s description of the French as “cheese-eating surrender monkeys” and such ragging.

A few thoughts:

Granted, in a historical sense, the term neocon does not apply to Woodrow Wilson, etc.
Granted, also, there are differences in some aspects of the philosophy of neocons vs. interventionists in previous years.
However, note that I never said that all interventionism abroad is neocon. I view interventionism that is mainly geared toward the ideological quest of forcing democracy on everyone as being the hallmark of neoconservatism. This does not mean that intervention to aid democracies (say, aid to Israel) is inherently neoconservative. Nor is the creation of democracy in a foreign country as an incidental consequence of intervention necessarily neoconservative. Rather, I see the idea of intervening in a military or pseudo-military (e.g. creating a coup) way with the express purpose of creating democracy to be neoconservative, particularly when it is combined with a grander vision of spreading democracy through the world.

In brief, neocons are characterized by:
A belief in universalism, that is, that all people are basically the same in the culture they desire, namely, one similar to the US’s.
A belief that all conflicts are ideological in nature, and that race, ethnicity, and other similar factors do not play a direct role, so if everyon could agree on an ideology, there would be no conflict.
(This also leads them to be pro-immigration under the belief that all of the immigrants will become just like Americans).
A belief that history is working toward an ideological transformation to universal democracy and trust in government to bring about this ideological transformation.
The willinnenss to make peace with big government domestically in order to achieve these goals, or in some cases, the acceptance of big government as a positive good.
The one issue that most encapsulates these ideas is the desire to use the military to spur an ideological pro-democracy crusade.

On the issue of Cuba, our intervention there was offensive rather than defensive, so it is not exactly an example of the Monroe doctrine. The US attacked Cuba, as i understand it, not to prevent Spain from trying to colonize the area, but to take an aleady existing Spanish colony and to bring it under US influence. As I understand it, it was mostly an attempt to project US power, which is consistent with the neoconservative ideology. To the extent that the goal was specifically to refrom the culture of Cuba to be more like our own, I would say that the war was not significantly different than a neoconservative war.

As for the issue of France, yes, if what bothers you about the French government is its duplicity, you have reason to be upset with it. However, I do not think that your opinion is refelctie of the larger body of people who criticize the French.
I have heard very few people who criticize the French question why the French supported UN Resolution 1441. Rather, they tend to look for ulterior motives as to why the French did not follow through. That suggests to me that they are more concerned with France not supporting us rather than their being duplicitous.
As for Turkey, yes, that was a bad thing for the French to do. Nonetheless, we were pressuring Turkey to take an action that the vast majority (~90%) of its people opposed and that it had plenty of reasons to oppose even without ouside pressure from France. When they decided not to give us support, Wolfowitz said that it was too bad that the Turkish military hadn’t put more pressure on the parliament. Yes, the French betrayed us by threatening Turkey, but we were trying to bribe Turkey with loans to do something that the government, and the majority of its people, thought unwise, so any betrayal ought to be thought of in that context.

I’ll repeat my point, and then leave this. For Mr. Jose to take a term that came into existence around 1970 and apply it to, for example, the Spanish American war, is ridiculous. If the neoconservatism today resemble American imperialism of the past, then Mr. Jose ought to find an appropriate generic term that covers the two phenomena. “Neoconservatism” is not that term.

I think that Mr. Auster makes a very good point. I think that in my previous postings, I have used rather sloppy language and consequently sloppy thinking in expressing my views.

Perhaps the appropriate generic term would be “democratic imperialism,” or better yet, “messianic democratic imperialism.”
I think I got sidetracked earlier. When I said
“I myself tend to define any idea that says we need to spread democracy by force as neoconservative,” what I actually had in mind was that any current philosophy advocating the spread of democracy through force is neoconservative, in other words, that one issue forms a litmus test for current comentators, political philosophers, politicians, etc. In other words, while issues such as immigration or monetary policy or the welfare state also tend to have positions associated with neoconservatism, I don’t see those issues as sine qua nons for neocon-ness. A neocon can be pro-open borders or for more border controls, for example. I suppose that one could theoretically construct a position that would be pro-democratic imperialism but also non-neocon (say, an open socialist who advocates building democratic socialist welfare states across the world through US military intervention), but in practice I don’t see many of them around.
As for the Spanish-American War, and WWI, it would ahve been more precise of me to say that I see those policies as the forerunners of neoconservatism (at least in the foreign policy realm), and that I see Woodrow Wilson, for example, as one of the spiritual ancestors of the neocons. In other words, I look at them as the “neoconservatives of their day” in the same way as some look at pro-lifers as the “abolitionists of their day.”

Greetings Mr. Auster. What frosts me about the imitation Conservatives known as “neocons” is that most of them have no problem with Israel erecting a protective “security” wall (nor do I); but when it comes to the United States (their country) securing it’s borders, their thinking undergoes a strange metamorphoses in that: they find no problem with open borders for America. Nor do the neocons seem to see any contradiction in such a stance. (note: the “paleocans” have the same pathology, but, in reverse) So, from these points it would not seem unreasonable to venture that the neocons may, indeed, be in the service of the Trans-National-Global-Elites. The price they would be paying for such a “partnership” I will leave for others, more informed than I, to conclude.
As for “spreading” freedom, and democracy, in various and desperate places in the world: we should first and foremost — it seems to me — be anxious to well secure the aforementioned here at home.

Well said by “American Man.” I would recommend that he challenge neocon writers on this contradiction when he sees them engaged in it. However, if you don’t want to give them an excuse to dismiss you outright, you’ve to be careful in the way you make the point, since the situations are not identical. After all, we don’t have suicide bombers walking across the Mexican border.

A dose of reason:

http://theamericancause.org/

Mr. Auster writes: >”you’ve to be careful in the way you make the point, since the situations are not identical. After all, we don’t have suicide bombers walking across the Mexican border.”<
Of course, I recognized this nuance. For the analogy to hold one has to accept the idea that the open borders policies of the Trans-Nationals are, indeed, deleterious to the welfare of the citizens of America (it’s easy to get caught in a circular argument here; nor are analogies ever perfect). Also, one has to ask: “What citizens?” For example, Mexicans are not crossing our borders to become part of, or take jobs away from the “intellectual” elite. I don’t think David Horrowitz is in danger of losing HIS job to illegals anytime soon! (I wonder how many of the neocon founding fathers had construction jobs on the side?) Maybe in the future — when more, so called, “important” jobs are at stake — their thinking will change. Unfortunately, by that time it may be to late.

American Man’s point reminded of a point made by Steve Sailer, when discussing the disagreements between Paul Craig Roberts and Norman Podhoretz:
One of the reasons that the idea of dissolving Israel and letting all Israeli Jews immigrate here (an idea proposed by Paul Craig Roberts, that he later said was not to be taken literally) is so unworkable is that the average Jewish IQ is so much higher than the average American IQ that there would be a great increase in the competition for higher-paying powerful jobs.
While this would probably make the elites more likely to see the light about the dangers of mass-immigration, it would also likely produce a strong antisemitic backlash, as most of the immigratns creating the new competition would all be Jewish.

http://www.vdare.com/sailer/podhoretz.htm
(Links to the Podhoretz and Roberts articles within).