Jacob Heilbrunn is editor of the National Interest and author of They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons.

Don’t look now, but the latest installment in the decades-old neocon saga is currently taking place. Reviled as serial bunglers and amateurs after the Iraq war went south, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith and a host of other neoconservatives are seizing the spotlight to conduct their own very personal war of liberation. They want to free themselves from the rap that they got it all wrong. And so they are going into overdrive to pin the blame for the collapse of Iraq on anyone other than themselves. Only this time, the American people, unlike in 2003, seem primed to ignore them.

Take L. Paul Bremer III, whose move to disband the Iraqi army led to the rise of the insurgency. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, he lays all blame for the chaos in Iraq at Obama’s feet, claiming that he squandered the fruits of victory by refusing to keep U.S. troops in Iraq in perpetuity. “The crisis,” Bremer writes, “unfolding in Iraq is heartbreaking especially for those families who lost loved ones there. They gave so much; it is all at risk. It did not need to be this way.” Nor is this all. Echoing Bremer, Max Boot declared in the Weekly Standard that in pulling troops out from Iraq “Obama has helped restart the war.” Even Dick Cheney, emerging from his undisclosed location, teamed up with his daughter Liz to write, with an admirable lack of self-awareness, “Rarely has a U.S. president been so wrong about so much at the expense of so many.” Yes, that Dick Cheney, the vice-president who predicted in August 2002 that after Saddam’s ouster, “the streets in Basra and Baghdad are sure to erupt in joy in the same way throngs in Kabul greeted the Americans.” Of course, in their utopian quest to put “an end to evil,” to quote the ridiculous title of a ridiculous book by David Frum and Richard Perle, the neocons have ended up emboldening the very country they saw as the main threat to America—Iran.


But perhaps the most prominent sign of the neocons’ return came in the form of a flattering profile of the neocon thinker and Brookings Institution scholar Robert Kagan in the New York Times. Just below a lengthy portrait of how former British prime minister Tony Blair is haunted by the legacy of the Iraq war, the Times’ Jason Horowitz offers a remarkably different take in rehabilitating Kagan, one of the principal intellectual authors of that conflict.

Kagan, whose recent cover story in the New Republic, “ Superpowers Don’t Get To Retire,” so irritated Obama that the president invited him for lunch, is described in the Times profile by an unnamed former White House official as a “gentleman,” which is true, who has an “excellent grasp of history,” which is questionable. For all his undeniable talents, Kagan has a penchant for subordinating the grim realities of power politics to a tale of fictitious virtue, when it comes to the U.S., and unadulterated evil, when it comes to our adversaries and foes. He tends to create, in other words, a fairy tale in describing America’s role in the past and present.

In his doorstop history of 19th-century American foreign policy Dangerous Nation, for example, Kagan sounded his favorite, and the neocons’, favorite theme. He depicted America as uniquely virtuous, pursuing idealistic aims, while presenting all other great powers as fighting for venal and self-interested motives. So assiduous was Kagan in his fanciful interpretation of American actions that even the Spanish-American War, seen by most historians as the product of William Randolph Hearst’s yellow press and the U.S. desire to expand its influence on behalf of economic imperialism, becomes something else entirely—a bright and shining crusade for freedom: “Too few have seen or perhaps have wanted to see how the war was the product of deeply ingrained American attitudes toward the nation’s place in the world. It was the product of a universalist ideology as articulated in the declaration of independence.” Certainly Kagan pointed to economic factors and prejudice, among other things, as contributing elements but he emphasized that "by far the most persuasive interpretation of the war with Spain is that it was indeed undertaken primarily, though not exclusively, for humanitarian purposes, just as McKinley and everyone who supported the war claimed at the time."

Uh-huh. At bottom this was rousing nationalism masquerading as history, a return to the antiquated stories of national greatness that historians like George Bancroft produced in the 19th century. It makes for a good yarn but bad policy. As Michael Lind wrote in the British magazine Prospect, “Kagan’s ingenious but unconvincing attempt to rewrite American history to make Americans into neoconservatives and the Iraq war the logical consequence of the declaration of independence is doomed to fail, just as the policy for which he seeks to provide a usable past has already failed.”

But the past, of course, is precisely what neocons want to sweep away. In a Tuesday post on the website of the Weekly Standard, William Kristol and Frederick Kagan, a brother of Robert who played a key role in designing the Iraq surge, airily announced that there’s no point in dwelling on old mistakes: “Now is not the time to re-litigate either the decision to invade Iraq in 2003 or the decision to withdraw from it in 2011. The crisis is urgent, and it would be useful to focus on a path ahead rather than indulge in recriminations.”

How convenient. They go on: “All paths are now fraught with difficulties, including the path we recommend. But the alternatives of permitting a victory for al Qaeda and/or strengthening Iran would be disastrous.”

In essence, the neocons appear to be offering a grand bargain to Obama: Forget about our mishaps in exchange for our forgetting about what we perceive as yours. Such brazen behavior is emblematic of the neocons’ refusal to reexamine their own record on Iraq. Far from retreating, they’re doubling down. (Indeed, this fall Wolfowitz and Scooter Libby, a former Cheney aide who was sentenced to prison for disclosing the identity of CIA officer Valerie Plame, will teach an online course called—no joke—“The War in Iraq: A Study in Decisionmaking.”)

Whether the neocons’ audacious attempts to once more guide the debate over foreign policy will succeed is an open question. Kristol, for one, seems to think this is his moment, writing recently, “A war-weary public can be awakened and rallied. Indeed, events are right now doing the awakening. All that’s needed is the rallying.”

Wrong. This is classic neocon bombast, which is to act as though foreign policy is simply a matter of willpower. It isn’t. Foreign policy is not a cheerleading event. A host of other factors—the strength of the economy, our alliances, the growing power of China, climate change and other developments—mean that American cannot simply act with impunity abroad, as the neocons would have it. What’s more, the American people are not ready to rally: A recent Pew poll indicates that 54 percent of the public, a new high, believes that the United States should “mind its own business” internationally. Put simply, Obama is not flouting the will of the public. He is expressing it. It’s the neocons who are out of step with history.

No doubt the liberal hawks at magazines like the New Republic and perhaps politicians such as Hillary Clinton, not to mention Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham, hanker for a return to the glory days of the certitude about American muscle-flexing abroad that prevailed immediately after 9/11—a spirit Kristol, sounding like a latter-day Theodore Roosevelt championing the virtues of outdoorsmanship, calls “moral health and martial vigor.” In their incessant yearning for war and tumult, the neocons bring nothing so much to mind as Shakespeare’s Coriolanus: “Let me have war, say I; it exceeds peace as far as day does night; it’s spritely, waking, audible, and full of vent. Peace is a very apoplexy, lethargy: mulled, deaf, sleepy, insensible; a getter of more bastard children than war’s a destroyer of men.”