BILL KRISTOL appeared on Fox News Sunday and said this:

I think at this point you probably have to do more than a no fly zone. You probably have to tell Qaddafi he has to stop his movement east and that we are going to use assets to stop him from slaughtering people as he moves east across the country. We might take out his ships in the Mediterranean. We might take out tanks and artillery.

Andrew Sullivan blogged this item under the title "Another Neocon War!", and asks:

[I]s it too much to ask that they acknowledge that the last two wars they argued for with such moral preening led to a human catastrophe, with no long-term security gains for the US, and vast amounts of debt? Is a total lack of reflection or responsibility now mandatory with these people?

You know what's funny? Answering rhetorical questions. So: "No" and "No". Anyway, who are "these people", the "neocons"? The label has become a term of abuse, but I fear it's unclear to most of us who counts as a neocon, what these people believe, and why they seem ceaselessly to bang the drum of war like a hippie with a new bongo and fresh ounce of hash.

Over at Cato Unbound (I used to be the editor), C. Bradley Thompson, a professor of political science at Clemson University and author of "Neoconservatism: An Obituary of an Idea", offers a fascinating critical summary of the content of neoconservatism as practical political creed, which is, more or less, Irving Kristol's operationalisation of Leo Strauss' political philosophy. The piece is too rich to fairly summarise, and I encourage you to read it all. For now I want to focus on the elements of neoconservatism that help explain the alarming truculence of its adherents.

The key to understanding the neocon's warmaking way, according to Mr Thomspson, is the role of the "national greatness" project within the comprehensive neocon scheme. And the point of national-greatness conservatism? Mr Thompson writes:

In the end, the neocons want to “remoralize” America by creating a new patriotic civil religion around the idea of “Americanism”—an Americanism that will essentially redefine the “American grain.” The neoconservative vision of a good America is one in which ordinary people work hard, read the Bible, go to church, recite the Pledge of Allegiance, practice homespun virtues, sacrifice themselves to the “common good,” obey the commands of the government, fight wars, and die for the state.

Many neocons, I'm sure, earnestly believe American global hegemony is the way to worldwide peace, democracy, and liberty. However, it is also thought that striving to fulfill this role will save Americans from the amoral meaninglessness of liberal-democratic capitalism. Making war in the attempt to dominate the globe offers otherwise pathetic average American something to live for. Seriously. Mr Thompson:

The neoconservatives' policy of benevolent hegemony will, according to William Kristol and Robert Kagan, “relish the opportunity for national engagement, embrace the possibility of national greatness, and restore a sense of the heroic.” In other words, the United States should wage war in order to combat creeping nihilism. In the revealing words of Kristol and Kagan, “The remoralization of America at home ultimately requires the remoralization of American foreign policy.” ... The neocons therefore believe that a muscular foreign policy—one that includes military intervention abroad, war, regime change, and imperial governance—will keep the American people politicized and therefore virtuous. By saving the world from tyranny, America will save herself from her own internal corruption.

Moreover, war offers ubermenschen the enlarging opportunity to enrich the lives of their fellow citizens by treating them as pawns in a megalomaniacal game, "statesmanship", we plebes couldn't possible understand.

By keeping America perpetually involved in nation-building around the world, neoconservative rulers will have the opportunity to exercise their statesmanlike virtues. There can be no statesmanship without politics and there can be no truly magnanimous statesmanship without war, so the neocons fear and loathe moral principles that might deny them this outlet. A condition of permanent war, a policy of benevolent hegemony, and the creation of a republican empire means that there will always be a need for politics and statesmanship.

I know. This sounds totally insane. But I've spent enough time in Washington wonkland, and I've read enough of the Straussean/neocon classics to say that, yes, this is a fair representation of what much of the neocon elite believes. They also believe the elite shouldn't admit to believing this, so expect denial. But it's true: there really are people who go on television and argue America should go to war against Libya at least in part to combat the imagined nihilism of modernity.