Fairer Jacques

The piece by Martin Jacques in the Guardian that Trunk linked to below –“The Neocon Revolution” — is less objectionable than I expected. For example, Jacques recognizes that President Bush’s foreign policy is not driven by a single-minded ideological commitment either to unilateralism or to regime change. Rather, administration policy, though informed by certain basic principles, is formulated rationally on a case-by-case basis.
I do wonder, though, what Jacques and others mean when they characterize the administration as “neo-conservative.” The people in charge — President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and Secretaries Rice and Rumsfeld — were not, to my knowledge, considered neo-conservatives in the past. And the administration’s emphasis on the pursuit of democracy stands in contrast to the views of original neo-conservatives like Jeanne Kirkpatrick, who vigorously opposed