Is Neoconservatism dead, or just brain damaged?

“Neoconservatism, one of the dominant ideologies of the past decade, was decisively wiped out in the past six months, slaughtered along with a good number of innocent people in the imbroglio of the Iraq war – a conflict that was devised as a pure test of the neoconservative concept.”

There are a lot of people who would quibble with that, but Globe and Mail European bureau chief Doug Saunders, writing in this weekend’s paper (behind a subscription wall here) presents an assessment of the foreign-policy aspects of "neoconservatism" that is the most clear-eyed and honest I've read in a daily newspaper. It's especially valuable for a saucy question Saunders raises about neoconservatives: "Did they represent, for those of us who consider ourselves progressives, the only group of conservatives who are ever likely to share our values? Were they the conservatives leftists could love?"

My answer would be no, they're not. Not for Canadians of the left, anyway.

Of course it depends what one means when one says `neoconservative': "To many Canadians on the left, it was a way of saying American, in the worst possible sense of the word. For some, it was code for Jewish, and was at the root of many sinister conspiracies involving oil, money, and Washington. Even other conservatives, of the non-neo variety, took to calling the neocons "cowboys" or "imperialists."

Seen through the eyes of "an intelligent leftist," though, what neoconservativism did promise, despite its pathetic domestic obsessiveness with dismantling the state, was a break from paleoconservative isolationism of the kind that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in Rwanda and the Balkans, just for starters. Of the liberal left that found at the least the basis for a foreign-policy conversation with some neoconservatives, Saunders cites Michael ("I'm cautiously in favour of a military operation on humanitarian grounds against Saddam Hussein under certain circumstances") Ignatieff, and Saunders also takes the time to have a chat with Oliver Kamm, author of the deliberately cheeky title Anti-Totalitarianism: The Left-Wing Case For a Neoconservative Foreign Policy.

Many like-minded people on the left are associated with the Euston Manifesto, which takes an ad-hominum drubbing from the unreconstructed left - the standard, unintentionally funny melange of half-truth and hyperbole - here.

Saunders offers two ways to look at the failure in Iraq.

One: Saddam's overthrow was not accompanied by the necessary "social spending, the aid money, the nation building" because the entire project was left to American neoconservatives. "If that's the case, countries like Canada have a lot to answer for, and the anti-war movement has a lot of blood on its hands." Alternatively: The Iraq project was doomed to failure because it could never have succeeded under neoconservative leadership. They just don't "do" nation-building.

Saunders observes that the latter analysis is now the default position of neoconservativism's repentant architects, such as Francis Fukiyama (who now says neoconservatism is now so irretrievably associated with George W. Bush that any attempt at reviving it would likely be futile) and Kenneth Adelman, who concludes that after everything that's happened in Iraq, it's just "not going to sell."

But out of this Saunders sees something hopeful emerging, "a more socially-focussed form of nation-building," with "elements of a social-democratic, progressive foreign policy."

I'd hope so.