Reply #56: Washington Monthly, May 2004

[Adelante]

President Bush's approach to Iraq and to the Middle East in general has been greatly influenced by a group of foreign-policy thinkers whose defining experience was as hawkish advisors to President Reagan and the first President Bush, and who in the last few years have made an explicit comparison between Middle Eastern regimes and the Soviet Union. These neoconservatives looked at the nest of problems caused by Middle East tyranny and argued that a morally unequivocal stance and tough military action could topple those regimes and transform the region as surely as they believed that Reagan's aggressive rhetoric and military posture brought down the Soviet Union.

-snip

As has been well documented, even before September 11, going after Saddam had become a central issue for them. Their Project for a New American Century seemed intent on doing to President Clinton what the Committee on the Present Danger had done to President Carter: push the president to take a more aggressive stand against an enemy, while at the same time painting him as weak.

September 11 gave the neoconservatives the opportunity to mobilize against Iraq, and to wrap the mobilization up in the same moral imperatives which they believed had achieved success against the Soviet Union. Many of them made the comparison direct, in speeches and essays explicitly and approvingly compared the Bush administration's stance towards terrorists and rogue regimes to the Reagan administration's posture towards the Soviet Union.

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2004/0405.clark.html