They're Back: The Neocons and Iran

From Jacob Heilbrunn, at the Los Angeles Times, "The neocons: They're back, and on Iran, they're uncompromising as ever":

If nothing succeeds like failure, then the neoconservatives who championed democracy promotion and regime change against Saddam Hussein are very successful indeed. After the Iraq war went south, the reputations of leading neocons such as former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz came into disrepute. But as the Obama administration has worked toward its controversial nuclear deal with Iran, the neocons have once again become the dominant voice on foreign policy in the Republican Party.

Writing in National Review on the eve of the agreement, the historian Victor Davis Hanson declared, "Our dishonor in Lausanne, as with Munich, may avoid a confrontation in the present, but our shame will guarantee a war in the near future."

Over the last few decades, the neocons, who are mostly based at think tanks and magazines in Washington, have come to constitute a kind of military-intellectual complex. Their credo is as sweeping as it is simple: No compromise is ever possible with America's foreign enemies. Instead, they are championing a liberation doctrine that allows them to present bombing and invading other countries at will as an act of supreme moral virtue.

Exhibit A is Iran. Just as they argued that Saddam Hussein was on the verge of obtaining a nuclear bomb, so leading neocons are rehearsing the same arguments about Tehran. They say the U.S. has no choice but to go on the attack before Iran explodes a nuclear bomb and becomes a regional superpower with the ability to destroy Israel.

"The United States could do a thorough job of destruction, but Israel alone can do what's necessary," John Bolton, ambassador to the United Nations during the George W. Bush administration, recently wrote in the New York Times. "Such action should be combined with vigorous American support for Iran's opposition, aimed at regime change in Tehran."

Similarly, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), who studied under Harvey Mansfield, a neoconservative government professor at Harvard University, is pushing the GOP toward a more hawkish stand. In March, Cotton circulated a letter designed to torpedo the Obama administration's negotiations with Iran and in a speech at the Heritage Foundation said Congress should be "offering to transfer advanced weapons like surplus B-52 bombers and 30,000-pound bunker-busting bombs to Israel."

If the neocons are well-represented in Congress, they also have the ear of some leading potential GOP presidential candidates...

It's like six degrees of separation for Heilbrunn. Sheesh. Most of the folks he mentions aren't even remotely considered "neocon." John Bolton, for example, repudiated the neocon label repeatedly in the years following the Iraq war, and especially around the time he served as U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. And Tom Cotton's a neocon because he took a class with a neocon? Well, most young college students should be communists by that standard, given the far-left colonization of the academy by America's ideological enemies.

Keep reading, for what it's worth.

Seriously. Heilbrunn even goes so far as to smear über isolationist Rand Paul by the dreaded "n-word." The horrors!