neocons are old news

The charge that the neocons are running foreign policy is past its expiration date, writes Michael Young:

Maybe 2008 will be the year when we will finally be rid of that vacuous belief that “the neocons” are in control of the Bush administration’s foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East. Habits are hard to break, particularly lazy ones, but if anyone bothered to look more closely, they would see that the United States has not really engaged in what we might call a neoconservative approach to the region since at least 2004, when the situation in Iraq took a sudden turn for the worse.

Defining neo-condom, roughly, as unilateralist, preemptive, and aggressive on behalf of democracy and free markets, Young goes on to cite the specifics of Bush pulling away from that ideology in favor of seat-of-the-pants pragmatism:

[S]oon after the takeover of Iraq, the administration gradually began acting in the Middle East pretty much like its predecessors. It was compelled to rely on the multilateral institutions it had spurned in the run-up to the Iraq war, …

By 2004, the U.S. was resorting to the U.N. in other Middle Eastern crises as well. For example, the Security Council was the preferred route for U.S. efforts in 2004 to push for a Syrian military withdrawal from Lebanon. …

[T]he Bush administration only latched onto the democracy imagery [in Lebanon] after the anti-Syrian rallies had started,  …

Since 2006, the Bush administration has all but abandoned the democracy agenda to rally the despotic Arab regimes against Iran. Containment is the new catchword and, no surprise, it is pretty much what the Reagan, Bush Sr., and Clinton administrations spent two decades applying to post-revolution Iran. …

Similarly, the Bush administration now finds itself back in the oldest gig in town: the Palestinian-Israeli peace process … [which] was always rubbish to the neocons.

Conclusion [e.a.]?

So maybe it’s time to stop referring to the neocon policies of the Bush administration. … What we now have in Washington is a mishmash of old political realism and improvisation, topped with increasingly empty oratory on freedom and democracy. That should please quite a few of Bush’s domestic critics. He’s returned to the futile routine in the Middle East that they always urged him to.

That’s true.

Speaking of which, I’ve been wondering why Walt and Mearsheimer haven’t stepped forward to congratulate the Bush administration for cutting Israel loose and seeing to America’s interests first.