From today's Los Angeles Times:
Bush Pulls 'Neocons' Out of the Shadows
WASHINGTON � In the unending struggle over American foreign policy that consumes much of official Washington, one side claimed a victory this week: the neoconservatives, that determined band of hawkish idealists who promoted the U.S. invasion of Iraq and now seek to bring democracy to the rest of the Middle East.
For more than a year, since the occupation of Iraq turned into the Bush administration's biggest headache, many of the "neocons" have lowered their profiles and muted their rhetoric. During President Bush's reelection campaign, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, one of the leading voices for invading Iraq, virtually disappeared from public view.
But on Thursday, Bush proclaimed in his inaugural address that the central purpose of his second term would be the promotion of democracy "in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world" � a key neoconservative goal. Suddenly, the neocons were ascendant again.
"This is real neoconservatism," said Robert Kagan, a foreign policy scholar who has been a leading exponent of neocon thinking � and who sometimes has criticized the administration for not being neocon enough. "It would be hard to express it more clearly. If people were expecting Bush to rein in his ambitions and enthusiasms after the first term, they are discovering that they were wrong."
On the other side of the Republican foreign policy divide, a leading "realist" � an exponent of the view that promoting democracy is nice, but not the central goal of U.S. foreign policy � agreed.
"If Bush means it literally, then it means we have an extremist in the White House," said Dimitri Simes, president of the Nixon Center, a conservative think tank that reveres the less idealistic policies of Richard Nixon. "I hope and pray that he didn't mean it � [and] that it was merely an inspirational speech, not practical guidance for the conduct of foreign policy."
Someone from the Nixon Center is calling Bush an "extremist"??? We're in for a rough ride. I'm blaming it on those red states, and I think we should make them pay. Details here from the Los Angeles Times (if this link requires free registration, try the one from Yahoo! at the top of this post).