NEOCONSERVATISM:

Why We Need It

Douglas Murray

THE SOCIAL AFFAIRS UNIT

© Douglas Murray 2005

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CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1

NEOCONSERVATISM IN THEORY

CHAPTER 2

US NEOCONSERVATISM IN PRACTICE

CHAPTER 3

RELATIVISM AND THE IRAQ WAR

CHAPTER 4

NEOCONSERVATISM FOR BRITAIN

THE AUTHOR

ABOUT THE SOCIAL AFFAIRS UNIT

MORE FROM THE SOCIAL AFFAIRS UNIT

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I should like to thank Michael Mosbacher and the Social Affairs Unit for their support and assistance during the writing of this book. Also my copy editor Clive Liddiard, and Dominic Hilton for many helpful suggestions on the first draft.

I am also indebted to all those friends and allies who have argued with me, published me and supported me over recent years - especially during the writing of this book. I fear, though, that I must eschew the normal courtesy of naming them all, not because I am not grateful to them, but because it is probable that some of them would not thank me for thanking them.

Aspects of this book may prove controversial, and I am aware that any full list of thanks I make might appear - with some justification - to consist of a rudimentary list of the neoconservative population of these islands. I do not wish to provoke a witch-hunt, nor to have to witness friends declaring that they have never 'knowingly' been a neocon, and so I trust that all those who have been kind know who they are, and will anonymously accept a thousand thanks.

I should like to dedicate this book, with gratitude for everything, to my family and to Tony.

And so these men then bore themselves after a manner that befits our city; but you who survive, though you may pray that it be with less hazard, should resolve that you will have a spirit to meet the foe which is no whit less courageous; and you must estimate the advantage of such a spirit not alone by a speaker's words, for he could make a long story in telling you - what you yourselves know as well as he - all the advantages that are to be gained by warding off the foe.

Pericles' Funeral oration

(Thucydides, Peloponnesian War, Book II, XLIII, trans. C. F. Smith)

INTRODUCTION

The spur for this book comes not from a presumption, but from a fact. That fact is that British conservatism (with both a lower and an upper case 'c') is in trouble. The natural party of conservatism has flat-lined at the polls in successive general elections, and in 2005 again proved unable to increase its share of the vote - an increase that is vital if it is to return to power. This estrangement between the Conservative party and power has inevitably led to self-examination, but it is a self examination that has proved woefully inadequate, even myopic in its tendency to tinker with splinters of wood, when it should be felling trees. What is more worrying about this failure is that it has had a knock-on effect in the country as a whole, where, with no one leading the counter-attack, the forces of counter-cultural degradation, growing statism and relativism have been allowed to grow and - worse - present themselves as inevitable.

From the moment of defeat in 1997, the instinct of many in the parliamentary party was to charge towards the centre or centre-left ground held by the Labour government, attempt to beat them at their own game, and win back power by being (not so much in the right place, as) in the same place, at the right time - to be there when the electorate fell out of love with New Labour. Yet not only is this tactic cowardly (and if not amoral, then certainly lacking in moral impetus), it is by no means certain to work. More importantly, it takes absolutely no account of the simple fact that politics is meant to improve people's lives, to offer change, and do good. Power for power's sake is not only gross; it also disenfranchises people from the genuinely important decisions they make at the ballot box about who runs their country, and in what direction that country should be heading.

Yet the Conservative party's failing is not a problem of one party, or one party's supporters. It is a symptom of a profound and seismic gap that has opened up in British life; a symptom of a country and people who have profoundly lost their way; an attribute of a nation not so much in flux, as one in drift, unaware of the direction in which it is heading. Were that drift in a broadly sympathetic direction, it might not be interpreted as a problem. But this drift is a drift towards dangerous ideals.

As a culture, we are, to steal Yeats' verb, slouching along this course - as unaware of the direction in which we are heading as we are ignorant of its cause.

Yet it is not an inevitable course - it is not even a condition that should be especially hard to reverse. But to reverse it we need to define its causes, and identify both the culprits and the cure. It is my belief that the solution to many, if not all, the problems lies in neoconservatism - not just because it provides an optimistic and emboldened conservatism, but because neoconservatism provides a conservatism that is specifically attuned, and attractive, to people today.

It is also a journey that British conservatism must make. Ever since Britain's first socialist government came into power, conservatism has been characterised as a force of reaction. It has been typified by the backward-looking, the nostalgic and, often, the snobbish (epitomised, perhaps, by Evelyn Waugh's famous comment in the late fifties that he saw no point in voting for the Conservative party, since after eight years in office, they hadn't managed to set the clock back even five minutes).

Such a brand of Toryism has both kept a wing of the party alive and reduced the body to a near cadaver. Conservatism is certainly, in part, about conserving that which is good - preserving the virtues of the past for the future. But it is not, and cannot be, about believing the past to be inevitably superior or desirable. Besides, in this age, with so much changed, what exactly is it that a conservative would wish to conserve?

One of the central dilemmas of conservatism has always centred around the paradox expressed by Giuseppe di Lampedusa in the great conservative novel of the last century, The Leopard. 'If we want things to stay as they are', Tancredi says to the Prince, his uncle, 'things will have to change.’[1] Conservatism is not archaism because it has always adapted to change. But for conservatives Tancredi's aphorism points down a two-pronged track: one path leads to conservative survival, the other tricks conservatism towards disaster. The crucial thing is to know when you have gone down the wrong path; to realise when you have conceded so much that almost nothing is the same. For many people this moment of realisation is hard or impossible to identify. How can you know whether you are being propelled into something good, or fooled into losing everything? How, most crucially of all, do you identify the moment when there has been so much change that nothing is the same? And how, if you realise this, do you muster the force to jump paths?

My contention is that conservatism and the Conservative party have been following the wrong path. Their moment of awakening ought to have come during the Blair premiership. This was the time for conservatism to regain its natural path - the path of conservative survival, where the good was preserved and the bad discarded. But during that time, instead, conservatives followed down the Labour route. Over a number of years they found themselves lured onto socialist territory, territory from which, by 2005, they were unable to escape. Where they had landed was the socialist territory of massively increased spending and taxation, a colossally enlarged state, the authoritarian institutionalisation of political correctness (an institutionalised mode of relativism) and an all-enveloping moral confusion.

This wrong direction has not only damaged a political party. It has allowed the journey in the wrong direction to continue unfettered. In Britain today, much has changed and changed for the worse. Not only has the look of the country - its people and places - altered beyond recognition, but so have the behaviour and outlook of the country, so that characteristics and beliefs that were once thought to typify the national character are seemingly lost beyond lamenting.

In these circumstances conservatives are placed in a uniquely unenviable position. Either they must hark back to that which is lost (a position often characterised as 'paleoconservatism'), berating with increasing bitterness and in decreasing numbers the slide away from tradition, or they might follow, like their natural political party, the road of allegedly inevitable socialist progress, and find themselves - as conservatives - defending a status quo that is not their status quo. In other words, they may find themselves defending an un-conservative status quo out of something like force of habit. While the former of these two positions is that characterised as predominant by those who hate conservatism, it is, in fact, the latter position which is infinitely more common. At present it is a widespread predicament, with conservatives remaining loyal to that which continually lets them down.

But in this situation conservatives do have another option: to do it they must do something that is profoundly un-conservative. Because the status quo has changed, because the status quo is no longer conservative, conservatives must seek to change the status quo. In so doing they must become new conservatives, radical conservatives - revolutionary conservatives. They should become neoconservatives.

Having leapt to public prominence in the lead-up to the 2003 Iraq war, the word 'neocon' now seems firmly embedded in our language, or at least in our lexicon of political insults. Usually conflated with 'hawks', 'neocon' is now a popular catch-all word to identify anything tough or seemingly sinister that emanates from Washington.

That there's a taste for the insult can be seen not only from the anti-war lobby, but across the range of British media and politics. For the 'anti-war' crowd and many on the 'left', the term 'neocon' now rivals 'fascist' as an all-purpose form of abuse. For traditional conservatives, meanwhile, neocons are often treated with either caution or open hostility. Both sides meet in holding neocons guilty not only of war-mongering, but of many associated ambitions, the dark nature of which can often only be hinted at by innuendo. All think they know what they mean when they summon the spectre.

Yet ask someone who slings the term around, 'what is a neocon?', and you are almost guaranteed an answer that is either circular ('a neocon is a hawk', and so on) or startling. As David Brooks noted in 2004, 'If you ever read a sentence that starts with "Neocons believe", there is a 99.44 per cent chance everything else in that sentence will be untrue.'[2] Rarely has a term been thrown around so wildly while its meaning remains so popularly elusive.

But it is not just the public in Britain who assume knowledge of neoconservatism while failing to begin to grasp the concept - the media and politicians in Britain have also both failed to engage the issue, too often satisfying themselves with fanciful cliches and grotesque simplifications. This fact can only partly be blamed on the increasing, and now undeniable, infantilism of British politics. A more pervasive reason is the fear that exists in British politics today of the grand idea, and an especial fear - now common across the political landscape, thanks to political correctness - of boat-rocking. When I say 'the grand idea' I do not mean it in the hyperbolic sense used by government in, for instance, press releases on healthcare reform. I mean the kind of big idea that gets people not just voting for politicians, but actually proselytising politics.

If voter apathy could be reduced to one prevailing cause, it is the feeling that there is no longer anything worth voting - let alone fighting - for. People think their vote won't make a difference because they sense that there is no big difference to make - too little is at stake. The big ideas often seem either to have already been accomplished or else appear tainted beyond use. One might feel justified in proclaiming Britain a post historical state: the battle is won; only skirmishes remain.

But this is not the case - and we should be alert to that fact. When politicians restrict themselves to discussing the small issues, the big issues have a tendency to come creeping silently back. In the wake of the terrorist assaults on America in 2001, and the conflicts that have resulted from those assaults, large questions, which had long lain dormant, surfaced again.

For instance, in the wake of the attacks of 9/11, the presumed consensus on our multicultural society seemed open to question as it had not been for many years. Think-tanks, occasional newspaper columnists and very occasional Members of Parliament were able to raise concerns that had long been silent. And within a few months the late Enoch Powell was on the cover of Britain's foremost conservative magazine, depicted not as a pariah, but as a seer.[3] At the same time, while British troops were being deployed in trouble-spots across the world, the nature of Britain's position as a world power resurfaced and brought with it manifold problems. But though these, and many more questions, emerged, they remained not only unanswered, but largely unacknowledged. Questions not of policy detail, but of fundamentals, stood unanswered - questions about where society in Britain is going (or whither it has gone); questions about Britain's role in the world.

It is my contention throughout this book that neoconservatism provides answers to many of the problems facing us in Britain today. On all these matters, not just the war on terror, I am aware that not everyone sees that these problems even exist. Among other things, there is always the easy expedient of avoiding a threat by pretending that it is not there. And it is no wonder that for many people, whipped along as they are by the profitable demagogy of Michael Moore and the BBC's flippant and false The Power of Nightmares, there is no terrorist threat, nor any problems of failing states, unstopped genocides, hostile dictatorships or WMD proliferation. With malignant equivalencing abundant, it is no surprise that even the protection of our society has become a subject barely debated, such matters being reduced, when do they arise, to the idiotic Rory Bremner-style perversion of satire without humour.

But equally, there are many people who, while they agree on the nature of the threats before us, will not agree with the answers put forward. If that is the case, then opponents of the neoconservative approach must come up with answers of their own. I say this not as a hollow challenge or taunt, but because of a genuine concern. Like our American friends, we must ask the big questions, not only because we need answers to current predicaments, but because, if we do not pre-empt the argument and if the big questions are not out in the open, the consensus all too innocently leaves the door open for true extremism. In a free society nothing should be incapable of being said: the scandal in a society as educated as Britain's, is that so little is even being asked.

From the point of view of neoconservatism, I believe that opponents of its thought will have to meet its arguments head on at some point. The questions it raises, and the answers it suggests, cannot continue to be evaded. They certainly cannot be evaded by pretending, quite simply, that the questions are other than they are. In America, as I will demonstrate, neoconservatism has won the audience it has through the simple power and attractiveness of its arguments. It is the contention of this short book that the same revolution should occur in Britain, albeit (unhappy as we always have been to adopt anyone else's revolution 'wholesale') in a variant manner.

But before embarking on the argument proper, it is worth backing up briefly to deal with a problem in defining not just neoconservatism, but any political belief today. I say this not in order, as a certain philosopher has said, 'to become confused by the "blind scholastic pedantry" that exhausts itself and its audience in the "clarification of meanings" so that it never meets the nonverbal issues'.[4] Whatever else I am accused of in this book, I hope I will not be accused of the obfuscation to which Leo Strauss referred. I raise the issue of broader political definitions because, in order to define new creeds, one must have some stability in referring to old ones. In this regard we are in a mess at the moment. It is a mess not helped by the most significant political language discrepancy that exists between Britain and America.

To describe something as 'right-wing' in Britain today is either to be abusive (when speaking of others) or antagonistically boastful (when talking of oneself). As Andrew Kenny asked in a superb article in February 2005, 'What is the meaning of "He is to the right of Attila the Hun"? Was Attila rightwing because he was violent and cruel?'[5] The answer Mr. Kenny would commonly be given to this question is 'yes'. And when not being used to define a propensity towards genocidal violence, 'right-wing' is now used simply to denote racism.

Ask a political activist who bandies the term 'right-wing' around whether one can be racist and a man of the left, and you will either be told 'no' or be blessed with a period of silence. Put another way, and as Kenny helpfully points out in the same article, 'Lenin was more violent and cruel [than Atilla]. Is Lenin to the right of Attila the Hun?' For all these reasons, I shall avoid, wherever possible, referring to the 'right'.

Concomitantly, I shall avoid 'left-wing' - a description which, though undoubtedly carrying some pejorative overtones, possesses none that proceed far beyond an implication of incompetence or harmless idealism. Considering that the idealism of the 'left' led both to Stalinism and National Socialism, the term has got off amazingly, and incomparably, lightly. But this is too prevalent an historical offence to dismantle in a short book on a different subject.

In the end, I agree with Kenny that the most basic distinction to be made in politics today is between those who believe in large amounts of state control and those who believe in as little state control as possible. We might be closest to the right path if we can, from now on, refer to the former as 'socialists', and the latter as 'liberals'.

But we live in confusing times, and the word 'liberal' is nearly as polluted as 'right-wing'. In America 'liberals' are what in Britain we would have to call socialists. They are those with the greatest propensity towards believing the state could make everyone happy if only it was given enough clout to do so. T. S. Eliot described such people in 1934, when he wrote of those who spend their days 'dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good'.[6] And, of course, the matter is not helped by the now omnipresent tendency of conservatives, or those most proudly opposed to the 'left', to sneer at liberals without using inverted commas. The ironic air quotation marks surrounding such use of the word 'liberal' have long been dropped. The simple grammatical change between 'liberal' as a term of derision for illiberal people and the current use of liberal - period - denotes a problematic change. That people often intend inverted commas when they refer to meddlers in their affairs is undeniable, but the result of neglecting to spell out this punctuational detail is that the badge of liberalism has been appropriated, for the foreseeable future, by a group of people with least right to wear it.

I will, therefore, attempt throughout to use the term 'socialist' to describe those broadly understood as 'left', and 'conservative' for those broadly characterised as 'right'. I hope it will soon become clear why this formulation is necessary, and why it should, in time, prove head-clearing rather than muddling.

The word 'conservatism' itself opens up a can of worms, but I will leave that one for the chapters on America, as that is one word at least that travels under recognisable guise in both countries, even if it hardly comes with less (let alone light) baggage.

What should be stressed from the outset, though, is that neoconservatism is not 'New Conservatism'. It is not merely an attempt to reinvigorate conservatism or the Conservative party, though that would be a very happy outcome. Neoconservatism is a particular creed, and one that I hope will expand the base of conservatism, not only revive the base it already has. When Labour rebranded itself as 'New Labour' it was primarily a marketing exercise (albeit a very successful one). Any doubt over this became clear with the New Labour party, in office, still feeling around for a philosophy. After eight years of a Labour government, the broad philosophy of New Labour is as muddy and unclear as it ever was, the essentially PR nature of the enterprise epitomised with ultimate vapidity in Peter Mandelson's 2002 call for the party to become 'new New Labour'.[7] In contrast to New Labour, neoconservatism is not about PR. If it were, it should have done a better job of its public image. But the antidote to spin is not more spin, or better spin: the answer to spin is the truth.

Neoconservatism is a political viewpoint for dealing with the world. If the Conservative party can adopt neoconservatism (which is neoconservatism's best hope in Britain for achieving party-wide standing) then it may yet return from the political doldrums in which it now resides.

Neoconservatism provides the moral and practical answers to the malaise of British politics as a whole, not just that of the Conservative party. But if the Conservative party is to return to office it will have to change. It will have to become in some way a new Conservative party. In order to sustain conservative principles, while adapting to new problems inside and outside our borders, this book maintains that there should indeed be a new conservatism, and that the new conservatism should be neoconservatism.

CHAPTER 1

NEOCONSERVATISM IN THEORY

The origins of the philosophy - Leo Strauss and his impact - Allan Bloom and the Straussians - Neoconservatism absorbs Straussianism - Irving Kristol

For those who use the terms as insults, 'neoconservatism' and 'neocons' are merely synonyms for sinister extremism. For those who are equally aggrieved, hold the same attitude, but have tried delving deeper, the movement's intellectual lineage is alternately simplistic and confusing. In fact, neoconservatism's genesis and progress are both simple and confusing. Neoconservatism does not have a manifesto, and nor are there any but the broadest tenets on which all neocons could be said to agree. Even if they do agree on areas, there is no guarantee that this makes them neocons. And even if they are neocons, they may not think of themselves as such, or thank you for calling them so. Neoconservatism is a broad church, containing multiple tracks and directions of thought. And, since it is a type of thought and not a membership club or cult, establishing a lineage, never mind a definition, is not a task with obvious beginnings, middles or ends. Any attempt to pin the matter down, particularly in so short a book, will inevitably lead to some great names being passed over, and others being given idiosyncratic prominence. But in seeking to portray a way of seeing the world, the best one may hope to achieve is a kind of sensory introduction to, or acquaintance with, this most misunderstood 'ism'.

In the widely disseminated version of events, neoconservatism began in the post-war years, with the philosopher Leo Strauss indoctrinating his students at the University of Chicago. They were then sent out to indoctrinate a further generation of followers, and in this way Strauss's students were able - within a generation - to launch pre-emptive wars against countries of their choosing. Although this calumny is untrue, it does bear some similarities to reality, and should certainly be considered, albeit in a more benign light. Neoconservatism's origins can be traced, if not exclusively to Leo Strauss, then certainly to the period in which he was at his peak. And so Strauss is a useful and necessary point of entry for any investigation of neoconservatism.

But for all the focus he has received in the world press over recent years, anyone reading through Strauss to find reasons for the British and American-led attack on Iraq in 2003 is likely to be baffled and disappointed. Strauss's oeuvre is no invader's handbook.

THE STRAUSS FIXATION

The present prominent status accorded to Leo Strauss in the States had a suitably shady kick-off. Joshua Muravchik is among those to notice that 'the prize for the recent resuscitation of Strauss's name would seem to belong to the crackpot political agitator Lyndon LaRouche'.[8] Not entirely coincidentally, LaRouche (a perennial presidential candidate and former felon) leads the American field in anti-Semitic conspiracy theory. Although he had been making speeches and writing on the matter for some months, it was in March 2003 that LaRouche wrote at greatest length about Strauss, describing him as a 'fascist', and cack-handedly talking of his '"genetically" Nazi like ideology'.[9] Children of Satan: The Ignoble Liars Behind Bush's No Exit War was distributed across America throughout 2003 by the 'LaRouche 2004' campaign team. In his contribution to this joint work, one Jeffrey Steinberg added that 'this cabal of Strauss disciples, along with an equally small circle of allied neo-conservative and Likudnik fellow-travellers' had been waiting 30 years for 'the moment of opportunity to launch their not-so-silent coup'.[10] All the soon to be popular, or populist, ingredients were there.

By 16 May, Steinberg was boasting in LaRouche's absurdly titled Executive Intelligence Review that the LaRouche attack had 'drawn blood':

Just weeks after the LaRouche in 2004 campaign began nationwide circulation of 400,000 copies of the Children of Satan dossier, exposing the role of University of Chicago fascist 'philosopher' Leo Strauss as the godfather of the neo-conservative war party in and around the Bush Administration, two major establishment publications have joined in the expose.

The two articles cited (rightly or wrongly) by the author were a piece by James Atlas in the New York Times of 4 May (accompanied by a crude caricature of Paul Wolfowitz) and a 12 May New Yorker piece by Seymour Hersh. Both articles contained all the hallmarks of conspiracy-theory reportage. Atlas (the author of a biography of Saul Bellow) wrote breathlessly that Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz 'has been identified as a disciple of Strauss', while Hersh revealed that Abram Shulsky, Director of the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans, was not only 'a scholarly expert in the works of the political philosopher Leo Strauss', but furthermore, 'like Wolfowitz, he was a student of Leo Strauss's, at the University of Chicago'. That any or all of this information could have been obtained from an alumnus list did not make the discoveries any less thrilling.

What was definitely less thrilling, and certainly more worrying, was that two of America's premier papers were publishing stories that bore traces suggesting they had been picked up from a document disseminated by LaRouche. It would be a worrying sign indeed if two of America's finest 'liberal' papers were finding common cause with a man like that. As Robert Bartley summed it up in the Wall Street Journal, 'Looking at the striking similarities in these accounts the conspiracy-minded might conclude that the New York Times and New Yorker have been reduced to recycling the insights of Lyndon LaRouche. But it's entirely possible that Mr. Atlas and Mr. Hersh have stumbled into the fever swamps all on their own.'[11] Encouraged, stumbled or pushed, where the New York papers went the rest followed.

The game of hunt-the-Straussian ran across the entire spectrum of print and news media. Everyone seemed to be asking, as Foreign Policy In Focus had it: 'Is U.S. foreign policy being run by followers of an obscure German Jewish political philosopher whose views were elitist, amoral, and hostile to democratic government?'[12] For people who had seemingly never read a word of his writings, Leo Strauss posthumously provided an additional target for the ever cruder anger of those opposed to the direction of US foreign policy.[13] With Strauss long dead, it was up to his pupils to absorb the wilder anger of the anti-neocon lobby. And for those intent on attacking, rather than debating, the neoconservative position, sinister motives would be attributed to almost anyone who had neared Chicago during Strauss's years as a professor there. No one was free from the taint; unless, of course, like the late Susan Sontag, you had been a pupil of Strauss, but somehow avoided being nudgingly vilified as 'a pupil of Strauss'.

Unable to identify quite what was going on, but convinced there was something afoot, the mainstream press in Britain, too, swiftly took up the name of Strauss as another byword for political nastiness. In January 2004 a Daily Telegraph column maligning Prime Minister Blair sneered that, 'Perhaps, like Paul Wolfowitz and other neo-conservatives, he [Blair] is a disciple of the political philosopher Leo Strauss', before going on to explain: 'Strauss was a champion of the "noble lie" - the idea that it is practically a duty to lie to the masses because only a small elite is intellectually fit to know the truth.'[14]  Misinformed Straussian summaries of this kind became commonplace across the media, finally culminating in the BBC's 2004 exercise in immoral equivalencing, The Power of Nightmares. This was the atmosphere surrounding the Iraq war - a time when conspiracies became commonplace and quacks became sources. But before any of them had arrived on the scene, there was already one writer who had attempted to dissect Strauss's teachings, and had done so with notable successes, or at least converts of her own.

In February 2002, the year before LaRouche's splenetically confused attack, the journalist Will Hutton briefly mentioned Strauss in his Observer column, as well as referring in passing (in a new book) to his allegedly 'lethal legacy'.[15] In the Observer, Hutton launched the wild claim that American conservatives were following Strauss's teachings by uniting 'patriotism, unilateralism, the celebration of inequality and the right of a moral elite to rule into a single unifying ideology'.[16] By the end of the year, Hutton was describing Strauss as 'the high priest of ultra conservatism', and claiming that his American followers intended to use Republican success in the 2002 midterm elections to penalise and punish the poor and outlaw abortion, a fantasist agenda presented by Hutton as 'the most fiercely reactionary programme to have emerged in any Western democracy since the war'.[17]

Anyone wondering what had inspired Hutton in these early populist British attempts to grapple with Strauss needed to look no further than the first, February, Observer article. Before revealing that 'Paul Wolfowitz...is a Straussian', Hutton had written, 'As Professor Shadia Drury describes in Leo Strauss and the American Right...'[18] It was clear from what followed in that article, as well as his other Observer article, that Hutton's understanding of Strauss had certainly been influenced by, if not come wholesale from, Shadia Drury.

Drury is today the most consistently outspoken attacker of Leo Strauss. Currently professor of political theory at the University of Regina in Saskatchewan, her 1998 book Leo Strauss and the American Right had become, post 9/11, a ready-made guide for Bush-administration critics intent on defaming neoconservatism's most prominent intellectual forebear. The vice-president of the Hudson Institute, Kenneth Weinstein, is just one of those who have identified Drury's book as the work 'paraphrased' by LaRouche for his own peculiar screed.[19] It is no coincidence that the book's misreadings and contradictions recur in nearly all of the less-informed attacks on Strauss.

In the wake of the New York Times piece in May 2003, the Boston Globe picked up and stretched the idea du jour with a 3,000 word article by Jeet Heer claiming that 'we live in a world increasingly shaped by Leo Strauss', and concluding that Strauss was a 'disguised Machiavelli, a cynical teacher who encouraged his followers to believe that their intellectual superiority entitles them to rule over the bulk of humanity by means of duplicity'.[20] The International Herald Tribune followed the Hersh New Yorker piece with an article by William Pfaff, in which he claimed that Strauss teaches that 'it has been necessary to tell lies to people about the nature of political reality'. He went on to explain that, 'An elite recognizes the truth, however, and keeps it to itself.'[21] This is the line that the Daily Telegraph and every other hostile article on Strauss and neoconservatism ran with. In reality, of course, the claim is not just debatable, but wrong. And, as Muravchik was to point out, 'neither Heer nor Pfaff offers a clue as to where in Strauss's corpus one might find these ideas'. We are left, he correctly concludes, with the impression 'that they learned what they know of him from a polemical book by one Shadia Drury, who holds a chair in "social justice" at a Canadian university and who finds Strauss to be a "profoundly tribal and fascistic thinker".[22]

Just as Hersh, Atlas and co. seem to have learned what they know of Strauss from Drury, so Drury - in a September 2003 article - subsequently used their articles as evidence to support her own contentions. This Drury self-referencing echo chamber allowed her to stretch her earlier conclusions to their inevitable non-scholarly ends. 'The trouble with the Straussians is that they are compulsive liars', she wrote in the September 2003 article, going on to compile an imaginative scare-list of the neoconservative 'agenda', and concluding, 'It is ironic that American neoconservatives have decided to conquer the world in the name of liberty and democracy, when they have so little regard for either.’[23]

With any due respect, it should be admitted that Drury's first book on Strauss (The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss, 1988) is a useful work, containing interesting and debatable points. Her later book, however - the one that has functioned as a crib sheet for writers from LaRouche to the mainstream newspapers - is a deeply flawed and partisan work, correctly identified by one writer who was a pupil of Strauss as 'a snide, careless and inaccurate piece of liberal boilerplate'.[24] Whether or not Drury has, as some have it, made it 'her life's work'[25] to attack Strauss, she has certainly made a career out of it. Her central accusations are not new, but rather build on older allegations against Strauss, allegations often made by Strauss's contemporaries and rivals, and all of them intent on portraying Strauss as an implacable opponent of American democracy.

In some cases, the misunderstandings of Strauss's writings can be put down to ignorance; in other cases to opportunistic mendacity. But since both groups misrepresent Strauss, it is worth attempting to describe who Strauss was, what impact he had, and why some of that impact can still be felt.

LEO STRAUSS

Born in the Hessen region of Germany in 1899, Strauss was the son of a Jewish small businessman. He received his doctorate at the University of Hamburg in 1921, and went on to study with Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger postdoctorally. Publishing in various journals throughout the twenties, his first book, on Spinoza's critique of religion (Die Religionskritik Spinozas als Grundlage seiner Bibelwissenschaft) was published in Berlin in 1931.

Strauss married in France in 1932 and moved to England in 1934, where the following year he took a post at Cambridge University. In 1937 he moved first to Columbia University, and then to New York. Having left Nazi Germany behind for good, Strauss became a US citizen in 1944. In 1949 he became professor of political philosophy at the University of Chicago, a post he held for nearly twenty years. It was around this period that his great works were written: On Tyranny (1948), Natural Right and History (1953), Thoughts on Machiavelli (1958), The City and Man (1964) and Liberalism Ancient and Modern (1968). From 1968 until his death in 1973, he taught in California and Maryland, and completed The Argument and the Action of Plato's Laws (1975).

From this cursory overview of Strauss's career there are perhaps only two things that would stand out to anybody. First, Strauss was an emigre to the United States from Nazi Germany; second, his area of expertise was classical political philosophy. When taken together, these two facts carry some of the most basic explanations for Strauss's current position of political controversy. The first led, and leads still, to Strauss being considered an outsider. The second either baffles people or sparks instinctive hostility: in the present reductive age, expertise on the classics is characterised as obscurantist or anti-democratic, while either expertise on, or the merest interest in, Machiavelli is definite evidence of something sinister.

In fact, little of Strauss's impact can be understood from the bare essentials of his life. To begin to understand why he is credited with the influence he has, one must glean from his followers - to those who credit him with their intellectual awakening - something of his essence.

STRAUSSIANISM

In a 2003 interview, Paul Wolfowitz poured scorn on the rumour that US foreign policy was somehow being dictated by the dead Leo Strauss. 'It's a product of fevered minds', he said, 'who seem incapable of understanding that September 11th changed a lot of things and changed the way we need to approach the world. Since they refused to confront that, they looked for some kind of conspiracy theory to explain it.’ Wolfowitz's main point is absolutely right, but it was worth highlighting - as he went on to do - why the New York Times caricature of him as Leo Strauss's warrior on earth was flawed.

'I mean I took two terrific courses from Leo Strauss as a graduate student', he explained. 'One was on Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws, which did help me understand our Constitution better. And one was on Plato's Laws. The idea that this has anything to do with U.S. foreign policy is just laughable.’[26]

Wolfowitz puts his finger on one of the central confusions of neoconservatism. Many people who are neoconservatives today never encountered Leo Strauss. Among second and third-generation neoconservatives, it has correctly been said that 'few read him today'.[27] But Strauss certainly had a great impact on certain thinkers who encountered him, in print and in person during his lifetime, influencing them in differing, broad and complex ways.

One of Strauss's most ardent pupils, and one who freely calls himself a 'Straussian', is Werner J. Dannhauser. Dannhauser was at Chicago at the same time as perhaps the purest Straussian of them all, Allan Bloom. In 2003 Dannhauser wrote that 'it is important to remember, though easy to forget, that he [Strauss] was not the sinister godfather of the Right, nor the pied piper of so-called conservative values'.[28] His influence on Dannhauser, Bloom and many others was quite different, and the star-struck feeling for him is still evident, even today. 'Leo Strauss was like a sun around which we thought ourselves privileged to orbit',[29] Dannhauser recollected. 'He was the center of our intellectual and even our moral universe.'[30]

The actual father of neoconservatism (as opposed to its suspected godfather) - Irving Kristol - recalls, on first encountering it, that 'Strauss's work produced the kind of intellectual shock that is a once-in-a-lifetime experience. He turned one's intellectual universe upside down.'[31] But what did that shock consist of? And how did it turn listeners' and readers' minds so completely? The answer begins with an anecdote related by a reluctant Straussian descendant, Anne Norton.

Strauss firmly believed that fifth-century Athenian philosophy was capable of assisting - practically - contemporary American democracy. Inevitably, this celebration of ancient thought was paralleled at times by just criticism and condemnation of 'The Moderns' and modernity. On occasion Strauss was felt by some to lay this criticism on rather too thick. 'But Mr. Strauss', a student asked on one such occasion, 'Aren't we Moderns?' 'Yes', Strauss replied, 'but we are not merely Moderns.'[32]

Strauss's way of looking at the world, and his way of approaching great texts, had a starting point at the opposite end from the modern scholarly norm. His devotion to the text being absolute, his first intention was to attempt to think of it not as a twentieth-century man, but as the thinker himself thought of it, and, furthermore, to understand the thinker as the thinker understood himself. Far from what Strauss's critics claim - that he somehow attempted to limit or reign in his students' thinking, to make them surrender their intellect - from this simple initial process Strauss (as more than one student has testified) sought to awaken the critical instincts of his pupils. 'We were not asked to abandon ourselves, but to fulfill ourselves by contact with texts written by minds greater than ours', wrote Dannhauser.[33]

Strauss believed that study of the great ancient philosophical texts was now - and always had been - the principal path to spiritual liberation. But he recognised a problem. Something in the modern age was resistant to the intellectual claims and intellectual revelation of the past. Certain modern philosophical presumptions and deeply questionable assumptions had begun clouding contemporary philosophers' attempts to understand great thinkers of the past. Since we are, by extension and as a result, unwilling to understand the past in its proper manner, Strauss saw that we fast become unable to understand ourselves. Some Straussians have put it more forcefully. Thomas L. Pangle summarised Strauss's attitude by writing that it is as a consequence of its perverse manner of approaching the past that 'ours is also an age of spiritual disintegration and intellectual crisis or decay'.[34]

But as I mentioned at the outset, anyone searching through even the more promisingly titled works of Strauss may initially be disappointed by what he finds there. The importance of Strauss's approach dawns on the reader only gradually. On Tyranny is an example. This - one of Strauss's most approachable works - consists of a superlative commentary on Xenophon's Hiero or Tyrannicus, a dialogue on the nature of tyrants. From the very outset Strauss maintains that in his (our) own time, 'when we were brought face to face with tyranny - with a kind of tyranny that surpassed the boldest imagination of the most powerful thinkers of the past - our political science failed to recognise it'. This is one of the clearest allusions in all his published work to the early lessons observed by the philosopher in Weimar Germany. 'It is not surprising then', Strauss went on, 'that many of our contemporaries, disappointed or repelled by present-day analyses of present-day tyranny, were relieved when they rediscovered the pages in which Plato and other classical thinkers seemed to have interpreted for us the horrors of the twentieth century.'[35] Here is a scholarly breath of fresh air, even now, and one whose significance in the academy of Strauss's day cannot be exaggerated. Here is not the modern thinker condescending to interpret the past, but Plato and his contemporaries interpreting us.

'Suddenly, one realized that one had been looking at the history of Western political thought through the wrong end of the telescope', wrote Irving Kristol. 'Instead of our looking down at them from the high vantage point of our more "advanced" era, he [Strauss] trained his students to look at modernity through the eyes of the "ancients" and the premoderns, accepting the premise that they were wiser and more insightful than we are.'[36] Though perfect common sense to some, the notion that Plato (for instance) was in crucial senses wiser than us discomfits many academics and others for numerous reasons, and not just because it pricks their intellectual arrogance. Critics of the position could, exceedingly coarsely, be divided into two groups. For those of a theistic mindset, Strauss's approach can appear (albeit falsely) to subvert the significance of the position of revealed religion; while for those of an atheistic standpoint, more inclined towards non-theistic theories of historical 'progress', Strauss might appear to be negating the much-cherished but little-explained consensus on species betterment. Of the two positions, the latter camp of Strauss critics is by far the more virulent and, naturally, religiously obsessive. That the arrogance needs pricking, even if the approach were wrong, was demonstrated with perfect idiocy by Shadia Drury in 2003, when she asserted that 'The idea that Strauss was a great defender of liberal democracy is laughable.' This accusation was justified with comprehensive incomprehension when she went on to ask: 'How could an admirer of Plato and Nietzsche be a liberal democrat?'[37]

But it is not simply Strauss's approach to ancient texts that made his work controversial. On delving into his major works, what becomes clear is that this opening approach is not a scholar's one-off trick. What perplexes many when they first attempt Strauss is that the entire approach seems to continue in a similar vein. Throughout his writing, none of the land on which we 'Moderns' believe we safely stand holds fast. Countless presumptions of the modern age are held up to scrutiny and found wanting, or cast aside as unneeded and unhelpful devices. What is more significant is that Strauss clearly believes that, by losing these fundamental presumptions of our situation, we have lost our connection with something far more important - our own souls.

Though this becomes clear from even his simplest texts and commentaries, Strauss never states such a contention explicitly in the manner of a polemicist. It comes across thoroughly, but, to begin with - to the first-time reader - somewhat obliquely. It is in this way, as Pangle observed, that 'the initially historical or even pedantic appearance of Strauss's writing reveals itself on closer inspection to be the sign of Strauss's painfully incisive critical stance towards almost every major feature of the contemporary intellectual and political landscape'.[38] The small signs, the apparent scholarly idiosyncrasies, reveal beneath their surface a vast and profound feeling of questioning unease about the way in which western society is conducting itself, the direction in which it might be drifting, and the forcelessness with which it is defending itself. A philosopher himself, it was in philosophy that Strauss made his stand.

Natural Right and History is a monumental book, perfectly fitting Dannhauser's description of Strauss's work as 'specializ[ing] in unsettling settled convictions, and usually [doing] so in quiet prose buttressed by formidable scholarship'.[39] Assessing the treatment of natural right from the pre-Socratics to the twentieth century, Strauss sets out to demonstrate that there is a natural and true distinction in ethics and politics between right and wrong. Starting with Heraclitus' statement that it is 'men [who] have made the supposition that some things are just and others are unjust',[40] Strauss traces the trend of refutation of natural right, and painstakingly constructs the case for the defence. Not only is the work a profound work of scholarship, it is also Strauss's most comprehensive stand against nihilism, an intention that Strauss outlines in his 'Introduction'.

Nihilism was and is the distinctive enemy of Strauss and his followers. Indeed, in a piece on Allan Bloom in 2000, Christopher Hitchens mentioned - before the current Straussfixation began - that 'the term "nihilist" is one of the giveaway words by which one can recognise a member or supporter of the school of Leo Strauss' (it might be noted that in the wake of 9/11, Hitchens was to begin using the term more, as it were, liberally, himself).[41] The identification and use of the term is in no way mere rhetoric, however. Strauss and Straussians recognise how incomparably deep the problem of nihilism has gone in society, and to begin countering it Strauss set out to identify its causes.

For Strauss, in Natural Right and History, the cause is clear: 'The contemporary rejection of natural right leads to nihilism - nay, it is identical with nihilism.'[42] In this, and similar passages, Strauss clearly and repeatedly stands with the American fathers, and against the historical trend that he had seen develop once before, towards relativism. It is relativism that is identified by Strauss as the opening that leads to nihilism. Relativism rejects the notion that any principle can be entirely and rationally justified, leaving itself ultimately mute before the excesses of which man is capable: it is the disintegrating component in democracy. 'This is not to say', one contemporary Straussian has written, 'that all social scientists who deny natural right are consciously nihilists, but only [sic] that their rejection of natural right logically leads to nihilism.'[43]

Though his successors were to take this stance to attack specific aspects of their culture and society, for Strauss the problem was firstly a problem of erosion within the academy. Equally importantly, the problem was a problem for philosophy itself, and it was in this framework that Strauss set out his argument.

At the very start of his book the philosopher gives examples of 'just' and 'unjust' laws, and argues forcefully that both are undermined by a rejection of natural right::

...the need for natural right is as evident today as it has been for centuries and even millennia. To reject natural right is tantamount to saying that all right is positive right, and this means that what is right is determined exclusively by the legislators and the courts of the various countries.

But by using the necessary notions of 'just' and 'unjust' laws, Strauss goes on, we imply

that there is a standard of right and wrong independent of positive right and higher than positive right: a standard with reference to which we are able to judge of positive right. Many people today hold the view that the standard in question is in the best case nothing but the ideal adopted by our society or our 'civilization' and embodied in its way of life or its institutions. But according to the same view, all societies have their ideals, cannibal societies no less than civilized ones.

And here we come to the crux of Strauss's argument:

If principles are sufficiently justified by the fact that they are accepted by a society, the principles of cannibalism are as defensible or sound as those of civilized life. From this point of view, the former principles can certainly not be rejected as simply bad.

And, since the ideal of our society is admittedly changing, nothing except dull and stale habit could prevent us from placidly accepting a change in the direction of cannibalism.[44]

There are two further central points set out early in Strauss's great work that are worth mentioning now, because they are going to recur later. The first is the notion that society had the opportunity to choose the side of natural right, and made the wrong decision. Strauss noted that:

...there is a tension between the respect for diversity or individuality and the recognition of natural right. When liberals became impatient of the absolute limits to diversity or individuality that are imposed even by the most liberal version of natural right, they had to make a choice between natural right and the uninhibited cultivation of individuality. They chose the latter. Once this step was taken, tolerance appeared as one value or ideal among many, and not intrinsically superior to its opposite. In other words, intolerance appeared as a value equal in dignity to tolerance.[45]

For followers of Strauss, both conscious and unconscious of the fact, Strauss had, in this passage and this book, set out the ground on which the people eventually to be defined as neoconservatives were to fight the culture wars. He had illuminated the point that would be popularised by his disciple (for once the term is apt) Allan Bloom, and that would be repeated and extended by others.

Strauss was, pace his critics, a passionate believer in liberal education. He saw the situation in what were, for his age, starkly ideological terms. With the ever-present threat of democracy's decline from mass rule to mass culture, Strauss was, like Alexis de Tocqueville before him, alert to the apparently soft 'tyranny of the majority'. He was also aware, and believed, that a practical and achievable antidote was at hand, both for democracy and for the avoidance of tyrannical conformity: for him it was a simple truth that 'liberal education is the counter poison to mass culture'.[46] In terms that Bloom would later extend, Strauss wrote: 'liberal education is the ladder by which we try to ascend from mass democracy to democracy as originally meant'.[47] Strauss did not believe that liberal education would make all men happy, nor that it would make all men good, but he believed that, if we keep alert to the dangers, and are cognisant of our failings, liberal education enhances, even enables, liberal democracy.

For Strauss was - again pace his critics - a great defender of liberal democracy. But his praise came with a caveat. In a phrase that stands greatly to his credit, he wrote in 1968 that, 'We are not permitted to be flatterers of democracy precisely because we are friends and allies of liberal democracy.'[48] What Strauss knew was that the true friend of democracy and the people is not the fawner and panderer to the people, but the individual who criticises the people when they deserve to be criticised. This may not allow the true democrat to be regarded with fondness during his own lifetime, 'though he may', as Pangle puts it, 'win a kind of posthumous respect that is worth much more than popularity'.[49]

What Strauss identified, and what he has hardly been thanked for identifying, is that liberal democracy carries within it certain seeds of its own destruction, and that foremost among the seeds are those of relativism. If Strauss's successors stated the case more plainly and antagonistically than he did himself, then it was because they were writing in a period in which relativism had secured a greater hold not just in the academy, but on western democracy as a whole. For Strauss, the immediate concern in his writings was for philosophy. He saw that the modern crisis of natural right could become a crisis of philosophy because of the politicisation of philosophy. This complaint may, posthumously, seem strong coming from Strauss, but what Strauss was attempting to do was to make philosophy secure from politicisation, a process that he considered had been destructive for philosophy ever since it first took hold during the seventeenth century. Since that time, in Strauss's eyes, philosophy had lost its position as 'a pure source of humane inspiration and aspiration', and become, instead, 'a weapon, and hence an instrument'.[50] In part, Strauss's life's work was an attempt to put that right.

When we look at his legacy today, even accepting that he does not have the impact now that he had when he was alive (and that, alive or dead, he never had the destructive power with which his detractors credit him), it is impossible to deny that Strauss's career left traces. Those traces carried on in thinkers, writers, politicians and philosophers. They carried on in those who learned from Strauss and in those who 'only' read him. But they also carry on in those who have benefited from neither his books nor his teaching, but who intuit, by the indefinable trickle-down process of ideas, that there were people in the past who thought as they do.

Of the generation of those who directly carried on his legacy I will focus on two men. In different spheres, and in different ways, they founded a distinctive new ideology, carrying aspects of Strauss and chunks of much else out into the world. They did this both inside and outside the academy in a way that Strauss himself had never done, and had arguably never intended to do.

In the realm of politics, the seeds of Strauss's thought were best expanded upon by Irving Kristol. In the realm of the academy, the man who stands out is Allan Bloom, a man who continued and extended Strauss's legacy, and who sprang from Chicago passionately advocating the words of Strauss to his class on the occasion of Winston Churchill's death:

We have no higher duty, and no more pressing duty, than to remind ourselves and our students, of political greatness, human greatness, of the peaks of human excellence.[51]

ALLAN BLOOM

If Strauss had largely kept his criticism within philosophy, Bloom was the person who would take it out into the world. Having studied under him at Chicago, Bloom (who was born in 1930) became Strauss's most celebrated intellectual successor. He can even be glimpsed, acolyte-like, flitting in and out of the philosopher's correspondence with Alexandre Kojeve,[52] and once stated that the first occasion he encountered Strauss was the 'decisive moment' of his life.[53] After Chicago, and further study and teaching in Paris and Heidelberg, Bloom returned to the States to teach over the following decades at (among other places) Chicago, Yale and Cornell. His translation of Plato's Republic came out in 1968, and his translation of Rousseau's Emile a decade later. A much published and revered academic on the campuses on which he taught, Bloom's name may never have become more widely known had it not been for his friendship with Saul Bellow. In the early 1980s, Bellow (who was also to become Bloom's biographer in fictional form after Bloom's premature death in 1992[54]) encouraged his friend to collect his wide-ranging thoughts on culture, philosophy and society into a book, written as much as possible in the manner in which he talked.[55] Working under the title 'American Nihilism', Bellow's encouragement eventually paid off in the monumental The Closing of the American Mind.

If it may now be hard to understand why certain Straussian texts initially had the impact they did, no such confusion could exist over the effects of Bloom's masterpiece. A surprise bestseller when it was published (with an introduction by Saul Bellow) in 1987, The Closing of the American Mind is certainly the most widely bought and - they are not always the same thing - probably the most widely read Straussian argument in print.

The book caused a shockwave when it appeared, and Bloom was instantly both vilified and lauded. Its central thesis, that the American mind had become closed by becoming so indiscriminate was, it has been observed, 'almost unhinged' by its success, 'because the unregarded morbidity of the American soul turned out to be something that millions of Americans wanted to read about'.[56] The book was popular not only because it provided a totem of resistance for reactionaries, but because it consisted of the lengthiest, most intellectually solid, and wittily erudite analysis of American education and culture of the decade. It was practical in its appeals and provided crystalline explanations for things that many Americans had been thinking and feeling for a long time.

His friend Bellow began the diagnosis in his superb foreword. Discussing the situation of the artist in contemporary America, he writes: 'to put the matter at its baldest, we live in a thought-world, and the thinking has gone very bad indeed'.[57] Bloom's ambition in helping to repair this is also stated at the outset. 'This essay', as he puts it, is 'a meditation on the state of our souls.'[58] His own 'Introduction' shows that this is not just a meditation, but a fight for those souls - in particular for the souls of the young.

'There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative.'[59] Thus the first sentence. The rest of the book is Strauss out of the lecture hall and in the public arena. 'They [the students] are unified only in their relativism and in their allegiance to equality. And the two are related in a moral intention...The danger they have been taught to fear from absolutism is not error but intolerance.'[60] This attribute may seem all very well, or even display a high level of culture and sympathy, but this is not so, says Bloom - worse lies beneath. 'The students, of course, cannot defend their opinion. It is something with which they have been indoctrinated. The best they can do is point out all the opinions and cultures there are and have been. What right, they ask, do I or anyone else have to say one is better than the others?'[61] The American mind has not just become open: it has become so open it has become closed. Furthermore, it has become so 'open' that it cannot even defend itself from this position in which there is no enemy 'other than the man who is not open to everything'.[62]

Bloom's theory is set out clearly and fervently: 'Cultural relativism destroys both one's own and the good.'[63] 'Historicism and cultural relativism actually are a means to avoid testing our own prejudices and asking, for example, whether men are really equal or whether that opinion is merely a democratic prejudice.'[64]

It was always known that there were many and conflicting opinions about the good, and nations embodying each of them. Herodotus was at least as aware as we are of the rich diversity of cultures. But he took that observation to be an invitation to investigate all of them to see what was good and bad about each and find out what he could learn about good and bad from them. Modern relativists take that same observation as proof that such investigation is impossible and that we must be respectful of them all.[65]

Twentieth-century man has set himself up - as though by nature - as greater than Herodotus.

Where Strauss ventured first, Bloom follows, making - and this is key - suggestions for where we could go right. In discussing relativism's assassination of free thought and its inability to discern the good from the bad, Bloom argues (not simply as some have interpreted it, for a 'great books' approach to education) that at the root of any meaningful system of learning there must be solidity. He says of his generation that:

When they talk about heaven and earth, the relations between men and women, parents and children, the human condition, I hear nothing but cliches, superficialities, the material of satire. I am not saying anything so trite as that life is fuller when people have myths to live by. I mean rather that a life based on the Book is closer to the truth, that it provides the material for deeper research in and access to the real nature of things. Without the great revelations, epics and philosophies as part of our natural vision, there is nothing to see out there, and eventually little left inside. The Bible is not the only means to furnish a mind, but without a book of similar gravity, read with the gravity of the potential believer, it will remain unfurnished.[66]

If the men in Plato's cave[67] are able to discern and ascend thanks to the light, these 'modern' men are starting off (and remaining) self-inflictedly blind and incapable of movement. Not only, says Bloom, do the young not have any image of the perfect soul - as they do, say, of the perfect body - 'they do not even imagine that there is such a thing'.[68]

And he does not simply say that this emptiness at the centre of the young is tragic. It is also, he recognises, dangerous. In a land which pretends so completely that everything is open, but in which - as the briefest of glances could show - so much is ignored (a comedy without an Inferno[69]), the society and the people who set out to be free in it will become slaves (have perhaps already become so). Tyranny of some kind is looming when, as Saul Bellow put it, 'public virtue is a kind of ghost town into which anyone can move and declare himself sheriff'.[70]

And what is the tyranny? There are several answers.

One is the tyranny of popular culture, of mass culture, which Bloom believes the people do not in any sense 'believe' in. He asks whether, when people talk of 'preserving' their culture they really imagine this 'artificial notion' can take the place of God or country 'for which they once would have been willing to die'.[71] Drug-taking has produced people whose 'energy has been sapped', for whom 'the pleasure they experienced in the beginning was so intense that they no longer look for it at the end, or as the end'.[72] In passages of what one critic has described as 'extreme dyspepsia',[73] Bloom consistently attacks the low conformity of rock music - dissected by Bloom with the final analysis that 'never was there an art form directed so exclusively to children'.[74] In these circumstances the vital objective is not - as this generation has it - 'speaking one's own mind', but rather, 'finding a way to have one's own mind'.[75] It is no surprise that the second part of Bloom's book, entitled 'Nihilism, American Style', details the crass popular absorption of Continental despair into American culture, with its demeaning end hybrid of 'nihilism with a happy ending'.[76]

With this form of nihilism rampant, the other main tyranny that Bloom identifies and warns against is the tyranny of 'liberalism', or pseudo-liberalism.

Bloom taught at Cornell during the campus upheavals and riots of 1968 and, as one commentator put it, 'never recovered from the moment when black students produced guns to amplify their demands'.[77] Shocking as some of the violence on campuses was, it was not this that shocked Bloom and fuelled his 1987 book. Rather it was the (not just unwillingness, but) inability of his colleagues to defend themselves and liberal education from violence and intimidation that spurred Bloom to make his stand.

Firstly, Bloom saw this fatal weakness as a challenge to the universities. Secondly, it was a challenge for America. Of the universities he wrote that 'One cannot say that we must defend academic freedom when there are grave doubts about the principles underlying academic freedom...In order to find out why we have fallen on such hard times, we must recognize that the foundations of the university have become extremely doubtful to the highest intelligences. Our petty tribulations have great causes.'[78]

For America, the battle to be fought and re-won was cultural. The cultural battle had been lost in the sixties - and not, Bloom notes in supremely caustic mode, by people with any especial bravery. These victors did not come to prominence entirely without message or aim, but with ill-thought aims that were tyrannical in their insistence on conformity, so 'open' that their thought 'pays no attention to natural rights or the historical origins of our regime'[79] (indeed despises them), and so blind that they are led into the worst mass culture of them all - a mass culture into which nihilism has been entirely absorbed as an attitude.

In addition, listing the non-'sacrifices' made by the students in the name of their new-found creed, Bloom makes a pertinent observation on the sheer 'coincidence' of it all: 'Never in history had there been such a marvellous correspondence between the good and the pleasant.'[80] The easy giving-up of cherished principles, the genuflection of elite institutions to barbarism and infantilism, and the resounding sense that a group had been given a victory from a war which, though petulantly fought, had gone un-resisted, informed Bloom's bitterest attack. The ground had been given to people who, having won it, had no idea what they were going to do with it, and who, now in position, were free to wreak their damage.

That damage, Bloom saw, was firstly to the soul. Secondly it was to the institutions which provided the best chances to properly form the soul, but which had been so degraded that they ensured the young have 'a long climb just to get back up to the cave',[81] never mind ascending from there. Thirdly, the damage was to America. At the close of his book, Bloom wrote:

This is the American moment in world history, the one for which we shall forever be judged. Just as in politics the responsibility for the fate of freedom in the world has devolved upon our regime, so the fate of philosophy in the world has devolved upon our universities, and the two are related as they have never been before. The gravity of our given task is great, and it is very much in doubt how the future will judge our stewardship.[82]

In the 'Preface' to his Philosophy of Right, Hegel famously wrote that the Owl of Minerva flies at dusk - that philosophy only takes wing when the light is failing. Bloom recalled Hegel's claim midway through The Closing of the American Mind.[83] By the book's end it is clear that the 'closing' refers not just to the closing of the American mind and of the American soul, but to the possibility of the closing of America tout court, and with it the last best chance, as Strauss too had seen it, for democracy and liberty.

After Allan Bloom died, in 1992, his friend Werner Dannhauser wrote, 'The legacy of Strauss lives on, and nobody did more to secure it than Allan Bloom.'[84] In his progress from devoted disciple to rightful heir, Bloom's work brought Straussian preoccupations into the mainstream. As many people reading The Closing of the American Mind discovered, those preoccupations turned out to be far from just the concerns of academic philosophers. They were the concerns of a large number of those in America and the West who felt that their values were under threat; that they were threatened from within; that the path they were on was not the right one, but that the fight to regain the right path had begun.

Irving Kristol once wrote that 'It is the self-imposed assignment of neoconservatism to explain to the American people why they are right, and to the intellectuals why they are wrong.'[85] With Kristol - the next Straussian on the horizon - this concern became overtly political. Becoming political involved many things Strauss would never have intended, and many things with which he would have disagreed. But Strauss himself was no longer the centre. As the political movement began, it was Straussianism that became absorbed into neoconservatism.

Irving Kristol

Irving Kristol is commonly referred to as the father, grandfather or godfather of neoconservatism. Born in 1920, and thus, with the likes of Norman Podhoretz, among the first generation of those to be identified as a 'neoconservative', no individual has done more to define, explain and argue the neoconservative point of view. Married to social commentator and historian Gertrude Himmelfarb, and father of William Kristol (editor of The Weekly Standard and chairman of The Project for the New American Century), Kristol is also, like Podhoretz, head of a neoconservative family as well as movement. Having edited, among other publications, Commentary and (with Stephen Spender) Encounter, and having co-founded The National Interest and The Public Interest, Kristol has been central in encouraging other neoconservative thinkers, as well as in leading the way in his own articles and books. He is best defined, as one admirer has put it, as simply 'the central figure in neoconservatism'.[86]

Having started his life as a Trotskyite, Kristol found the two great formative influences of his mature years to be, in the 1940s, the literary and social critic Lionel Trilling, and in the 1950s, Leo Strauss (acquaintance with whose thought provided Kristol with the intellectual revelation quoted earlier). Trilling was a sceptical liberal, whose gifts to future neoconservatism included the phrase 'adversary culture', identifying the paradox at the heart of contemporary American cultural life. From very different schools and disciplines, and with widely differing aims, what Trilling and Strauss had in common, as Kristol noted half a century later, was that 'their skepticism went to the very roots of modern liberalism and modern conservatism, respectively'.[87] Apart from the influence of their ideas, one result of Kristol's discovery of these two thinkers was that from the very outset of his career he understood that almost all the presumptions of modern American society were open to question. Kristol was to spend his career ensuring that they were not merely questioned, but interrogated, forcefully and repeatedly, in order to expose cant, false ideology and lies. The first big target Kristol aimed at was communism.

From the beginnings of his career as a writer and journalist in the late 1940s, Kristol had become a forceful and lucid anticommunist. At this point anti-communism was itself a defining political stand, and one that could by no means be taken for granted. But even by the sixties, anti-communism was retrospectively seen by many in the West as some kind of an 'elaborate con game on behalf of the power structure'.[88] Later generations - often urged on by no more than an acquaintance with Arthur Miller's most famous work - have been prone to regard McCarthyism as something as medieval and fruitless as the witch trials. But the truth is that the problem existed, was growing, had nuclear weaponry, and possessed a great many supporters in the heart of America. For those like Kristol, living through the period and seeking to retain traditional liberal Americanism while utterly opposing communism, Senator McCarthy was still an unappealing figure, described by Kristol in one essay as a 'vulgar demagogue'. However, as Kristol wrote in the same essay, '"Civil Liberties," 1952 - A Study in Confusion': 'there is one thing that the American people know about Senator McCarthy: he, like them, is unequivocally anti-Communist. About the spokesmen for American liberalism, they feel they know no such thing. And with some justification.'[89]

Kristol led the way in smoking out those whose real sympathies were far from American and far from liberal. 'It is a fact that Communism today rules one-third of the human race, and may soon rule more', he wrote in 1954. 'It is the most powerful existing institution which opposes such changes and reforms as liberalism proposes. Why, then, should not liberals, and liberals especially, fear and hate it?'[90]

But with time it was not just its inconsistencies, but the fundamental assumptions of liberalism that became questionable to Kristol. As the 'culture wars' of the 1960s began, Kristol noticed that the liberal ethos was fast moving towards the political extremities. 'My liberal credentials became tattered, in my own eyes as well as in the eyes of others', he wrote.[91] The blame for this lay principally with the counterculture that emerged after 1965, engulfing the universities, and overwhelming popular culture. It was during this period, wrote Kristol, that 'we discovered that traditional "bourgeois" values were what we had believed in all along, had indeed simply taken for granted'.[92]

What Bloom had witnessed on the campus, Kristol, Podhoretz and others noticed in society at large - that the values and presumptions which had successfully underpinned society in America from its beginnings were being openly and popularly attacked; and furthermore, this assault was taking place at all levels of society. Even though they had initially regarded themselves as liberals, living through a period of terrible societal change (and, for instance, recognising innate flaws in the Great Society initiatives of Lyndon B. Johnson) Kristol and his fellow thinkers came to believe not just that liberalism was not up to the job - that there were unbridgeable flaws in the liberal programme - but that the whole liberal world-view was faulty. It wasn't that liberalism didn't feel nice, or didn't look nice; the problem was that it was wrong.

By its consistent refusal to adequately condemn Nazism's single moral equivalent in Russia, liberalism had shown that it possessed none of the attributes its name suggested. By undermining the society that was defending true liberal values from the threat of communist tyranny, it had shown its flaws and its deceits.

It was in this climate that neoconservatism was born. The first appearances of the word itself are debatable, though it is commonly thought to have been used first by Michael Harrington and Dissent magazine. Though it was initially intended as a term of insult, Kristol was one of the few among his contemporaries to happily embrace the new and still indistinct moniker, content simply to be free of the 'liberal' label if liberals themselves were going to retain their presumptuous use of the term. Many others who were identified as neoconservatives held out against the term, unwilling to have it thrust upon them, but Kristol accepted it readily 'perhaps because', he joked, 'having been named Irving, I am relatively indifferent to baptismal caprice'.[93] Becoming a neoconservative did not require any great leap in itself - to become a neoconservative in the 1960s, Kristol later remarked, 'all you had to do was stand in place'.[94] It was the ground itself that was slipping: neoconservatives were not going to totter with it. In defiance of both conservatism and liberalism, Kristol best defined his movement at an unattributable moment: 'A neoconservative', he said, 'is a liberal who has been mugged by reality.’

Kristol found that embracing the new identity provided 'an experience of moral, intellectual, and spiritual liberation'.[95] He said later, 'It usually makes no sense...to argue over nomenclature. If you can, you take what people call you and run with it.'[96] Abandoning the increasingly narrowing position of 'anticommunist liberal' in favour of 'neoconservative' allowed Kristol to confess to something he had long suspected:

I no longer had to pretend to believe - what in my heart I could no longer believe - that liberals were wrong because they subscribe to this or that erroneous opinion on this or that topic. No - liberals were wrong, liberals are wrong, because they are liberals. What is wrong with liberalism is liberalism - a metaphysics and a mythology that is woefully blind to human and political reality.[97]

That blindness was increasingly demonstrating itself in American society. Kristol recognised that what he termed 'the rot and decadence' within American society was not just a consequence of the liberal agenda, but the actual aim of it. This 'liberalism' was simultaneously aiming for 'political and social collectivism on the one hand, and moral anarchy on the other'.[98] In order to stand against this threat, Kristol and other first-generation neoconservatives had not just to call for reversals in the progress of the agenda of socialism, anarchy and nihilism; they had to explain how and why an end should be made of it. Liberalism had failed, and to replace it neoconservatives had to adopt a better stance; one that was not only practical, humane and truly liberal, but that expressed the politics of reality, not the perpetually dangerous politics of fantasy - it required, as Philip Selznick put it, 'moral realism'.[99]

Assisting him in that objective was Kristol's study of the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, which pointed him - as he put it - 'beyond liberalism',[100] helping him to read, among other things, the Book of Genesis with new insight. Michael Novak wrote of the effect of Niebuhr on neoconservative thought in a 1972 Commentary piece, and Mark Gerson rightly cites the significance of one particular line of Niebuhr's (from The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness): 'It is man's capacity for justice that makes democracy possible, but it is his tendency to injustice that makes it necessary.'[101] From time spent on the liberal side and as anti-communists, neoconservatives were convinced that, flawed though it may be in places, liberal democracy provided the best possible means by which man's natural tendency towards evil could be contained. As they read through the past for its insights on their own time, and contemplated the present, neoconservatives found it increasingly remarkable that liberals were able to sustain the attitudes they did on the fundamentals of human nature.

To get right down to it (as Leon R. Kass says and does at the very opening of his commentary on the Cain and Abel episode in Genesis - an essay in honour of Kristol), when it comes to tracing the source of human troubles and misery, liberals are inclined to blame external causes - for example, poverty, societal prejudice, misfortunes in upbringing, and so on - while conservatives are inclined to blame 'causes lurking naturally within the souls of men', such as greed, pride, vanity and so forth.[102] Kristol realised that the drift since the 1950s, and certainly during the 1960s, had been towards an unalloyed vision of human perfectibility - a vision that was socialist inspired, even when the end aim was not knowingly socialism. He realised the terrible dangers of this drift of vision. Drawing on a wealth of philosophical ancestry, not least Strauss, Kristol came to the conclusion that, although we can improve our condition, governments cannot make it immeasurably better, or unrecognisably better. Though our conditions may be improved, the basic, flawed mould cannot be altered. Though many of neoconservatism's critics have complained that such analyses make neoconservatives pessimists or worse, the result, both in Kristol's thought and in the thoughts of those who have come after him, is, on the contrary, optimistic and encouraging. It recognises the limits of our ambition, and aims for the achievement of that which can be achieved - not in the best of all possible worlds, or in a different world, but in this world, now.

Of all the consensus attitudes that stood at the opposite end from this achievable and encouraging aim of Kristol and co., none was more glaring than the increasing cult of unending 'welfarism': a thing whose grand end aims were often so impossible, its attempted explanations so tortuous, that the whole edifice was in need of a drastic overhaul. Having studied - through his wife's writings - the successes of charity in areas of Victorian society, Kristol accepted none of the common modern perceptions.

Compassion organized into a political movement is a very dangerous thing and, I think, a wicked thing. If you want to be compassionate, go out and be compassionate to people. If you want to give money, give people money.

If you want to work with poor people, go out and work with poor people. I have great respect for people who do that. But when people start becoming bureaucrats of compassion and start making careers out of compassion - whether political, journalistic or public entertainment careers - then I must say I suspect their good faith.'[103]

Welfarism was not, as it stood, the answer - it was a problem, and it had become a problem because a piece of false or bad logic had been taken for granted, and then acted upon. The same thing was happening elsewhere.

At the root of many of these assumptions, on race, welfare, employment and other issues, lay the most mistaken rallying cry of liberals, 'equality':

I know the question of equality is something that many religious people are quite obsessed with. Here, I will simply plead my Jewishness and say, equality has never been a Jewish thing. Rich men are fine, poor men are fine, so long as they are decent human beings. I do not like equality. I do not like it in sports, in the arts, or in economics. I just don't like it in this world.[104]

Kristol pioneered robust attacks on every aspect of liberalism, but this did not mean that his position - or that of neoconservatives as a whole - was traditionally 'conservative'. From their very beginning neoconservatives were different from traditional American conservatives. And it wasn't always merely a matter of outlook. For a start, most of the first neoconservatives were from lower-middle or working-class backgrounds. Veterans of the Second World War, they had also seen the process from triumph against one totalitarian regime to hostile peace with the other, and they were disillusioned with conservatism's weak response.

What was needed was not, as a conservative might have it, the turning back of the clock: neoconservatives did not want to see society return to the 1930s, 1920s or even a Victorian hey-day. Neoconservatives saw that society had made, not least economically, significant progress. But socially, economically and philosophically they represented something very different from conservatism - they represented revolutionary conservatism. Richard Perle said in a 2004 interview, 'We're closer to being revolutionaries than conservatives',[105] and the title 'revolutionary conservatives' certainly fits the movement well, when from its very outset, the differences were plain in policy and outlook.

The work of Kristol's that permanently separated him from traditional conservatism, and that supplied neoconservatism with a distinct stand on economics (an area into which neocons had not previously strayed), was the result of a sabbatical year from teaching at New York University during 1976-77. By this point a supporter of the Republican party, Kristol recognised that Republicans would have to be able to do more than book-balance if they were ever again to become a dynamic political force and return to power. Following the period in the seventies of simultaneous inflation and depression that had destroyed his faith in Keynesian economics, Kristol decided 'with the greatest reluctance that "neoconservatism" could not blandly leave the economy to the economists'. He decided he had to become 'economically literate' himself.[106]

Taking his lead from E. M. Forster (on whom Lionel Trilling had been an authority) and his Two Cheers for Democracy, Kristol wrote his 1978 book Two Cheers for Capitalism. In it Kristol performs the difficult task of securing the humane ground in the successful capitalist state. It is, as Michael Novak wrote in Commentary, 'a liberal critique of both corporate capitalism and socialism'.[107] In E. M. Forster's argument on democracy, two cheers were permissible because they allow for criticism - a third is undeserved. For Kristol a similar equation is at play. Market capitalism cannot be given unanimously good reviews because it neglects man's need for the moral authority that can only come with tradition. Economists cannot fulfil all the needs of men, they can only make economic sense of the world, 'and the world does not move by economic sense alone'.[108] 'On the whole', Kristol confessed, 'being a humanist rather than an economist, I think this is a good thing.'[109]

His second major complaint (argued against later by the neoconservative economist Irwin Stelzer in his essay 'A Third Cheer for Capitalism'[110]) is that the capitalist free market, though allowing the people to have nearly limitless choice over what they can buy, brings with it profound non-economic questions. Only libertarians would argue that people should have anything they like. Kristol argues (in an essay in Two Cheers entitled 'Capitalism, Socialism and Nihilism') that there are repercussions for society beyond those conceived of by economists, and though they are 'quite obvious and easily comprehensible', they 'are terribly difficult to explain to economists'.[111] Since the economy only makes up a part of our lives, it must not be allowed to take over and entirely dictate to our society. In a spirit of mature acceptance of that which is largely good, Kristol argues that a third all-praising cheer for capitalism would destabilise this necessary balance. Capitalism should not be allowed to tread on, let alone dictate, ground on which it has no business. Warning capitalism to stay within its respectable confines, it is in the end simply 'safer' to give it 'only two cheers'.[112]

Aside from being a comment on the position in society of economics, Kristol's argument was also, of course, a sustained and lengthy explanation to those in government of the rightful limits of their power. Just as there were areas in which economists would cause damage if they ventured, so government should avoid the trap of thinking that ever increasing interference, indeed comprehensive interference, would either endear it to the people, or make the people happier.

In his writings over a fifty-year career, Irving Kristol set out, in thoughts on morality, politics and economics, the first comprehensive vision of a new approach to politics. Profoundly disenchanted with the liberal slide to decay, neoconservatives were happy to join the fray on behalf of traditions for which conservatism per se seemed to have lost its voice. And that they were a new breed was made eminently clear by Kristol. Even the optimistic manner of neoconservatives differed from their conservative cohorts. 'The trouble with traditional American conservatism', Kristol once explained, 'is that it lacks a naturally cheerful, optimistic disposition. Not only does it lack one, it regards signs of one as evidence of unsoundness [and] irresponsibility.[113] It is not 'tradition' that made American conservatism morose and unappealing, however, but 'nostalgia'. And as Kristol wrote in 1964, 'nostalgia is one of the legitimate, and certainly one of the most enduring of human emotions; but the politics of nostalgia is at best distracting, at worst pernicious'.[114]

Despite having seen much of their culture degraded, and much of their conservative instinct on liberty trampled upon, neoconservatives refrained from gloomy nostalgia because they knew that they had two things on their side. Firstly, their arguments were broadly in tune with the American public, who had felt similarly adrift stuck between the nihilistic world of the counter-culture and unrestrained capitalism. Secondly, neoconservatives knew that their ideas had persuasiveness on their side, and that their attack on the status quo of socialist inspired 'liberalism' in particular had only just begun. In the battle to come, neoconservatives knew that everything was to play for, that they were on the right side of America, and the right side of history.

CHAPTER 2

US NEOCONSERVATISM IN PRACTICE

Philosophy in action - The UN - The evil empire - The end of history? - The 1990s - 9/11 and its aftermath

The line of descent from Leo Strauss is the most notorious as well as the clearest of the neoconservative lineages, but it is not exclusive. Neoconservatism could have sprung up without Strauss, or indeed any single one of its forebears, because it is the result of specific cultural and social circumstances, created by a vacuum in society and political life. And it is worth remembering what Kenneth Weinstein pointed out: that Strauss's writings are philosophic inquiries with 'nothing of the dogma of a political movement'.[115] Today Strauss gives neoconservatives an intellectual pillar, and remains a monumental forebear, but the history of neoconservatism is replete with examples of people who owe no conscious debt to him. What I have aimed to show by tracing the thought of Strauss, Bloom and Kristol is that, during the peace that followed the Second World War, conservatism - and indeed society - shifted in such a way that certain observers saw a fault line open up. Strauss and his followers identified the chasm, because it had opened up on their ground; on ground they had thought was secure - that of liberal democracy.

A set of major objections to the status quo of post-war politics had arisen. Individual thinkers identified their objections, felt their own concerns being voiced, and were emboldened to make their own diagnoses and stands. There was never any question, when the issue at stake was the future of liberal democracy, but that neoconservatives aimed to affect things in practical ways. They did not intend to grumble while the world slid by. They wanted to act for the good, and that meant taking the concerns of academia out into the mainstream. Kristol saw the shift in clear terms. In his analysis, it was Strauss's own students who were the ones to produce a generation of students who relocated to Washington, in part because the academic political science community had by then become antagonistic towards Strauss and his school.[116] It remains a pleasing and common taunt to hostile academics that their objections to Straussians having a say in the running of the universities led to the same people instead having a prominent say in running the country.[117]

IDENTIFYING NEOCONS

In relating neoconservatism's progress from theory into practice, several considerations should be borne in mind. Firstly a matter of nomenclature: a great many people who are broadly or selectively neoconservative utterly reject any identification as such. For instance, Tony Blair is, like Paul Wolfowitz, almost perfectly neoconservative on foreign policy, yet he would certainly reject the label; and Wolfowitz himself shuns it in preference to being described as a 'Scoop Jackson Republican'.[118] If we are to get anywhere in identifying neoconservative trends and achievements we will have to accept that many have been carried out, and will continue to be carried out, by people who would hesitate at being described as a neocon, Of course, much of this has to do with the term's presently less-than-happy connotations. Few serving politicians can afford the uninformed opprobrium that the label now brings; and even certain journalists and writers, whose careers would - were the neocon label used - be less affected than that of a serving politician, steer clear of an explicit link. But just because someone doesn't call himself a neoconservative, does not mean that his ideas, outlook and actions are not neoconservative or neoconservative inspired.

Which brings us to another caution: neoconservatives are not a homogeneous group (let alone a cabal) and, as will become clear, there is no party-like manifesto to which they adhere. Indeed, in America it was by no means even inevitable that neoconservatism would end up finding its party-political home among the Republicans. 'There is', Irwin Stelzer has stated plainly, 'no such thing as a neoconservative  "movement".[119] By 'movement', Stelzer means the word in the sense of a group of persons with the same object, and in this sense he is right: indeed many neoconservatives have played up intellectual feuding among themselves precisely in order to demonstrate this.

To assist in defining the phenomenon, Norman Podhoretz has described what he calls a 'neoconservative tendency';[120] Kristol has termed it a 'persuasion';[121] while James Q. Wilson has described it as more of 'a mood, not an ideology'.[122] All are far closer to the truth than those who talk of cabals and organised coups. Since many people have neoconservative instincts without knowingly ever having met a neoconservative or read one of their books, we should suspect neoconservatism of being a propensity or outlook much like liberalism or any other political bias: a peculiarly relevant modern political frame of mind. That it is a modern phenomenon cannot be doubted; but it is so because it has been necessitated by modern problems. Its central tenets, however, are timeless. Since neoconservatives have, from the outset, been united only by their broadest beliefs, and since it is these beliefs that most clearly define them to the outside world, it is worth crudely summarising what those common beliefs are.

In domestic policy, neoconservatives are united by specific and general objections to the post-60s western status quo, to increasing secularism, to illiberalism masquerading as liberalism, and to the destructive effects of the counter-culture. Implacably opposed to relativism, they invariably differ in what they believe the specific foundations of contemporary culture should be, but not in the belief that American society was better off and more itself when the common values of organised religion formed its bedrock. Although neoconservative domestic beliefs can most often be summarised by identifying what they oppose, on foreign policy neoconservatives are demonstrably less reactive.

Spurred on by Professor Donald Kagan (father of Robert and Frederick Kagan, and colleague of Allan Bloom at Cornell), as well as by Strauss, neoconservatives drew, and continue to draw, inspiration for their attitudes to conflict from the ancients, in particular from Thucydides. It is important to stress that they do not read his History of the Peloponnesian War in order to learn how to act in the world, but rather regard it as a text that supports their instinctive beliefs on foreign policy. These instincts may be summarised, as they were by Kristol in 2003,'[123] to include three basic notions: that patriotism is a good and natural thing; that world government is to be rejected because of the likelihood of its leading to tyranny; and that leaders should distinguish clearly between friends and enemies. On the face of it, none - except possibly the second - of these proposals would ordinarily seem controversial. But they are, and this is at the root of the problem as neoconservatives see it. An age which regards moral clarity as suspect, extraordinary or dangerous, is a world in which one has to be newly armed, for clearly none of the old assumptions work here. This is the sinew that connects neoconservative thought: the world is adrift, and for our safety it needs to be moored.

Conservatism has failed because it will not proselytise for its instincts, nor defend its just causes. It has failed because it has failed to stand up against the arrival and ingraining of attitudes to which conservatism should be instinctively opposed.

And since conservatism would not take up the mantle on behalf of its own causes and the causes of liberty, a new form of conservatism and liberalism is required. This is neoconservatism, revolutionary conservatism - conservatism that refuses to sit back, but steps forward, because someone has to, and because it is the right thing to do.

MORAL CLARITY

The moral clarity that was such a defining aspect of Kristol's career and writings courses through the foreign policy decisions and approaches that best exemplify the neoconservative world-view. An early and palpable such event took place in 1975 at the United Nations, when Daniel Patrick Moynihan spoke against an infamous motion proposed by Idi Amin.

At university in New York in the 1940s, Moynihan had been a contemporary of Daniel Bell, Irving Kristol and many other first-generation neoconservatives. A scholar as well as  politician, his 1963 book Beyond the Melting Pot (co-written with fellow neocon Nathan Glazer) was an enormously influential look at the situations of the various racial groups in New York, arguing the immovable significance of ethnicity in a person's identity. As the authors wrote in their preface, the very concept of integration had to be rethought because 'the point about the melting pot...is that it did not happen'.[124] In 1965 (the same year Kristol and Daniel Bell founded The Public Interest) Moynihan's office at the Department of Labor issued what became known as the Moynihan Report, a scholarly, influential and deeply humane study of the problems confronting black families within American society. But the report was widely misinterpreted in the press when it was leaked, and, faced with misinformed and outrageous accusations of racism, Moynihan and his fellow neoconservatives could not but notice that the liberal and academic communities, which should have been loudest in their defence, not only failed to support him, but abandoned him entirely.[125]

With experience in a range of cabinet and sub-cabinet positions under Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon and Ford, Moynihan was appointed US Ambassador to the United Nations in 1975, in the wake of an article he had published in Norman Podhoretz's Commentary ('The United States in Opposition'[126]) which was well received by both President Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Among other things, Moynihan's article had attacked those liberals within the US who had proved so incapable of defending liberalism in the face of communist and Arab hostility. Though Moynihan was to end his career serving almost twenty-five distinguished years as a Democrat Senator, for neoconservatives his finest hour came on the floor of the UN in 1975.

Moynihan's moment came as the result of the 10 November passing (by 72 votes to 35, with 32 abstentions) of Resolution 3379, which stated that 'Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination', and furthermore 'a threat to world peace'. The motion was led by Idi Amin - Ugandan President, genocidal wife-eater and Hitler and holocaust supporter - and supported by the Muslim countries and a swathe of African nations. In his speech to the UN, Amin declared that the United States had been 'colonised' by Zionists, and claimed that these Zionists were controlling the country. He then called for the 'extinction' of Israel. When he finished his speech, Amin received a standing ovation. The following night UN Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim, previously Oberleutnant Waldheim of the SA and implicated Nazi war criminal, threw a party in Idi Amin's honour.[127]

The Amin resolution was, naturally, condemned by Israel and her allies, but it was the reaction of Moynihan, speaking on behalf of the United States, that had the greatest impact. Known for his occasional bluntness[128] Moynihan entirely abandoned the diplomatic niceties that would have been so inappropriate under the circumstances, and in a speech partly written with Norman Podhoretz, he made the case plain:

The United States rises to declare before the General Assembly of the United Nations, and before the world, that it does not acknowledge, it will not abide by, it will never acquiesce in this infamous act.

Noting that the resolution had given international sanction to anti-Semitism, and reiterating painstakingly why the idea that Jews are a race 'was invented not by Jews, but by those who hated Jews', Moynihan stated baldly that historians alone might see what damage had been done to the UN by the passing of this resolution. Americans and the world would have cause to reflect, he noted, 'that if there were no General Assembly, this could never have happened'. '[The resolution] is a lie. But as it is a lie which the United Nations has now declared to be a truth, the truth must be restated', he said. And Moynihan proceeded to do just that.

The seriousness of the act committed by the UN was plain. It had, among other things, Moynihan said, granted 'symbolic amnesty - and more - to the murderers of the six million European Jews'. For this, and for many other reasons that he gave, the lie would have repercussions. There were prophetic words:

The terrible lie that has been told here today will have terrible consequences...people [will] begin to say, indeed they have already begun to say, that the United Nations is a place where lies are told.

Moynihan explained that the motion that had been passed threatened not only the security and legitimacy of the State of Israel, but the legitimacy and standing of all nations of the UN. The motion harmed the fight against racism, by stripping the term of any meaning and potentially damaging the security of all nations, for if 'racism' could be so drained of meaning today, then so, tomorrow, could 'national self-determination' or 'national honor'. Finally, the resolution damaged the idea and language of human rights. By assaulting a word, assaulting language, assaulting the truth and telling lies, the United Nations had done something that the United States 'does not acknowledge [and] will not abide by'. Moynihan stated in conclusion that the United States 'will never acquiesce in this infamous act'.[129]

Moynihan's speech before the UN was a pivotal moment, and one of the earliest opportunities for a neoconservative in a position of influence to make a stand for neoconservative values. But what were the aspects of the matter that were specifically neoconservative?

Firstly, the occasion had only arisen because of the existence of the pseudo-world government of the UN. Under any other system, such an opinion from a man like Amin would have been deemed morally and politically negligible. Under a system that accurately reflected and upheld the cause of liberty and free peoples, as opposed to a system that gave equal power and voice to countries led by homicidal hate-mongers, Amin's voice would have been drowned out. Resolution 3379 provided the neoconservatives with evidence of the long-felt truth - that world government was a dangerous and potentially tyrannical concept, giving, as it did, equal significance to freedom and tyranny, equivalent significance to right and wrong.

Secondly, Moynihan's response to Resolution 3379 bucked the accepted trend of diplomatic discourse. The acclaimed master of realpolitik, Henry Kissinger, disapproved of what Moynihan did (and of Moynihan's description of Amin as a 'racist murderer'[130]), but to neoconservatives this simply demonstrated a flaw in conventional conservative thought and practice. If conservatism was epitomised by the retention of diplomatic nicety, and the honouring of the status quo over the defence of right and the support of allies, then conservatism had shown itself - like liberalism - to be incapable of discerning right from wrong, truth from lies, and friend from foe.

Finally, the Moynihan speech was important because it expressed in clear terms, entrenched by example, the attitude of neoconservatives towards Israel.

During the 1970s, and especially in the wake of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, neoconservatives noticed not just a rise in hostility towards the state of Israel, but an increasing unwillingness to defend Israel on the part of many countries that had, like the UN, previously acknowledged her right to exist. And this was occurring during a period in which Israel had been under continuous aggressive attack, in which her physical survival was at stake. Neoconservatives felt that Israel - militarily invaded by all her neighbours - deserved more than lukewarm support, and deserved it for many good reasons. These reasons are far from the libel of dual loyalties that is levelled at neoconservatives by those whose anti-Semitism is ever more thinly veiled behind 'anti-Zionism'. Neoconservatives who are Jewish, and neoconservatives who are not, have always supported Israel's rights to exist and defend herself because Israel has, for a long time, been the only democratic nation in a region of squalid dictatorships. Neoconservatives believe that Israel, assailed as it is by tyrannies from all sides, needs and deserves the support of free people, not because it is Jewish, but because those who enjoy democracy and freedom should always defend their own against despots and tyrannies.

Zionism was also, it may be said, itself a precursor to neoconservative thinking. When Theodor Herzl envisioned the Jewish state he did so because there existed a problem (a problem for the Jews, not of the Jews). The comprehensive solution Herzl envisaged was, like much neoconservative thinking, intended to start the solution to the problem, not tinker with the failing status quo. When Herzl wrote in 1895 that 'the Christian bourgeoisie would not be unwilling to cast us as a sacrifice to Socialism[131] he did not know how absolutely his prediction would be demonstrated. But after that knowledge was learned, neoconservatives, like all those inclined towards defence of liberal principles, backed the beginning of the answer to the problem. With all the other problems that have undeniably issued from that first step, it is basic neoconservative intuition that a state for the Jewish people in their historical homeland was the inevitable and just positioning of the answer onto the right track.

But there is a more philosophical cause for neoconservatism's stance on Israel, which has nothing to do with race or specific politics. For in the episode typified by Resolution 3379, neoconservatives saw a moral inversion taking place. In the reasoning quagmire induced by relativism and countercultural equivalence, vast swathes of the West's populations, as well as their representatives, were proving incapable of telling truth from lies. Warnings, explicated in theoretical terms by Strauss and others, were physically demonstrated at the UN in 1975. Israel, a democratic country whose existence had been approved at the UN, was being assailed by totalitarian enemies seeking her total annihilation. In these circumstances, not only did vast numbers of people and countries not support Israel in her fight to exist, they allowed the moral situation to be inverted. In an inversion that was to persist, Israel's Arab enemies equivalenced their way around their offences, and relativised their way around condemnation to portray themselves as the injured party. Wars that Israel had mercifully won were turned against them, with the Arab aggressors now themselves posing as the victims of aggression. Were this a pose that persuaded nobody, the matter could have been dismissed; but the pose became the norm, indeed the agreed version in much of the West. The neoconservatives were fuelled in their realisation that the West was slouching to decay. At a time when lies could become truths, then aggressors could masquerade as victims.

THE EVIL EMPIRE

The effect on neocons of the UN's Zionism vote paved the way for louder moral clarity on a range of issues. Moynihan's UN legacy was most obviously continued when, five years later, the same post was given to another neoconservative who was also a Democrat, Jeane Kirkpatrick. Like Moynihan, it was an article in Commentary that brought Kirkpatrick to the attention of a President, in this case Ronald Reagan. The article, 'Dictatorships and Double Standards' appeared in Podhoretz's magazine in November 1979, and was passed to the presidential hopeful by his National Security Adviser, Richard V. Allen.[132] Summing up many of the neoconservatives' widest ranging feelings on foreign policy, the piece dissected President Carter's policy of not engaging with the leaders of countries like El Salvador and Iran, while continuing to trade, negotiate and remain opaque on the natures of communist dictatorships like the Soviet Union. Kirkpatrick believed this policy of Nixon's and Carter's towards the communist countries displayed not only a glaring double standard, but also terrible naivety. Apart from anything else, the possibility of a communist tyranny in any of the countries whose regimes America hoped to see fall would, Kirkpatrick argued, be far worse for America's interests and the interests of the countries themselves. Marxist uprisings that succeeded led inexorably to only one thing - totalitarian tyranny. 'However incomprehensible it may be to some, Marxist revolutionaries are not contemporary embodiments of the Americans who wrote the Declaration of Independence', she wrote, 'and they will not be content with establishing a broad-based coalition in which they have only one voice among many.'[133]

Like many of her neoconservative contemporaries, Kirkpatrick saw that the problem at the root of recent American governments' attitudes to the Soviet Union and other communist dictatorships came, in part, from the counterculture's misunderstanding of political ideology - a misunderstanding that fundamentally failed to grasp the threat posed by socialism:

Because socialism of the Soviet/Chinese/Cuban variety is an ideology rooted in a version of the same values that sparked the Enlightenment and the democratic revolutions of the eighteenth century; because it is modern and not traditional; because it postulates goals that appeal to Christian as well as to secular values (brotherhood of man, elimination of power as a mode of human relations), it is highly congenial to many Americans at the symbolic level. Marxist revolutionaries speak the language of a hopeful future while traditional autocrats speak the language of an unattractive past. Because left-wing revolutionaries invoke the symbols and values of democracy - emphasizing egalitarianism rather than hierarchy and privilege, liberty rather than order, activity rather than passivity - they are again and again accepted as partisans in the cause of freedom and democracy.[134]

The intellectual rigour and moral clarity which Kirkpatrick's article brought to the debate on foreign policy greatly impressed Reagan, and his appointment of her to the UN position when he came to office in 1981 was a great advance for neoconservatives. Indeed James Mann, in his superb, if unfortunately titled, book Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet describes the appointment of Kirkpatrick as 'the beginning of an epochal shift'.[135] Having earlier often backed Democrat leaders like Henry 'Scoop' Jackson and Hubert Humphrey (especially the former during his quests for the presidential nomination in 1972 and 1976), by the time of the Reagan campaign neoconservatives were nearly all firmly behind the Republicans.

Years later, Kirkpatrick confessed that her switch to the Republicans came at a time when foreign policy dominated her political thinking absolutely.[136] In part, that transition reflected a broader trend in American society, in which, since Vietnam, a person's position on foreign affairs strongly suggested their wider societal impulses. Carter's administration had drifted far enough to lose the loyalty of a number of older Democrats, and when in the 1980 race for the Democratic candidacy, Carter's leading challenger, Edward Kennedy, campaigned even further from the middle ground, a break was inevitable. But for Kirkpatrick, as with many others, the break had been coming since before the Vietnam War.

Kirkpatrick would later write that, though it was generally believed it was the resistance to the war that had sparked the counter-culture, she believed that, in truth, 'the ideological assault on authority symbols and structures preceded the antiwar movement and made it possible'. She explained that 'the central aspect of the anti-war movement was less its rejection of the Vietnam War than its rejection of the United States. The argument was less that the war was unwise or unnecessary than that the United States was immoral - a "sick society" guilty of racism, materialism, imperialism, and murder of Third World people in Vietnam.' The anti-war movement 'constituted a wholesale assault on the legitimacy of American society'. And Kirkpatrick echoed the feelings of Kristol and many others when she asserted, 'I believe this assault became the foundation of the opposing neoconservative position.'[137]

If the Kirkpatrick diagnosis of the effect of Vietnam seems high-pitched today, it should be remembered at what a pitch the debate was run in the sixties. It was a time, as Kirkpatrick remembers, when the New York Times could run columns stating that 'The United States is the most dangerous and destructive power in the world', and during which a prominent cleric declared that Lt. Calley (who had been sentenced to life imprisonment for his part in the My Lai massacre) 'is all of us. He is every single citizen in our graceless land.'[138] And, of course, it was a time when political discourse monotonously equated America's state to that of Nazi Germany. Kirkpatrick remembers the president of a leading university claiming that 'We conquered Hitler but we have come to embrace Hitlerism.'[139] Remembering his own similar experiences, Allan Bloom summarised that 'So refined had the capacity for moral discrimination become, it followed that the elected American officials and the duly approved federal, state and local laws had no more authority than did Hitler.'[140] Kirkpatrick deplored the tendency 'to blame America first and most, and to extend to others  "understanding" and tolerance denied the United States', and she summed up the feelings of all neoconservatives when she wrote, 'We did not doubt that American society could be improved but we believed it first had to be preserved.'[141]

To preserve American society, America had at least to have the right stance for dealing with her enemies. But Kirkpatrick urged - in opinions that (like her suspicion on the viabilities of transplanting democracy) were by no means unanimously held by other neoconservatives - that America should vary the way it dealt with countries of whose regime it disapproved. After all, as she later observed, 'morally responsible people recognize that there are degrees of evil'.[142]

But it was partly as a result of Kirkpatrick and other neoconservative influences that Reagan was to make one of his most morally uncompromising and famous pronouncements - a pronouncement that was to gratify, and become an example for, all neoconservatives. Writing in Commentary, Norman Podhoretz had spelled out in 1981 why the communist empire was so incomparable and un-nuanced a threat to America and the West. The Soviet system was unambiguous not just because it was evil, but because it seemed so uniquely appealing to intellectuals in the West. And it was partly as a result of moral ambiguity on the issue of the Soviet Union from the US government that the views of such people were allowed to seem acceptable or legitimate. For Podhoretz and other neoconservatives, the situation was clear: '[the] conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union is a clash between two civilizations. More accurately, it is a clash between civilization and barbarianism.'[143] This was the language that Reagan adopted two years later.

The 'evil empire' speech was given on 8 March 1983 at the National Association of Evangelicals. It constituted one of the acts of 'truth telling about the Soviets' which David Frum and other next-generation neoconservatives clearly see as having 'accelerated the delegitimization of Soviet rule'.[144] At the event in Orlando, at a time when the calls for a cessation of the arms build-up were growing, Reagan called on his listeners to avoid the temptation:

to declare yourselves above it all and label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong, good and evil.[145]

As Allan Bloom noted sarcastically: 'right-thinking people joined in an angry chorus of protest against such provocative rhetoric...[at] the presumption that he [Reagan], and America, know what is good'.[146] Such opposition to Reagan's rhetoric had been explained by Leo Strauss thirty-five years earlier when he had written that 'Our political science is haunted by the belief that "value judgements" are inadmissible in scientific considerations, and to call a regime tyrannical clearly amounts to pronouncing a "value judgement".’[147]

Reagan's speech was the absolute antithesis of the orthodoxy complained of by Strauss. The speech constituted a stand - a stand that neoconservatives encouraged and wanted repeated: clarification on democratic opposition to tyranny, and support for absolutes, in particular, and, unapologetically, the necessity and incomparability of freedom. Moving beyond a purely 'anti-communist' stand, neoconservatives began arguing for the encouragement and kindling of democracy across the globe. Those who still suspected that this espousal of democracy was merely an anti-communist stance were surprised at the scope of the ambition, expressed, for instance, in the pressure beginning to be applied from State Department to the governments of countries like Chile. In part, the policy shift represented a moral decision to stand firm against tyranny, but it also spelt simple good sense. The new moral clarity on the Soviet Union (reiterated in Reagan's 1987 call to 'tear down' the Berlin Wall) proved to be 'both morally satisfying and politically prudent'[148]: morally satisfying in the short term, and politically prudent in the long term, because, as Kirkpatrick said (though was not the first neoconservative to observe), 'democratic nations don't start wars'.[149]

By the year of the 'evil empire' speech, neoconservatives  were doing well in the administration. Kirkpatrick was at the UN, Paul Wolfowitz had been made Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, and Caspar Weinberger had brought in Richard Perle as Assistant Secretary of Defense, responsible for dealing with the Soviet Union and Europe. Perle, who had been a staffer to Wolfowitz's hero, 'Scoop' Jackson, during the previous decade, was among those profoundly opposed to the status quo 'detente' with the Soviet Union, and one of those within the administration urging a rethink. Supported by such figures, the Kissinger school of diplomacy was fading from prominence, and those of a neoconservative persuasion were happy to see it go.

At the UN, meanwhile, recognisable diplomacy of any kind was deserting the neoconservatives. Kirkpatrick was not alone in having become disenchanted with the entire institution. To her eye, there was a fundamental contradiction in the UN's Charter: it assumed that the member states would embody democracy, yet the Soviet bloc and its comrades had never posited any democratic pretence whatsoever. The UN was founded on - and was living - a lie. That democratic nations of the free world should be deemed within the UN to have moral parity with dictatorships - communist dictatorships at that - displayed the futility of the enterprise.[150] The failure of the UN was inherent from its very origins. Like the League of Nations, its case had been laid out in part in Immanuel Kant's Perpetual Peace and An Idea for a Universal History. Yet Kant's precepts, though aped, had been ignored - in particular the First and Second Definitive Articles, which make it plain that, for a system of perpetual peace, every constituent nation must be 'republican' (that is a liberal democracy) and 'the law of nations should be founded on a federation of free states'.[151]

Official American expressions of distaste for the UN reached a high point in 1983 when the deputy chief to the UN mission, Charles Lichtenstein, said in response to a proposal to move the UN from New York, 'We will put no impediment in your way, and we will be down at the dock bidding you a fond farewell as you sail off into the sunset.' Irving Kristol - who lauded Kirkpatrick in an article the same year[152] - sent Lichtenstein a congratulatory telegram. For neoconservatives, the UN was fundamentally compromised by the equivalence with which it treated democratic and totalitarian regimes. Outright opposition to, or simple ignoring of, the UN became commonplace, summed up with characteristic force by Irving Kristol at the American Enterprise Institute in 1987, when he declared, 'I just want to go on record as saying that I thoroughly deplore in this serious conversation on foreign policy, any mention of the UN Charter.'[153]

THE NEW GENERATION

Within months of the Reagan administration's arrival in office, Wolfowitz had brought in an almost entirely new set of policy planning staff. Many came from the same schools as he did: a number were fellow former pupils of the nuclear theorist Albert Wohlstetter, whose direct impact on Wolfowitz had been far greater than that of any other professor, including Strauss. But Straussian descendants were also brought in, prominent among them Francis Fukuyama, who had studied under Bloom at Cornell. Later Irving's son - William Kristol - moved to Washington, to act (from 1985) as an aide to Secretary of Education William Bennett. Though neoconservatives, let alone pure Straussians, never had the grasp over the Reagan administration that some commentators have credited them with, there were enough of them to make an impact, and also to give a flavour of the kind of opposition they were going to face during the George W. Bush presidency. Even a touch of the later misrepresentations can be felt in the 1987 Newsweek article entitled 'The Cult of Leo Strauss', which asked in conspiratorial tones, 'Why are so many Straussians in the Reagan administration?' The writer, Jacob Weisberg, even went so far as to say, 'Some of their critics suggest that the brotherhood [sic] is committed to no less than halting the drift of modern democracy.'[154]

Yet what Straussians and neoconservatives were actually committed to doing during the Reagan administration was defending and reinvigorating democracy: first by altering the  unsatisfactory status quo of detente with hostile ideologies, and second by preventing the United States' humiliation before supranational bodies. In advocating massive increases in spending in areas such as defence, neoconservatives were going by one of their basic political rules, expressed succinctly by Irving Kristol: '[W]e should figure out what we want before we calculate what we can afford, not the reverse, which is the normal conservative predisposition.'[155] Although many convincing economic arguments for avoiding the Reagan-era arms race were put forward, for neoconservatives the issue of prime importance was that America should hold overwhelming military superiority over the Soviet bloc. Although some neoconservatives have not so much overemphasised the significance of the arms build-up, as underplayed the importance of the cracks already emerging in Soviet society, the Reagan doctrine, by any analysis, increased pressure on the Soviet authorities, and at the very least greatly assisted the collapse of the communist empire.

That collapse - in the last year of Reagan's presidency - spelt for neoconservatives both a victory and a period of deliberation, for the victory over communism saw the end of the struggle in which neoconservatism had been rooted. It left some first-generation neoconservatives, such as Norman Podhoretz, vindicated, but it also left them temporarily redundant. Some, including Irving Kristol, saw the collapse of the monolith that had defined aspects of their neoconservatism as an opportunity for America to stand back from the world for a period. But among the younger generation, neoconservative preoccupations proved more than relevant and adaptable to the new post-1989 environment. In a 1986 Commentary article, Brigitte and Peter Berger had written that 'We believe that the most important political and moral challenge of our time is the struggle for the survival of freedom. In the international context this struggle has its focus in the resistance to the spread of Soviet-style totalitarianism.'[156] For the younger generation of neoconservatives, such as Charles Krauthammer, Joshua Muravchik and William Kristol, it was clear that the survival of freedom was a fight and goal that would long survive the collapse of the communist enemy. During that momentous year the central themes of this debate came right out into the open in an article by Bloom's pupil Francis Fukuyama.

'The End of History?' was published in the summer 1989 issue of The National Interest. Although written before Fukuyama joined the policy planning staff of the State Department as, by his own admission, 'a relatively junior official with little impact on policy',[157] Fukuyama's fifteen-page article caused a stir equalled only by Samuel Huntington's 1993 essay 'The Clash of Civilizations?'. Easily understandable and equally easily misunderstandable, in both cases the simple central theses were bolstered by formidable scholarship and popular appeal.

By the end of the nineties, the work of Fukuyama and Huntington (whose articles were, in both cases, extended into books) held incontestable sway over political discourse, albeit a sway that could occasionally fall into the irritating 'binary simplicity'[158] which too often proved misinformed or glib.[159] Huntington's thesis (which gained many more admirers after events in 2001) broadly attracted 'realists' of the school associated with his Harvard contemporary, Henry Kissinger, whereas Fukuyama's thesis - whilst by no means introducing a neoconservative consensus - provided a version of world history deeply appealing to those of a neoconservative persuasion. Apart from anything else, it displayed (especially in its book version) a number of Straussian preoccupations - though Strauss himself is nowhere cited. In his book, Fukuyama charts some of the inherent flaws of the liberal democratic state, both the apparently harmless and the specifically destructive. Among the latter, Fukuyama notably highlights the problem of relativism in democracies where 'we are fundamentally adverse [sic] to saying that a certain person, or way of life, or activity, is better and more worthwhile than another'.[160] However, it is not the specifics, but the general sweep of Fukuyama's argument that is important and most debated.

There was, and remains, much misunderstanding of the nature of that argument. This arises largely from a misunderstanding of the sense in which Fukuyama used the word  'history' (he was using the term not in its sense of 'the end of worldly events', but in the Hegelian sense of 'the end of the evolution of human thought about...first principles'[161]). What Fukuyama suggested to his readers was that 'we may be witnessing not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government'.[162] Or, as he summarised in the 'Introduction' to the book of the article, 'there would be no further progress in the development of underlying principles and institutions, because all of the really big questions had been settled'.[163]

Many neoconservatives agreed with Fukuyama's theory, and all agreed with aspects of it. But Fukuyama never intended his article as the last word on the matter. In a set of responses to Fukuyama, published in the same magazine issue as the original article, a number of people, including Gertrude Himmelfarb, Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Irving Kristol, wrote reactions to the piece. Of perhaps greatest interest was Allan Bloom's response. It had been thanks to Bloom and Nathan Tarcov (both of the Olin Center for Inquiry into the Theory and Practice of Democracy) that Fukuyama had been invited to Chicago to deliver the lecture on which his subsequent article and book were based. In responding to his former pupil's thesis, and expressing his concern at this juncture for all the 'faithful defenders of the Western Alliance', Bloom noted:

Now that it appears that we have won...what are we to do? This glorious victory, if victory it really is, is the noblest achievement of democracy, a miracle of steadfastness on the part of an alliance of popular governments, with divided authorities and changing leaderships, over a fifty year period. What is more, this victory is the victory of justice, of freedom over tyranny, the rallying of all good and reasonable men and women. Never has theory so dominated practice in the history of human affairs, relieving the monotony of the meaningless rise and fall of great powers. As Fukuyama underlines, it is the ideas of freedom and equality that have animated the West and have won by convincing almost all nations that they are true, by destroying the intellectual and political foundations of alternative understandings of justice.[164]

But a new problem now confronted western man; one that Irving Kristol (who disagreed with Fukuyama's thesis for Aristotelian reasons) picked up on in the same issue. It was Kristol who acknowledged, with characteristic succinctness, that though it is nice to have won the Cold War, indeed 'more than nice, it's wonderful', it does mean 'that now the enemy is us, not them'.[165]

Opposition to communism had provided western man, as well as neoconservatives, with a clear ideological enemy. It also, as Bloom saw it:

...protected] us from too much depressing reflection on ourselves. The global nature of the conflicts we were engaged in imposed an unprecedented uniformity on the world. It has been liberalism - or else. The practical disaster of the anti-liberal Right and Left has in general been taken to be a refutation of the theories which supported or justified them. Now, however, all bets are off. The glance back towards ourselves, as Fukuyama indicates, is likely to be not entirely satisfying.[166]

What is more, liberalism may have won, says Bloom, but not necessarily forever. It is a claim to which Fukuyama was alert, but which he ultimately rejected. In his sheer optimism, apart from anything else, Fukuyama shares more with his own generation of neoconservatives than he does with their predecessors. While the pessimism of many people regarding the process of history may be understandable, he writes, 'it is contradicted by the empirical flow of events in the second half of the twentieth century. We need to ask whether our pessimism is not becoming something of a pose, adopted as lightly as was the optimism of the nineteenth century. [167]

Attacks on Fukuyama's theory have been persistent, and gained credibility throughout the 1990s. Most recently, attacks on Fukuyama have ranged from Francis Wheen's questioning of his method and motive,[168] to Philip Bobbitt's debatable accusation that Fukuyama had 'missed [out] the resurgence of nationalism' from his thesis, and the specifically erroneous suggestion that he had also 'missed Islamic fundamentalism'.[169]  Though events of the 1990s were evidence to many people that Fukuyama's theory was wrong, most such objections had been either considered or answered in the course of the book The End of History. Aware of democracy's imperfections, the author remains alert to the threats which face it from outside. Perhaps he underestimated the extent and speed at which the post-Soviet world changed, but the central claim, that liberal democracy was the rightful end point of human achievement, continued to have a resonance beyond the walls of The National Interest or the University of Chicago. What Fukuyama gave impetus to, and a further ideological justification for, was a view of history which became part of the neoconservative DNA - that democracy was the desirable end point of all human societies, and that, though democracy could not alone make people good, it was the surest means of preventing nation states waging war on each other.

THE CHALLENGES OF THE 1990s

Samuel Huntington later wrote, with a realist's grim satisfaction: 'the moment of euphoria at the end of the Cold War generated an illusion of harmony, which was soon revealed to be exactly that. The world became different in the early 1990s, but not necessarily more peaceful. Change was inevitable; progress was not.'[170] In distinction to Huntington, neoconservatives continued throughout the decade not only to increase their belief in, and rationalisation for, democratic progress, but to argue harder to see their dream achieved. If Fukuyama's position was, as Huntington was to characterise it, 'the expectation of harmony'[171] then - in the wake of the Cold War - it was an expectation that many people shared, and, for a variety of reasons, fought to achieve.

But two distinct challenges arose during the decade that threatened both the security of America and her allies, and also - the two being intertwined - the advance of freedom. The first was the emergence of the familiar border-crossing dictator in the form of Saddam Hussein. The second was the fracturing of a nation state in Yugoslavia, and the country's descent - under the supervision of Slobodan Milosevic - into inter-ethnic conflict. Both developed into humanitarian catastrophes, and appeared to show for a time the 'return' of history to the post-Cold War world. But neoconservatives had other explanations for the resurgent problem. Bloom had written in response to Fukuyama:

Liberalism has won, but it may be decisively unsatisfactory. Communism was a mad extension of liberal rationalism, and everyone has seen that it neither works nor is desirable. And, although fascism was defeated on the battlefield, its dark possibilities were not seen through to the end. If an alternative is sought there is nowhere else to seek it. I would suggest that fascism has a future, if not the future. Much that Fukuyama says points in that direction. The facts do too.[172]

Communism was a spent force, its return in a recognisable guise made impossible by its comprehensive ideological and physical destruction. But fascism presented a different problem, and Fukuyama acknowledged his old teacher's point of view when he wrote in his book that 'Fascism was not around long enough to suffer an internal crisis of legitimacy.'[173] The 1990s presented - especially in the continental version of Milosevic - a freakish coda of that creed. For those of a neoconservative mind-set, the task of dealing with such aberrations was viewed not just as a mopping-up exercise, but as a challenge to be dealt with effectively and comprehensively, in order to send the twentieth century's twin evil ideologies conclusively back into history.

When Saddam Hussein's forces crossed the border into Kuwait on 2 August 1990, a new international problem came to the fore and remained there for thirteen years. In the run-up to the 2003 war in Iraq, it was often misleadingly stated that there had been a consensus for removing Hussein's troops by force the first time round. This was not the case. In 1990, opposition to American intervention came from all political sides, and, as in 2003, many characteristics united the opposing ends of the political spectrum. Both their rhetoric and the direction of their finger-pointing were to become familiar. For instance, to the eyes of Pat Buchanan, the only supporters of the war in Iraq were the 'Israeli Defense Forces and its Amen corner in the United States', into which category he grouped A. M. Rosenthal, Richard Perle, Charles Krauthammer and Henry Kissinger. Of course, all those fingered as being 'for' the war were Jewish.[174] As in 2003, certain conservatives and socialists encouraged people to draw very particular conclusions.

However, the Bush administration ignored the opposition and honoured its obligations. Iraqi forces were expelled from Kuwait after a ground war lasting less than a hundred hours. The fact that the Allied military did not, as Margaret Thatcher urged (she was then no longer British Prime Minister), use this momentum to go on to Baghdad and remove Saddam Hussein from power, split many neoconservatives and stored up regrets for many others. But the appetite for regime change was simply not there; the definite notion of a link between insecurity at home and hostile dictatorships abroad was not yet entrenched. Even Paul Wolfowitz was not advocating the toppling of the Iraqi menace.[175] But the missed opportunity was summed up later by Robert Kagan and William Kristol, when they wrote of the episode: 'if the United States is prepared to summon the forces necessary to carry out a Desert Storm, and to take the risks associated with expelling the world's fourth largest army from Kuwait, it is absurd, and in the event self defeating, not to complete the job'.[176]

Though he may not have been in favour of regime change, Wolfowitz was certainly one of those in the first Bush administration for whom Iraq's propulsion to the foreground of the international agenda did not come as a surprise. In the late seventies he had worked on both the Pentagon's Team B intelligence review and its Limited Contingency Study, focusing on the likelihood of a new instability arising in the Persian Gulf.

At that time, the threat had centred around the Soviet client states in the region. But by 1990 it was clear that, though no longer a Soviet client, Iraq could be a problem all on its very own. As Margaret Thatcher said, 'When Soviet power broke down, so did the control it exercised, however fitfully and irresponsibly, over rogue states like Syria, Iraq, and Gadaffi's Libya.' In effect, these states were 'released to commit whatever mischief they wish without bothering to check with their arms supplier and bank manager'.[177] In the 1979 Pentagon Limited Contingency Study, Wolfowitz and his colleagues had specifically considered the likelihood of an invasion of Kuwait by Iraqi forces intent on seizing her oil fields. The Pentagon study had also cited admiringly the 'timely' British military intervention when Iraqi troops had threatened Kuwaiti sovereignty in 1961.[178] Yet, though the right precedents were cited, the impetus for a newer type of solution was just not yet there.

In a new era and an unclear global situation, America and her allies responded to the 1990 invasion of Kuwait in a way that was reflex-like in its reliance on old-style realpolitik. The Iraqi army had been driven back to within its own borders, and the regional status quo restored. No great shake-up in the region was contemplated or even deemed particularly desirable. Paul Wolfowitz wrote in 1994 that 'nothing could have insured Saddam Hussein's removal from power short of a full scale occupation of Iraq...even if easy initially, it is unclear how or when it would have ended'.[179] Old-school realism approached this threat in the way it did because the threat seemed familiar. It would soon re-emerge as a challenge that was quite new.

The other great challenge that preoccupied neoconservatives and the international conscience throughout the nineties also cropped up before the Republicans were out of the White House. Reactions to the break-up of Yugoslavia factionalised all political parties and persuasions, and though neoconservatives were no different, throughout the decade their voice became increasingly unified, coherent and admirable. Unfortunately, this was a decade when they were arguing from outside government, not within it.

Out of power, and with the collapse of its defining foe having robbed it of its most salient antithesis, neoconservatism began to be seen by many as a spent force. As the US-Soviet relationship warmed, Jay Winik had written in the pages of Foreign Policy that 'America is witnessing the end not just of the Reagan era, but perhaps of the neoconservatives as well.'[180] Such premature obituaries for neoconservatism continued throughout the nineties, even as the phenomenon was redefining itself. Even some inside the fold thought they were observing neoconservatism's passing - though for different reasons. In 1995 Irving Kristol wrote that 'it is clear that what can fairly be described as the neoconservative impulse...was a generational phenomenon, and has now been pretty much absorbed into a larger, more comprehensive conservatism'.[181] In other words, neoconservatives were now un-prefixed conservatives. Kristol saw Newt Gingrich and the 1994 congressional elections as exemplifying the change, in which neoconservatism had become 'an integral part of the new language of conservative politics'.[182] The other grand old man of neoconservatism, Norman Podhoretz, concurred, writing 'Neoconservatism: A Eulogy',[183] and suggesting with characteristic boldness in a speech at the American Enterprise Institute that 'neoconservatism is dead'.[184] Of course, neoconservatism was not dead, but rather - as Podhoretz also posited in his speech - temporarily 'missing'.[185] For while older neoconservatives were looking for direction, a younger faction had already found theirs.

Figures like Joshua Muravchik and Charles Krauthammer recognised that the basic mission of America remained the same, on either side of the Cold War. 'Communism may be dead, but the work of democracy is never done', wrote Krauthammer. 'With the decline of communism, the advancement of democracy should become the touchstone of a new ideological American foreign policy.'[186] Krauthammer, Muravchik and many of the other younger-generation neoconservatives understood that corollaries of erasing tyrannies and spreading democracy were interventionism, nation-building, and many of the other difficulties that had long concerned traditional conservatives. The choice, they recognised, was difficult but inevitable. After all, as Krauthammer wrote, 'If America wants stability, it will have to create it...the alternative to such a robust and difficult interventionism...is chaos.'[187] The Balkans dilemma highlighted the disparities between old conservatives and neoconservatives, but what was clear was that the neoconservative tendency still existed, treading a path that remained distinct from traditional conservatism, and from most of the Clinton White House.

Yet it was because of the Balkans that a small number of neoconservatives had earlier switched parties and backed Clinton's presidential bid. From the outset of the Balkans crisis, many were disenchanted with the first Bush administration's inertia or lack of interest in the growing humanitarian catastrophe. Richard Perle later described Secretary of State James Baker's initial comment that the US 'has no dog in this fight' as 'one of the most appalling statements from somebody who claims to be a leader'.[188] The administration's torpor in the face of the break-up of the Yugoslav state during its last months in office struck some in the neoconservative camp as typical, just another part of a wider pattern of dithering on major issues. Joshua Muravchik even contributed to a 1992 New Republic feature, 'Conservatives for Clinton', in which he traced a sequence of foreign policy misjudgements that had propelled him to supporting the Democratic candidate in 1992. 'When Chinese students demonstrated for democracy in 1989, Bush was inert', he said. 'When Communist regimes fell, Bush did not rush to shore up new democracies.' And, of course, 'Bush kept democracy off Desert Storm's agenda.'[189] To this list of grievances was added the Balkans.

Those neoconservatives who did swing towards Clinton were driven by his criticism of Bush's inaction in situations where human rights violations were taking place. Though all came to feel let down by the perpetual disparity between what Clinton said and what he did, neocons who supported him felt at least that Clinton couldn't do less in these areas than Bush.

'On what I care about - human rights and promoting democracy, keeping some sense of ideals in our foreign policy - Clinton is more amenable than Bush', declared Muravchik.[190] But neocons who swung to Clinton turned out to be bitterly disappointed by the lack of moral clarity and the hesitancy over the Balkans in the administration, and ended up finding solace only in the op-ed pages and think-tanks. From there they wrote of how American policy ought to be operated, for the falling-out with Clinton was lasting and mutual. A dejected Muravchik wrote of this disenchantment when he stated that he had come to the conclusion that 'Clinton turned out to care not a whit more about Bosnia than had the elder Bush.'[191]

But the wars in Yugoslavia demonstrated to neoconservatives not just the inactions of the Democratic administration, but also the iniquities of many of the international systems that were meant to be in place to deal with precisely this sort of event. When the Luxembourg Foreign Minister Jacques Poos declared at the start of the Yugoslav crisis that this was 'the hour of Europe', many neocons, like many conservatives across the board, were happy, as Richard Perle put it, 'to let the Europeans have a go'.[192] But the Europeans proved hopelessly incapable of containing, let alone dealing with, the situation.

Within a year of election in 1992, the President and the highest officials in his administration were repeatedly calling for multilateralism, and specifically UN-directed peacekeeping operations. An open letter to the President in the Wall Street Journal of 2 September 1993 attacked Clinton for failing to act in Bosnia, and criticised the UN's efforts at peacekeeping. Signatories included Wolfowitz, Kirkpatrick, Perle and Bell.[193] The distrust neoconservatives felt towards the UN, and in particular its ability to co-ordinate any such operation, may be said to have been vindicated by events in the ensuing years. The massacre, under the UN's eyes, in Srebrenica in July 1995 was just the worst of many dates in the Yugoslav disaster, which fulfilled their gloomiest predictions.

Throughout the period, once again facing ethnic cleansing and genocide in Europe and government inaction at home, neoconservatives kept up what pressure they could from outside government. Paul Wolfowitz, for instance, was at the forefront of the Balkan Action Council, a pressure group that called for military intervention on the side of the Bosnians. Even their opponents acknowledge that it was genuine moral outrage at what was occurring that fuelled neocons in the policy fray over the Balkans.[194] In an already complex situation, multiple misunderstandings (largely the result of equivalencing between sides) allowed neoconservatives to inject much-needed moral clarity into the situation. In petitions, letters to the newspapers, speeches and articles, Wolfowitz, Perle and Kirkpatrick were among neoconservatives who consistently lobbied for armed intervention to halt the progress of ethnic cleansing and slaughter. 'After seven years of aggression and genocide in the Balkans, the removal of Milosevic provides the only genuine possibility of a durable peace', they wrote in a 1998 letter to President Clinton.81 It was a stand dictated by morality, and though many people subsequently lambasted the same neoconservatives during this and later interventions aimed at saving Muslim lives, there were some who took notice. The British-born writer Christopher Hitchens was among them:

That war in the early 1990s changed a lot for me.

I never thought I would see, in Europe, a full-dress reprise of internment camps, the mass murder of civilians, the reinstitution of torture and rape as acts of policy.

And I didn't expect so many of my comrades to be indifferent - or even take the side of the fascists.

It was a time when many people on the left were saying 'Don't intervene, we'll only make things worse' or, 'Don't intervene, it might destabilise the region.'...

And I thought - destabilisation of fascist regimes is a good thing. Why should the left care about the stability of undemocratic regimes?...

It was a time when the left was mostly taking the conservative, status quo position - leave the Balkans alone, leave Milosevic alone, do nothing...

That's when I began to first find myself on the same side as the neocons. I was signing petitions in favour of action in Bosnia, and I would look down the list of names and I kept finding, there's Richard Perle. There's Paul Wolfowitz.

That seemed interesting to me. These people were saying that we had to act.[195]

The Kosovo campaign allied the neoconservatives with many liberal and humanitarian interventionists: all believed in the moral imperative to act to prevent the ethnic cleansing being committed by Serb forces. Ad hoc moral, as well as military, coalitions became common, and neocons were surprised when they found no ground whatsoever separating them and Clinton's Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright (whose own family history gave her something of Strauss's distaste for - and understanding of - tyranny). Indeed, so apparently similar had the instincts of some liberal interventionists and neoconservatives become by the time of Kosovo, that Norman Podhoretz was at pains to stress, in Commentary, the importance of what separated them - in particular the emphasis placed by neoconservatives on 'interests as well as values'.[196] There is some truth in this distinction, for although neoconservatives were driven by humanitarian instincts, they remained certain that it was also in the interests of American security that such interventions were carried out.

Neocons advocated intervention from anyone willing and able to do the job, but they advocated quasi-unilateral intervention only when they observed that Europe was not equal to the challenge before it. 'The hour of Europe' boast, in Robert Kagan's words, 'proved hollow when it became clear that Europe could not act even in Bosnia without the United States'.[197] The problem was not simply that Europe was suffering a bureaucratic failing, but that its bureaucratic failing was partly a result of - and not just coincidental with - its military failing. Europe had taken the opportunity, in the wake of the Soviet Union's collapse, to 'cash in on a sizeable peace dividend', and take 'a holiday from strategy',[198] spending the money it saved on welfare programmes and the like. As European defence spending continued to lag behind that of America, Europe found that it depended on America's military assistance even when it did not want it. Many neocons used the crisis over the Balkans to lambaste Europe en masse, citing the military debacle as part of a pattern of continental stubbornness, fuelled by a refusal to boost defence spending, and an unwillingness to 'take the other necessary steps to establish an independent foreign policy'.[199]

The disparity in defence spending between the two continents could not have been better highlighted than it was in the defining intervention of the nineties. When a coalition of nations, without UN approval, launched air strikes on Slobodan Milosevic's regime to halt the Serb army's atrocities in Kosovo, the reliance on American military technology became appallingly apparent. Not only did American planes fly the majority of missions, but almost all of the precision guided weaponry used was American made, and American technology provided 99 per cent of proposed targets. As Kagan cites in his analysis, the UK - one of the few countries internationally that had kept anywhere near America's technological lead - provided only four per cent of the planes, and the same percentage of bombs dropped.[200] Other countries in the coalition, though useful on paper, often proved a hindrance. Not only did mainland Europe's legal teams sometimes seem larger than their military, but certain allies, while bringing nothing special to the table, cost the mission significantly in effectiveness and secrecy. Some allies were more of a liability than a boon.[201]

Yet American military spending and technology actually saved lives in the conflict. The precision-guided munitions used in the conflict had been honed for years. During the seventies the process often referred to as RMA (the Revolution in Military Affairs) had proved the key to finding a strategic route out of nuclear deadlock, with the development of conventional weaponry providing a peaceful way out of nuclear stand-off. As Michael Ignatieff put it, 'The beauty of such weapons was that, unlike the nuclear arsenal, they could be used.'[202] Munitions like the cruise missile enhanced the oppor tunities and possibilities of wars like Kosovo which targeted the regime, while causing minimal risk to the lives of the civilian population. The clumsier technologies of the majority of European air forces were just not up to this new job.

But if European capabilities had dictated much of the argument away from home, within America the use, or non-use, of ground troops to assist in solving the Kosovo crisis proved to be the recurrent domestic dilemma. Clinton's opposition to sending in ground troops was highly controversial, and only reinforced an emerging international view that America was keen to engage in regime change only if it could do so from 15,000 feet. From this, hostile regimes could well draw the lesson that, though America might be willing to kill for its values, it was not willing to die for them.[203] Belligerent Hussein-style tyrannies could only be emboldened by such a lesson. If American forces were taking care to minimise civilian casualties, despots, by contrast, could learn to use collateral damage as a weapon against America and her allies. Clinton's pre-emptive certainty seemed to be not only a moral, but also a military blunder. One of those hoping to take over the President's job expressed his feelings on hearing that Clinton had stated that ground troops would not, under any plan, be used in Kosovo. 'I think it said, "We're coming to fight you with one hand'", said Governor George W. Bush. 'I happen to think it's important for Milosevic to hear one voice, and that we're serious...We need to have one objective in mind and that is to achieve the goals and to do so ferociously.'[204] This was distinctly different doctrine already rising.

The lessons taken away from the Kosovan conflict were varied and complex. Neoconservatives learned a number of practical lessons. Firstly, a relatively swift war, using massive, technologically advanced power could prevent a humanitarian catastrophe, and eventually topple a regime. This was the ideal post-modern war. Humanitarian aims, mixed with massive contemporary military technology, allowed America to target a regime without waging war on the people who suffered under that regime. Humanitarian intervention to alleviate suffering - which had hitherto so often been desirable - was proved to be practical and possible. It was a landmark in warfare: as Prime Minister Blair said, 'Twenty years ago we would not have been fighting in Kosovo. We would have turned our backs on it.'[205] But that back-turning would no longer be considered an option. And it was no surprise that those, like Brendan Simms, who took most notice of the Balkans debacle and observed neoconservative participation in the debate often came out of that conflict at the very least 'sympathetic' to neoconservatism.[206]

But flaws and hindrances to the campaign had registered. As Robert Kagan wrote in his masterly new-generation neoconservative tract Paradise and Power, 'by the end of the 1990s the disparity of power was subtly rending the fabric of the transatlantic relationship. The Americans were unhappy and impatient about constraints imposed by European allies who brought so little to a war but whose concern for "legal issues" prevented the war's effective prosecution.[207] This second issue in particular was to arise again: neoconservatives were insistent that a Europe that couldn't act should not hold back an America that could.

By this time America was gearing up for another election, and the neoconservatives had become a revitalised force.  The period in governmental exile had seen the succession of a new generation of young neocons. The 'Project for the New American Century' (PNAC), founded in 1997 by William Kristol (also the founder of the neoconservative Weekly Standard) epitomised the distance neoconservatism had travelled in exile. Situated in Washington, in the same building as the American Enterprise Institute (which had many neoconservatives in its ranks), the PNAC invigorated and led much of the post-Kosovo discussion on major issues. It also symbolised a neoconservatism that was almost exclusively foreign policy inspired. It was not that the neoconservative attitudes to domestic affairs did not continue, but in an era of global crises, it was on foreign policy that neoconservatives made their most distinctive and impassioned mark.

'American foreign and defense policy is adrift', the PNAC declared in its founding Statement of Principles. Citing the  'incoherence' of the Clinton administration's policies, the PNAC set out how a conservative (un-prefixed) foreign policy should look. The signatories declared that the use of American power had been repeatedly shown over the previous century to be a force for good. For the next century America needed, among other things, to: increase its defence spending to enable it to carry out its global responsibilities; strengthen ties with its democratic allies; challenge regimes hostile to American interests and values; and 'promote the cause of political and economic freedom abroad'. The Statement finished by declaring: 'Such a Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity may not be fashionable today. But it is necessary if the United States is to build on the successes of this past century and to ensure our security and our greatness in the next.[208]

What is striking about this now famous statement is the political scope of the signatories. Among them were a number of usual neocon suspects, Norman Podhoretz and his wife Midge Decter, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Kagan and Francis Fukuyama. But also adding their names were older, non-neo conservatives - Jeb Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. The PNAC solidified an alliance, moulding together surprisingly disparate types of conservatives, many of whom were going to be neocon-tagged even if they only had a few broad views in common with signed-up neoconservatives.

Some of the PNAC foreign policy stances that were going to define the post-Clinton era were clearly expressed in a 2000 book edited by William Kristol and Robert Kagan. Present Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in American Foreign and Defense Policy laid out the neocon case for the new century. Kagan and Kristol set out to show that what they and their colleagues were proposing was not a mere 'tinkering around the edges' of American policy. 'What is needed today is not better management of the status quo, but a fundamental change in the way our leaders and the public think about America's role in the world.'[209] The authors took it for granted that, even if America had, for instance, never intervened in Kosovo or expressed disapproval of China's record on human rights, it 'would still find itself the target of jealousy, resentment and in some cases fear'.[210] What was important was not a public relations exercise, but a sustained American attempt to spread freedom and democracy ('with democratic change sweeping the world at an unprecedented rate over these last thirty years, is it "realistic" to insist that no further victories can be won?'[211]) and, for security's sake, the deterrence that comes from sending the message to America's foes, 'Don't even think about it.'[212] The editors also famously stated that 'we will occasionally have to intervene abroad even when we cannot prove that a narrowly construed "vital interest" of the United States is at stake'.[213]

Elsewhere in the book, Richard Perle wrote of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein, and demonstrated how Clinton's 'flailing, ineffectual policy' on Iraq had merely postponed an inevitable confrontation, one which now left 'a heavy burden for the next American President'.[214] Inaction on Iraq had remained a major neocon preoccupation since Desert Storm, and as Saddam Hussein's non-compliance with weapons inspections, arms control and sanctions became more and more flagrant, neoconservatives were among the few to realise that Saddam Hussein was not a problem that was going to go away, but a problem that would have to be taken away, which was exactly what Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and the other signatories of a 1998 open letter from the PNAC to President Clinton had called for. There were indeed strikes, and talk of regime change, but the Iraqi President remained in place, to flaunt his position and pose further problems at a later date. The signatories of the PNAC letter recognised that Hussein's continuing presence was not only threatening to the US and disastrous for the Iraqi people, but also destabilising for the entire region. The old 'big idea' - containment - was not working. Another way had to be considered.[215] What the signatories were calling for was not just a specific answer to a specific problem, but a new and different type of statecraft. In what turned out to be perhaps the most important contribution to Present Dangers, Paul Wolfowitz provided a lengthy blueprint for such a policy - 'Statemanship in the New Century'.

Wolfowitz's prescriptions and solutions were in the distinctive tradition of neoconservatism. He even quoted aptly from George Orwell (writing in 1942): 'One effect of the ghastly history of the last twenty years has been to make a great deal of ancient literature seem much more modern...Tamerlane and Genghis Khan seem credible figures now, and Machiavelli seems a serious thinker, as they didn't in 1910. We have got out of a backwater and back into history.'[216] The piece sets itself against a trend of traditional conservative foreign policy debate by acknowledging that the global situation had changed, and that America must change to cope with it. Wolfowitz lambastes old-school Buchananite conservatives, who seem 'willing to let almost any hostile superpower dominate Europe or Asia if the alternative is risking major war'.[217]

The United States is not Switzerland (nor, for that matter, is it the United States of George Washington's or John Quincy Adams's time), which can afford to isolate itself from a world over which it has little control and focus simply on how to make money and enjoy its life in peace. With so great a capacity to influence events comes a requirement to figure out how best to use that capacity to shape the future.[218]

The nature of that shaping, he writes, centres around the spreading of liberal democracy, for which 'there are no visible philosophical contenders'.[219] Discussing events in Iran and Korea, Wolfowitz comments that it is impressive 'how often promoting democracy has actually advanced other American interests'.

Wolfowitz proposes clear practice in treating with difficult regimes, agreeing with Kissinger that Harold Macmillan's exploration of 'pragmatic' concessions at the time of the Berlin crisis only emboldened Kruschev. Advocating firmness, he states that any 'signalling' of the use of force 'should not be done without a careful calculation of what might come next'.[220] In contrast to some other neocons, he praises America's history of coalition-building, and explains its practical benefits. This is realism - moral and strategic realism - and at times Wolfowitz may be mistaken for a typical 'hawk' or 'vulcan'. America must deal effectively with rogue states, he says. And for practical as well as moral reasons:

A country determined to mount a major attack on the status quo would find in a country like Iraq a willing ally and a source of leverage against the U.S. and its allies.

The Clinton administration's tendency to temporize rather than go for the jugular, although understandable in many circumstances, has had the effect of piling up future problems.[221]

But the break-off point with traditional 'hawks' is that in Wolfowitz's diagnosis democracy is the surest way to defend American interests against the forces of aggression. The same realism that dictated his judgement in 1991 remains, however.

Wolfowitz is practical, not Panglossian, on the possibilities of global democracy. 'We cannot ignore the uncomfortable fact', he admits, 'that economic and social conditions may better prepare some countries for democracy than others.[222] One of the countries that was seen as ripe for democracy was Iraq, and on that neocons and their friends in Washington began to agree.

This was not just a neoconservative vision, but a neoconservative vision with which many traditional conservatives sympathised. So when George W. Bush won the 2000 presidential election, it was unsurprising that Wolfowitz, Perle, John Bolton and others of a neoconservative persuasion received government appointments. After the Clinton years and multiple claims of an early death, neoconservatism arrived, with the younger Bush, at its strategically strongest point to date.

But those who thought neoconservatives had taken over the government hadn't done much thinking. Among the top level of officials in the administration, not one could be described as a neoconservative. Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell: all were various categories of the Republican species, but none was a neocon. The popular confusion came about with events later in 2001, demonstrated perhaps by the progress of National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice. Rice - who had trained and risen as an expert on Soviet affairs, unparalleled in her field on issues like detente - shared her boss's early concern over neoconservative watchwords like nation-building and democracy spread. But her stance, like George W. Bush's, was to change because events changed. The Rice of the campaign season was not the same Rice who began to emerge even before the catastrophe of 2001, conceding to William Kristol, when she called him to the White House for a talk before 9/11, that she was coming round to the idea of democracy spread, and believing a little less in pure realpolitik.[223]

The first months of the Bush administration were unpromising, quiet and, not only in retrospect, over-hung with an air of near somnolence. But neoconservatives knew what to expect from quiet moments on the world stage, and were familiar with the way in which the savageries of the past re-emerge. In the opening pages of The End of History Fukuyama acknowledged the pitfalls and presumptions of prejudging history, citing two famous examples of pre-First World War misjudgement. There was the famous eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1910-11) which had written of torture that 'the whole subject is one of only historical interest as far as Europe is concerned', and the claim by Norman Angell in his popular and esteemed 1910 book, The Great Illusion, that free trade had made war in Europe irrational and obsolete.[224] Kagan and Kristol also pondered the lessons history taught, when they reflected, in 2000, that in 1788 Louis XVI was on the throne of France, with philosophers proclaiming the age of peace, yet ten years later the King had been executed, and Napoleon was 'rampaging across Europe'.[225] They were right to expect and fear the return of historical turmoil. Though neoconservatives could not have expected the horror of 11 September, they were ready with some of the answers. Neoconservatives did not 'take over' the Bush administration, nor did they - as some critics have offensively put it - 'hijack'[226] it.

But what happened that day brought home a threat that was new to America, though long considered by neoconservatives. Since the neoconservatives had a head-start in the thinking, and since their philosophy alone adequately covered the 88enormity of the problem, it is hardly surprising that figures like Rice and Bush seemed to 'come over' all neocon. The actual neocons were not among Bush's senior appointees: Wolfowitz was a deputy, Perle was chair of the advisory Defense Policy Board. That was as high as the neoconservatives had got, but the influence of their ideas and the significance of their combined thought at this period could not be overestimated, even if their personal influence could be. What neoconservative ideology did was help define George Bush's escape not just from the shadows of his father's style of politics, but from the whole oppressive philosophy of status-quo American conservatism.

A veteran intelligence official told James Mann eighteen months after 9/11, 'I've been schooled for thirty years that things go back to normal within six weeks or two months or so after a crisis. But these people aren't changing. There's a clear commitment on their part to make a difference. They refuse to go back to business-as-usual.'[227] The seismic shift happened from the day itself. What neoconservatives had been saying for years - that America's security was inseparable from global security - became startlingly clear that day. A barbarous regime on the other side of the globe, if left to fester, could eventually erupt, not in a far-off place, but on the streets of New York, Washington DC, and over the skies of Pennsylvania. Richard Armitage, Powell's deputy (and himself no neocon), summed up the new mood in a meeting on the day itself. Armitage cut off a run of diplomatic platitudes on historical complexity from Pakistan's Ambassador and its head of Intelligence Services with the simple and curt statement, 'History starts today.'[228] And so it did.

AFTER 9/11

'America did not change on September 11', wrote Robert Kagan. 'It only became more itself.[229] That process was epitomised in the country's President. Having given off many signals on the campaign trail and since arriving in office that he pretty much followed in his father's footsteps, 11 September made him, as Norman Podhoretz put it, 'politically born again as a passionate democratic idealist'.[230] Bush had always believed in the concepts that became his mantras after 9/11, but the events of that day clarified and reinforced them. If America was to be free, then it had to be proselytising in its efforts to make other people free. If it was to support and spread democracy, then it must first comprehensively wage war on the forces of anti-democratic reaction - the forces of terror. Before a month was out, America had launched its military against the aspirant-medieval tyranny of the Taliban, and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld was declaring that 'these strikes in Afghanistan are part of a much larger effort, one that will be sustained for a period of years, not weeks or months. This campaign will be much like the Cold War. We'll use every resource at our command. We will not stop until the terrorist networks are destroyed.'[231] There was to be none of the short termist, Clinton-era approach, which had - at best - just stored up problems that America would have to deal with another day. The new impetus given by the September outrages meant the whole pitch could be changed.

At his coming-of-age speech to a joint session of Congress on 20 September, with Tony Blair looking on, George Bush declared:

This country will define our times, not be defined by them.

As long as the United States of America is determined and strong, this will not be an age of terror; this will be an age of liberty, here and across the world. Great harm has been done to us. We have suffered great loss. And in our grief and anger we have found our mission and our moment.

Freedom and fear are at war. The advance of human freedom - the great achievement of our time, and the great hope of every time - now depends on us.

The world, not just America, had been transformed. Among world leaders, none grasped this faster than George Bush and Tony Blair. Both realised the new threat - not just terrorist cells, but the threat of terrorism combined with the threat originating from the proliferation of weapons of mass destruc90tion. A new nightmare scenario was suggested by the possibility that a non-state terror organisation could acquire weapons, wreak devastation worse than 9/11, and yet - unlike in the Cold War - provide no target for response. This new threat required new strategies. George Bush said at a speech at West Point on 1 June 2002:

For much of the last century, America's defense relied on the Cold War doctrines of deterrence and containment. In some cases, those strategies still apply. But new threats also require new thinking. Deterrence - the promise of massive retaliation against nations - means nothing against shadowy terrorist networks with no nation or citizens to defend. Containment is not possible when unbalanced dictators with weapons of mass destruction can deliver those weapons on missiles or secretly provide them to terrorist allies.

America had two jobs to do, and they went hand in hand: the elimination of hostile terrorist groups, and the toppling of governments that harboured them. The two goals were indistinguishable from one another: it was failed, rogue states that had allowed the terrorist menace to fester and to train within their borders; it was these states that gave the threat sanctuary.

One of the things that the President grasped immediately the towers in New York fell was that this was not a crime. It was not a case to be treated, like the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, as an FBI crime-scene investigation. What had occurred was an act of war - a monumental assault on the peoples and government of the world's supreme superpower and defender of freedom. What made this the case was not just the enormity of the attacks, or the number of innocent people targeted and killed in the attacks. It was the fact that there were governments that harboured the people who had done this deed, governments that overtly and covertly applauded those deeds, and countries that would like to see the same thing done on an even grander scale. Foremost among those to welcome the attacks was the regime of Saddam Hussein.

In such a situation, Bush would not take the Clinton route - what former CIA Director James Woolsey referred to as the 'PR-driven' approach to terrorism: ‘Do something to show you're concerned. Launch a few missiles in the desert, bop them on the head, arrest a few people. But just keep kicking the ball down the field.'[232] Bush's practical view was that, for the terrorist swamp to be eradicated, it would have to be drained. Draining the swamp meant removing those regimes that entertained terrorists within their borders. The only countries that did this were tyrannies. Democracies were not just nice; they were America's only natural allies.

Bush's view on this, and on America's duty, upheld and acted precisely on the theories Fukuyama had suggested in The End of History. The great battles, Bush saw, were over - the right ideology had fought and won. As he said at West Point:

The 20th century ended with a single surviving model of human progress, based on non-negotiable demands of human dignity, the rule of law, limits on the power of the state, respect for women and private property and free speech and equal justice and religious tolerance.

Over the following years, America's commitment to those principles was going to be tested, but not altered. What was also going to be tested were American alliances - alliances America had thought it could rely on. For 9/11 had opened up a gulf between America and Europe. When Donald Rumsfeld was asked by a soldier in December 2001, after the toppling of the Taliban, 'what's next' in the war on terror, Rumsfeld replied, 'the answer is that the president and the government will be considering that in the period ahead. Your job certainly is not over. There are a number of countries that are known as being on the terrorist list. There are a number of terrorist networks that exist around the world.'[233]

Reaction to 9/11 briefly brought expressions of consolation and support from many allies of America, summed up by Le Monde's famous headline, 'We are all Americans now.' But 92such sympathies were short lived, and allies which America might have expected to be secure turned on America, if not from the start, then over a remarkably short space of time. The stomach for a prolonged conflict did not exist in Europe. Part of this had to do with Europe's inability to sustain a prolonged and costly modern war: as Robert Kagan observed (adapting the Rumsfeldian toolbox-approach military metaphor[234]), 'When you don't have a hammer, you don't want anything to look like a nail.'[235] But Europe's unwillingness was also non-practical, part of its somnolent belief in inevitable progress towards 'post-historical' paradise. Iraq was the point of departure, the signal that a colossal philosophical, as well as military, breach had evolved between old allies. For Europe, war was the past, part of history and - as it had been for Norman Angell in 1910 - a pointless and irrational thing in the modern world.

Much of the population and political class of Europe tried to cover over the philosophical chasm by claiming it was actually a linguistic chasm, as though one did not stem from the other. It was President Bush's rhetoric that was the problem, they said. From the very outset they seemed under the impression that this was not a war, but a PR war. Distaste and outrage were expressed at Bush's simplicity - even backwardness - of rhetoric and vision, outrage expressed in language and imagery wearyingly similar to the kind that had been used to denigrate President Reagan in his day. Bush was aware that he made enemies by his use of certain terms; but equally he understood that anyone who was incapable of grasping the nature of the threat, or who thought the threat could be reduced by semantics and the employment of the language of equivalence, was not likely to be a useful ally. Anyone who was willing to back out of the war because they didn't like the vocabulary used could hardly be surprised when they were not missed. In his West Point speech Bush said:

Some worry that it is somehow undiplomatic or impolite to speak the language of right and wrong. I disagree.

Different circumstances require different methods, but  not different moralities. Moral truth is the same in every culture, in every time, and in every place...We are in a conflict between good and evil, and America will call evil by its name.

The pillars of the Bush doctrine were built, as Norman Podhoretz wrote, 'on a repudiation of moral relativism and an entirely unapologetic assertion of the need for and the possibility of moral judgment in the realm of world affairs'.[236] As Reagan had had the 'evil empire' to deal with, so now Bush had the 'axis of evil'.

But this was simply not the language of the new Europe. A continent, whose Brussels leaders were speaking proudly of Europe's 'post-Christian' era, reacted with cynicism and not a little superiority when Bush stated, for instance, 'I believe [that] freedom is not America's gift to the world; it is the almighty God's gift to every man and woman in this world.[237]

Over the four years since 9/11 two major conflicts have been fought in the new war: in Afghanistan and Iraq. The first of those conflicts was fought with much raucous and serious opposition. The second was almost universally unpopular outside the United States. Neoconservatives were suddenly sprung into the limelight. Figures who had been famous in Washington think-tanks for years suddenly achieved notoriety in popular papers and street demonstrations, and became (albeit not in a flattering sense) household names. Paul Wolfowitz was a particular favourite for attack, largely by people with no idea of his superb humanitarian record, but who knew, as Mark Steyn put it, that his name 'started with a scary animal and ended Jewishly'.[238] Even the German Financial Times joined in the barely concealed anti-Semitic slurs and echoes of the blood libel, when it warned darkly that 'Wolfowitz still has appetite.[239] Cartoonists in even the most esteemed papers portrayed Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and others of the hated neocons in the most libellous and familiar terms, as bloodthirsty, even blood-drinking monsters. In demonstrations on the streets of Europe, lists of neocons were trotted out as the hate figures par excellence. 'Neocon' became an ill-defined term of insult, something that could be replaced by - or conflated with - 'warmonger' and worse.

Journalists led or followed suit - it became impossible to discern who led whom - as comment in the lead-up to the Iraq war plummeted lower and lower. When Robert Fisk wrote in the run-up to the Iraq war that figures like Ken Adelman and Eliot Cohen (both members of the Defense Policy Board, the significance of which has been misunderstood and exaggerated) were leading America into a war against Islam, the inferences he wanted his readers to draw were clear. Fisk accused both men of singling out 'militant Islam' as the enemy of America. Why did he select these two over the more significant Donald Rumsfeld or Richard Armitage, for instance? The answer harked back to libels that had followed certain neocons from the very beginning. Fisk followed Pat Buchanan's lead of a decade earlier when he snidely described Adelman and Cohen as men who 'have not vouchsafed their own religion'.[240] In using his investigative skills to reveal that Eliot Cohen was a Jew, Fisk was simply stepping in line with the anti-Semitic, conspiracy theory-ridden attitudes of the anti-war movements of the European streets.

But the level to which commentary on neoconservatism sank was not just a result of anger at the war in Iraq, or shorthand for expressions of distaste for the non-neocon Republican administration. It was a sign of desperation. Neoconservatives had put forward, and were in the process of putting into practice, a vision of the world that was vastly at odds with prevailing 'liberal' orthodoxies in the West. Yet it was answering the very questions with which that orthodoxy had been trying, unsuccessfully, to grapple. Neoconservatives had provided the only coherent policies for dealing with the dilemmas of the day: genocide, dictatorships, and human rights abuses. To all of these increasingly fashionable dilemmas, neocons had answers and suggestions for action, and 'liberals' had none, other than a vague reliance on international institutions whose record in such areas was, to say the least, unimpressive. The actions and beliefs of the Bush team drove its enemies to distraction, because it exposed - as Michael Gove put it - 'the  bankruptcy of [the left's] international vision'.[241] That neoconservative vision may seem, to its more reputable detractors, 'a new political animal born of an unlikely mating of humanitarian liberalism and brute force',[242] and to its lowest haters as some kind of vampiric conspiracy. But neoconservative attitudes cannot be dismissed easily. It is an ideology that is not only desirable, but necessary, even vital. It is also - that rarest of things - achievable.

American conservatism and neoconservatism are, as a result, in a successful and powerful position, with opposition to American policy now almost entirely reactive. The narrative of meaningful global progress is at present largely in America's hands. In March 2005, Condoleezza Rice announced that President Bush was nominating John Bolton as UN Ambassador, and said something that only heightened the pleasure of hearing of the appointment. 'Through history', said Rice, 'some of our best ambassadors have been those with the strongest voices, ambassadors like Jeane Kirkpatrick and Daniel Patrick Moynihan.'[243] It seemed that the second Bush administration not only had all the right people, but all the right predecessors as well.

CHAPTER 3

RELATIVISM AND THE IRAQ WAR

The rise of relativism - Socialists, Islamists and 'anti-warriors' - The new counter-culture - The Iraq war - The counterculture backs the terrorists - The end point of relativism

The problem which neoconservatism addresses, and which society as a whole must address, begins not with deeds but with thoughts. We live, as the Saul Bellow quote in Chapter 1 put it, in a thought-culture, but the thought has gone bad. Justifications, actions and presumptions have been allowed to persist within our society that now demonstrably affect policy and detrimentally impact on people's lives. The impetus is not simply bad reasoning, but rotten reasoning. The reasons for this centre around one predominant thought-disease, a disease that links, and is carried by, all bad aspects of ill contemporary thought. That disease is relativism, together with its practical demonstration in the technique of 'equivalence'.

In his homily to the College of Cardinals before he was elected Pope, Cardinal Ratzinger fingered the rot at the core of western thought when he identified the 'dictatorship of relativism', a theory and a mode of thought that 'recognizes nothing definite and leaves only one's own ego and one's own desires as the final measure'.[244] Francis Fukuyama describes relativism as 'not a weapon that can be aimed selectively at the enemies one chooses. It fires indiscriminately, shooting out the legs of not only the "absolutisms," dogmas, and certainties of the Western tradition, but that tradition's emphasis on tolerance, diversity, and freedom of thought as well.'[245] It is the expression of the rejection of natural right, of a comprehensive objection to the notion of fixed truth.

How this perverse mode of thought became so all-pervasive in the West that it can indeed be described as a mode of mental, if not actual, 'dictatorship' is a story that bears out the most basic Straussian warnings. While taking Isaiah Berlin to task in the 1960s, Strauss highlighted 'the crisis of liberalism' as having come about 'due to the fact that liberalism has abandoned its absolutist basis and is trying to become entirely relativistic'.[246] By the end of the sixties, society as a whole was lurching the same way. A nation physically and morally shattered by great conflict was, unsurprisingly, vulnerable to the attractions of a system that appeared at first to offer no value judgements. But its widespread adoption has had devastating effects, permitting the adoption into the nation's heart of a nihilism which should never have flourished in a democratic system. That nihilism may not be deeply felt, and it may indeed largely be an attitude. But it is an attitude that is destructive, and conservatism must eradicate it. What it decays is not just the family, the Church and other foundations of society, but society itself. Like Strauss, we should recall that, although ours is the surest and noblest means by which man can be free, it is not a system without flaws. Only if we remain aware of those flaws and alert to their danger can we avoid tumbling into their trap.

Today, in Britain, our crisis originates in the fact that Britain's government, leadership and people find it all but impossible to draw lines in the sand or speak in absolutes - even in defence of their own existence. The supposed advance of rationalism since the nineteenth century has led not to greater understanding, but to greater confusion. It is a confusion from which Britain - like other western nations - can find no way of extricating itself. It can find no reason to protect its national beliefs, and it can find no absolute reason to defend its sovereignty. Neither can it, as both Bloom and Fukuyama have pointed out, find any logical reason not to let limitless numbers of refugees across its borders.[247] It is this 'rationalism' that makes it so hard to find a reason why an individual or group that desires, or even encourages, the downfall of our society should not remain a part of it - a 'rationalism' that produces examples of greater and greater irrationality every day. These examples arrive under the guise of the same phenomena - equivalence, relativism and their most workable everyday expression in the mini, petty tyranny of political correctness. All rely on the technique of preventing something, or condemning something, because a rule does not apply equally to all peoples, places and cultures across the globe. The result is a 'liberal' inability to defend tradition, national identity, and even, in its worst case, the nation's security. The original impetus was, perhaps, often meant to be fairness to all, but the results are enough to at least provoke a rethink on whether they are really 'fair' to anybody.

In the case of the defence of faith, for instance, it has become the accepted trope that any special privilege or priority given to one faith must be levelled by the same privileges and advantages being given to others. Even ignoring the fact that Britain has a national, established Church that should enjoy just such a special privilege, the educational authorities of the twenty-first century are at a loss to explain why equal opportunity in life should not be joined by equal competition in the marketplace of faith. Thus equal time is given in religious education lessons to informing children of the virtues and teachings of each of the major faiths. Yet no faith in particular is taught - let alone the established faith of the nation. Faced with even a single complaint from a parent that a Muslim or Sikh child should not be indoctrinated into Christian teachings, the authorities consistently crumple. No 'rational', 'logical' answer appears to exist in our advanced 21st century society.

The fact is that, though this equality does no discernible good, it does do a definite amount of harm to the intellectual and spiritual welfare of children. For what we are asking them to do - or rather presuming that they can do - is to recognise the validities of all faiths, and to choose between them like cars in a showroom (of course all the time with the message that opt-out is just as valid as any choice). If we set children out on this road in life, we can hardly be surprised when they grow up to believe the gospel of relativism. For since their very earliest thoughts, they have been shown faith and truth only as a variety of tools with which they might, if they so chose, tackle life. In her superlative All Must Have Prizes (a Closing of the American Mind for Britain in the 1990s), Melanie Phillips  quotes Marianne Talbot of Oxford University, who has written of the effects of relativism on Britain's young:

Many of the young have been taught to think their opinion is no better than anyone else's, that there is no truth, only truth-for-me...to question it amounts in the eyes of the young, to the belief that it is permissible to impose your views on others. The young have been taught, or so it seems, that they should never think of the views of others as false, but only as different. They have been taught that to suggest someone else is wrong is at best rude and at worst immoral: the truth that one should always be alive to the possibility that one is wrong has become the falsehood that one should never be so arrogant as to believe that one is right.[248]

As more and more individuals are produced by a system that extols this anti-ethic, so increasing numbers of individuals expect ever greater demonstrations of relativism to be practised on institutions, communities and people. Thus, in 2004 a Church of England school in Islington, London was ordered by the local council to drop the word 'Saint' from its name in order not to offend people of other faiths. Though a tiny case in itself, the underlying issues are significant. The borough in question had been found to have been running some of the worst schools in the country, yet this did not stop the local ruling Liberal Democrat council from ordering a costly 'consultation' into the use of the word 'Saint' in 'St Mary Magdalene Church of England School'. The result of the consultation was the decision that 'We want to create a school that is open to everybody in the community...we need to ensure this is a school which is appropriate for Islington in the 21st century.’ All the laziest presumptions are there: the presumption that non-ideology is the agreed way of the future; that 'openness' and 'inclusiveness' and belief-beige are the goals of all; and that these presumptions are self-evident enough to be unquestionable truths. There remains the self-hating assumption - which flies in the face of historical example - that the British people cannot be trusted not to cause physical damage to outsiders, and so all evidence of difference must therefore be (rather selectively) eradicated. But it also presumes that people who have come into this country have as much right to have their beliefs reflected in this country as have the indigenous people. All this comes disguised behind transparently dishonest euphemisms like 'progress'.

The Church of England was donating £2 million to the cost of the new school buildings in question, and for this it was offered the ludicrous compromise name of 'Magdalene Academy'. Presumably the same people who would be caused such grave offence by the word 'Saint' in the school's name would be none the wiser as to the meaning of 'Magdalene'. Ignorance of faith would at least preclude the possibility of giving some of the more elaborate offences imagined.[249] But this is all toying with a national glue that cannot be replaced once destroyed, and is certainly not replaced by spates of national self-defacement.

From a Scottish hospital in March 2005 came another representative example of relativism in the guise of political correctness. Again, the significant fact is not so much the event, as its lazily presumptive impetus and the craven manner in which it was accepted.

That month, Perth Royal Infirmary took the decision that all Christian artefacts must be removed from the hospital chapel, and an altar donated by a local church returned. This order was the result of guidelines from the newly created Scottish Executive which called for a more 'holistic' approach to 'spiritual care'. A spokesman for the health trust helpfully elucidated that 'spiritual care must be provided in the context of holistic care for all patients, carers and staff, acknowledging the different faiths, or none'. In other words, non-faith was equal as a faith with faith of any kind, and they were all equal with each other. (Where this left relatives of the sick and dying, or how many of them were found to be crying out for 'holistic' care is anybody's guess.) The significance of the decision lies not just in the barrenness of the gesture, but in the banal thought-weakness of those who gave into it. Perthshire 1 is one of the least ethnically diverse parts of Britain: less than one per cent of the population of the region is of foreign origin. Yet, when the chapel was stripped bare, the floor re-carpeted and development under way to create what was envisaged as 'a welcoming place of peace and tranquillity for all', the reaction of the minister whose altar table was sent back was simply to concede, 'It is a bit sad, but I appreciate that we live in a multicultural society.'[250] The fact that he doesn't live in a 'multicultural society' is not the point here; the point is that even a minister of the Church, seeing a holy place of his faith desecrated, bows before the inevitability of this new force that is desecrating it. There is no anger, no stand, no railing against sacrilege or desecration; only a benign acceptance that before the juggernaut of relativism and its practical destructions there is no adequate reason not to bow.

The inspiration for this type of event will be familiar to most working people in Britain. The impetus, as often as not, comes not from 'ethnic' people, or people of other faiths. The impetus most commonly comes from people with simply no idea of what they are talking about or what it is that they are getting involved in. They just know that there is a status quo on acceptance and niceness, and that they must follow it.

In today's Britain almost no organisation, church or charity is free from the tyranny of relativism in this common guise of political correctness. Government-supported theatres, in even the remotest parts of the country, are threatened with closure if they don't let in a target quota of coloured people,[251] yet at the same time government ministers find it impossible to even rationally condemn rioting and stoning at a theatre that shows a play disagreeable to members of a 'minority' faith.[252] We can see in such events not some new, highly developed and universally applied critical faculty, but rather a self-lacerating votary dedicated to misunderstanding the difference between cultural defence and cultural aggression.

The Samaritans, a charity staffed largely by unpaid volunteer counsellors, is a service available to anybody who calls them. Yet in February 2005, a grant application from the Samaritans to the National Lottery was turned down because the handsomely remunerated lottery organisers decided that the Samaritans were not doing enough to target, among others, ethnic minority communities and asylum seekers.[253] Quite how the lottery felt the Samaritans could better advertise their charitable service to asylum seekers was not explained, but the message was clear: charities, like the churches, can no longer expect to be treated with either deference or respect by those practising relativism. In other words - forgive the expression - nothing would be 'sacred'. A month after the decision on the Samaritans, a Christian refuge for the homeless in Norfolk was told that it would have its local council funding withdrawn unless it ceased the practice of saying grace before meals, and unless all alienating mentions of Christianity were removed from the Christian shelter.[254]

What is destructive about this is not just that such a force targets those things that are precious and established, but that it speaks to them as though it has control over them. In fairness, it should be said that often it speaks as though it has control of them, because it does. An order from the Scottish Executive, the National Lottery grants board or Norfolk County Council may sound from a distance like an edict from a pompous jobsworth to be ignored, but it cannot be ignored if you are a charity that relies on the organisation's handouts. The result of the Samaritans losing a lottery grant is that a branch of their organisation must close, which then has a knock-on effect on people who are in deep distress and are now unable to benefit from the service. This can come about because superannuated government bodies are attempting to wield a new and entirely uncertain form of moral judgement.

But such government bodies are not simply being idiotic: they are revealing an agenda. That agenda follows the 'liberal’ socialist fallacy of uniformity, conformity and spiritual agreement in the name of an undefined political and moral 'inevitability'. No such inevitability exists, but political correctness implies and lies to people that it does, saying that the end of all human endeavours is their view of the world, a world in which everyone will be happy because they will be treated in the same way - by order of the government. But this is not merely vanity and folly. What the perpetrators of this absurd and ill-thinking new 'system' cannot see - and this is why they must be removed from their positions of influence - is that stripping a chapel leaves Scots at a moment of bereavement or need stripped of the opportunity to pray in a place of worship; that taking a 'Saint' out of a school title trivialises faith and ignores the true purposes of education; and that punishing the Samaritans for not reaching more minorities leaves both majority and minority with no one to speak to at a moment of crisis. In other words, these acts, carried out under a misguided creed of doing good by making people equal, loses sight of reason, and gives little to the few while plundering much from the many.

These petty tribulations have great repercussions. In The End of History Fukuyama described how relativism as a mode of thought could create 'no barriers to a future nihilistic war against liberal democracy on the part of those brought up in its bosom', that, indeed, it destroys the possibility of raising such barriers.[255] This defencelessness caused by relativism might end up, he posited, not only undermining, but eventually destroying democracy and the tolerant values that come with it. A decade later, the prediction began to be vindicated.

WHEN RELATIVISM BECAME A SERIOUS PROBLEM

The period since 9/11 has afforded us unique opportunities to study the state of our society's soul, its wellbeing, and its durability in the face of a new threat. What we learn from the story so far should make us worried.

At present, wars fought by our country are not waged by civilians. Though people commonly talk grandiloquently about why 'we' went to war or why 'we' are at war, most people's participation in these conflicts is not so much limited as non-existent. They do not participate in the events, and there is not even any requirement to demonstrate support for those who do. For the vast majority of people the war against Islamic fundamentalist terror has taken place, and their part in it has occurred only in the worlds of thought and emotion. This is why we can learn so much about our present state from what has been written and said since 9/11. For four years in Britain, these have not been the emotions of those under fire, thrown out in the rage of battle. Even after the London bombings they remain the reflections, thoughts and beliefs of people who are generally safe, more than provided for, and yet consistently and often wilfully wrong. Those judgements, recollected in tranquillity, have demonstrated more about the intellectual and moral crisis of our time than their authors intended, precisely because they were writing from a position of comfort. The opponents and disbelievers, rather than critics, of the new world crisis are uniquely privileged by their life in the West, yet they are involved in a process which first undermines and then threatens the very fabric of that society. They are doing this at a moment of great importance, for events from 2001 to the present have brought back into focus a problem that fits Strauss's identification of 'the crisis of our time, the crisis of the West'.[256] If we cannot finds ways to protect our society from jobsworths and busy-bodies from local schools of relativism, how will we fare when faced with proponents of an ideology that seeks our absolute annihilation or subjugation? What begins as a local crisis of morality and philosophy eventually becomes a crisis of something much larger - our will to survive. With the Church sidelined, and political leaders ever more distrusted, 'leadership' comes almost entirely from the mass media. But this is now something that follows the mass culture, at the same time as it tries to lead it. This is the root of our popular degradation: the media and culture have become the same beast - one that is chasing its own tail. The rot both starts and finds its fruition here.

On any single day, and in any single British newspaper, readers can see examples of equivalence. These examples range from the lazy and ill-informed to the grotesque and wicked. Events in Britain's foreign policy in the years since 9/11 have made commentators, journalists and opinion formers dust off their skills in the techniques of moral and historical equivalence. The result has been intensely monotonous, universally unhelpful, and simultaneously revealing.

From the moment the Twin Towers in New York were hit, people both near and far from government began to consider what response America and her allies might make. On the home front in America, media outlets first of all incessantly warned the American people of the need for tolerance, and the White House bent over backwards to portray Islam as a religion of peace, and did its utmost to ensure, as Mark Steyn put it with indignant irony, 'that the American people should resist their natural appetite for pogroms and refrain from brutalizing Muslims'.[257] That is, before any reaction was possible, the familiar knee-jerk reaction of much of government and the media was one of anticipatory self-blame. The most common first questions asked were 'What did we do?', and 'How can we stop our people from behaving brutally?' That is - even in the US - from the outset significant portions of the media and the public tried to find reasons in the wrong place for why the attacks had occurred. Self-absorption found its inevitable end point, as observers pretended they could locate the cause of the conflict inside themselves. And of course no fundamentalists would have to be sorted out if the attacks simply led to prolonged periods of self-reflection. Such reactions have been repeated, and the specific presumption that the public must be prevented from indulging in a bout of Muslim-lynching (a thing that is both without precedent and likelihood) was repeated by UK authorities after the first bomb attacks on London. These are ways to avoid the real issue, not deal with it, so it is fortunate that at least some people in the US and UK governments understood from the outset that what the attacks meant was war.

When attention focused on Afghanistan, where the perpetrators of the 9/11 atrocities resided courtesy of the Taliban regime, those who offered opinion, to large or small publics, had to find out fast about a regime and country of which they knew little. Many waited for colleagues to say something that they could then repeat, which is why so many atrociously bad predictions about the Afghan conflict were echoed in such a short space of time - the 'Afghan graveyard', for instance, or the lethal 'Afghan winter' line. All foretold the hubristic undoing of the American army. But this was merely poorly disguised antagonism to American and Allied efforts. What was far more subtly disguised, and far more widespread, were new lines and depths in ignorant equivalence.

The line that became most useful to dig up was the charge that soldiers among the murderous al-Qaeda forces had been provided, two decades earlier, with tactical assistance from the United States. This weaponry had been supplied to expel the Soviet menace when it had invaded Afghanistan. But by 2001 the world of 'my enemy's enemy' was a very long way behind. A deposed Serb leader was facing trial in The Hague, and supranational bodies were having a greater and greater say in how a new era of global harmony could be brought about. In fact, so far in the past did the Cold War seem that the iniquity and comprehensiveness of the Soviet threat seemed entirely forgotten. For old fellow travellers, this was both convenient and satisfying; for others (especially the young) it was a simple result of historical ignorance. And so, with the nature of the original link derided, the clever charge to make became the charge of American hypocrisy. The 'facts' as they stood were that America was seeking to destroy a group it had armed. Under such circumstances, what right for action did America have?

The Soviet-era al-Qaeda link gave people two things. Firstly, it gave them the opportunity to say that the world was not black and white; that even after such a clear outrage as 9/11, no one group could be absolutely blamed or condemned. The second thing it gave people was the intellectually narcissistic opportunity to imply that they were, and always had been, informed on the intricacies of Afghan politics. In other words the 'America armed al-Qaeda' line was useful because it implied a degree of historical, as well as moral, sophistication - an ideal mixture for contemporary poseurs. It also relieved individuals from making serious moral decisions, an abnegation that is by no means brave or interesting when you're so far outside government that an opt-out from moral or strategic involvement is neither a real act nor any sacrifice. But this process of diminishing the assault and spreading the blame around a little was popular in Britain and much of the West, and proved the beginning of relativism's journey towards nihilism, and eventually to genocide-protection and the excusing of terror.

The old Marxist Tariq Ali was among those quick off the mark with the next stage - Bush-bin Laden equivalences. Ali swiftly published The Clash of Fundamentalisms, the cover of which showed Bush's face superimposed onto that of a mullah. Throughout his book, which suppurates with that unique mixture of pathological self-regard and passe Marxism, Ali attempted to demonstrate why the United States, indeed any western government, is not morally eligible to act against any other country. After all, Ali would repeat in broadcasts, books, and articles, 'the US had created Osama bin Laden and his gang during the first Afghan War'.[258] Case closed: you created him, therefore you must eventually allow him to kill you. This line became so popular that the man whose career was built on such notions, Noam Chomsky, enjoyed a come-back tour, even coming to London and preaching his gospel of equivalence from the steps of the altar of St Paul's Cathedral.

After 9/11 Chomsky's sole career line - 'America once did this and therefore has no right to do that' - rose to levels of fantasy unmatched even in his own earlier career. As early as 15 September he was comparing the attacks of four days previously to President Clinton's 1998 rocketing of the Al-Shifa chemical plant in Khartoum, and then with the allied bombings in the Kosovo war.[259] Chomsky was also one of the first to claim that the attacks of 9/11 were the result of 'grievances' suffered by the people of the Middle East, in particular over the situation of the displaced peoples of Palestine (a concern on which Chomsky and co. pre-empted bin Laden, who had never shown any particular concern for the sufferings of the Palestinian peoples). But if such analysis was unhelpful for understanding the threat outside, it was exceedingly helpful for understanding the threat within. Over the following years many people were going to follow down the logic-paths of planet-Chomsky. One of the places they would arrive at was the suspicious place identified by Christopher Hitchens when he wrote that 'Chomsky's already train-wrecked syllogisms seem to entail the weird and sinister assumption that bin Laden is a ventriloquist for thwarted voices of international justice.'[260]

Eleven days into the American forces' action in Afghanistan, on 18 October 2001, Chomsky excelled even himself in a broadcast speech - 'The New War Against Terror'.

In it he spoke of what American forces were doing in Afghanistan, declaring 'Looks like what's happening is some sort of silent genocide.' He alleged that there was a concerted American attempt to starve and kill between three and four million Afghan people.[261] Chomsky's lunatic claim that the United States was deliberately committing an act of genocide was no slip, however: as David Horowitz and Ronald Radosh pointed out, Chomsky's intention with this startling remark was to say, 'We are moral monsters; we are coolly planning the murder of not merely thousands of innocents like the desperate crew who brought down the World Trade Center - and whom we are about to punish - but millions.[262] Of course the 'silent genocide' was so 'silent' because it didn't happen. But Noam Chomsky is not a statesman, and his admirers cannot, and do not, hold him to account even for libelling an entire race with glib and false charges of genocide. Two years later, when Chomsky was asked where his 'silent genocide' had got to, he replied:

That is an interesting fabrication, which gives a good deal of insight into the prevailing moral and intellectual culture.

First, the facts: I predicted nothing...All of this is precisely accurate and entirely appropriate. The warnings remain accurate as well, a truism that should be unnecessary to explain. Unfortunately, it is apparently necessary to add a moral truism: actions are evaluated in terms of the range of anticipated consequences.[263]

Of course, Chomsky's language can be opaque when it suits him, just as it can be memorably plain when certain other points are being made. Mark Steyn had a good go at trying to explain Chomsky's manner of weaselling out of the genocide accusation: 'In Noam's rabbit hole, the buck never stops with him...He doesn't deny that he used the words...he simply denies that the words mean what they appear to mean to anyone whose first language is non-university English.'[264]

The reason this matters is that the habits of Chomsky were picked up more and more widely in Britain after 9/11. His increasingly lazy books (latterly consisting of leaden interviews with the man) sold and gave a vaguely intellectual flavour to dissent in the war on terror. But people weren't reading him to pick up on knowledge of American iniquity; they were reading him in the hope of American iniquity - because they wanted there to be American iniquities. And they went along with the imagined genocides because they wanted there to be genocides, silent and otherwise, committed by America. Because, if Chomsky was right, then America would not have the right to act, and if America did not have the right to act, then war would not be possible under any circumstances, and Chomsky readers would feel they'd done their bit in stopping it.

Except that a war had to be fought - a war with more than one battle. And it was a war that had to be won, not just because three thousand people had been reduced to human ash in New York and Washington, but because millions of people across the globe were living in countries which approved such an act, and would go on suffering under dictatorships that encouraged such slaughter both in other countries and in their own. It had to be fought because the Bush administration and its allies in London understood that a new threat existed. The likelihood of great stand-offs between nuclear superpowers had receded, and the populations of the world were safer as a result. But the likelihood of small terror cells colluding with tyrannical and isolated regimes, and achieving a one-off nuclear attack, or dirty strike, was proportionally higher than it had ever been. Unstable states were the means by which the US and her allies could continue to be hit. Al-Qaeda affiliates could not thrive in democratic states which opposed them and their nihilistic creed. As the dust and debris from the Twin Towers settled and was swept away, people in Britain and America became more and more sanguine and cocky about the threat. But the threat was there and, in this new situation, a peace brought about by universal guilt was not going to save the life of anybody. As Hitchens wrote in disgust at Chomsky's unhinged frippery, 'these opinions are a recipe for nothingness'.[265] But they were more than that. They were a recipe for forgetfulness - forgetfulness of the horror of that morning; and also, in other hands, a recipe not for inaction, but for action against the West.

Yet they remain opinions that have a strange appeal to large numbers of people who pride themselves on being at the forefront of cultural thought. In her printed advice to the people of the United States, the once-novelist and shrill, Arundhati Roy included the simple commandment: 'Read Chomsky.'[266] Roy has taken her own advice, for in a succession of almost childlike rants against American power since 9/11 she has demonstrated that she has picked up both the political simplicity of Michael Moore ('The US government's recent military interventions in the Balkans and Central Asia have to do with oil'[267]) and Chomsky's habits, minus the intellectual casuistry.

Though no one could say Roy's thoughts were necessarily influential, they certainly expressed what a lot of people who had never won the Booker Prize were thinking. A year after 9/11, as attention was turning to Iraq, she wrote:

What if Iraq does have a nuclear weapon, does that justify a pre-emptive US strike? The United States has the largest arsenal of nuclear weapons in the world. It's the only country in the world to have actually used them on civilian populations. If the United States is justified in launching a pre-emptive attack on Iraq, why then any nuclear power is justified in carrying out a pre-emptive attack on any other.[268]

Hiroshima and Nagasaki may have been nearly sixty years in the past, but by this formula the US had no right to disarm Saddam Hussein (even - note - if he had a nuclear bomb), because of the inherited guilt of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So the descendants of the Americans of the Second World War had no right to prevent a potential nuclear strike on them 1 because of the actions of their forefathers? Like Chomsky, Roy does not inflict this racist judgement on her own or any other particular race, but America is fair game, and much the most dangerous beast in town. 'The whole world', Roy raved in the 2002 piece, 'would be better off without a certain Mr Bush. In fact, he is far more dangerous than Saddam Hussein.'[269] Though they paid occasional lip-service to the notion of Hussein's nastiness, Roy, Chomsky, and every other two-bit peacenik-poseur never presented a solution for getting rid of the Iraqi menace. If your business is equivalence, then you don't have to; you just dig around in your nurtured repertoire of western crimes, and assume that the people of Afghanistan and Iraq would - if they could - be sitting back in their chairs reading your liberated thoughts and thanking you for your bravery.

The ultimate expression of futile equivalence is yet to come, but the route by which it finds its way is Israel. The British reaction to Israel since its birth, and particularly over the last thirty years, is a cause for concern, not just because of the attitude itself, but because of the means by which it has become implanted. It is hard to determine exactly how the sentimentalisation of Palestinian suicide bombing began, but the guilty party - whoever it was - has created a precedent that now haunts the West in Iraq and on our own streets. For in the case of Israel, equivalence found itself mixed with a good dose of contemporary pseudo-compassion to produce the first modern point at which terror is acceptable.

As was pointed out in Chapter 2, neoconservatives are committed in their support of Israel. And this support has strengthened since 9/11 for one very clear reason: the events of 2001 confirmed what many neocons had held all along - that in the mine of twenty-first century terror, Israel had long been the canary. The warnings that what had happened to Israel would happen to the West went unheeded. The warning that Islamic terror was aimed at the West and would strike there if, or when, it could went unheeded. In 1995 Benjamin Netanyahu had written:

It is impossible to understand just how inimical - and how deadly - to the United States and to Europe this rising tide of militant Islam is without taking a look at the roots of Arab-Islamic hatred of the West. Because of the Western media's fascination with Israel, many today are under the impression that the intense hostility prevalent in the Arab and Islamic world toward the United States is a contemporary phenomenon, the result of Western support for the Jewish state, and that such hostility would end if an Arab-Israeli peace was eventually reached. But nothing could be more removed from the truth. The enmity toward the West goes back many centuries, remaining to this day a driving force at the core of militant Arab-Islamic political culture. And this would be the case even if Israel had never been born.[270]

Yet for those in Britain who picked up on the 'Israeli-Palestinian peace is the issue' line after 9/11, nothing would throw them off that scent. Like the CIA-al-Qaeda connection, the Israeli-Palestinian question could be dropped into any argument to show both 'compassion' and 'understanding' of the issues. Unfortunately, as a result, many amid the British and western populations simply fell on the wrong side of the fence. When figures like Jenny Tonge and Cherie Blair professed sympathy for the young men and women who boarded buses and blew up Jews, they not only committed a moral inversion, confusing victim and aggressor, guilty and innocent; they also stripped the Palestinian people of the dignity of free will. The Palestinians became, and remained, the pawns of the professed 'liberals' in the West, as much as they had always been the pawns of the Islamic peoples. Roy made a characteristic attempt to describe the situation: in her version, Palestinians 'never know when their homes will be demolished, when their children will be shot'. And in the face of this unrestrained and insatiable Jewish thirst for killing children, 'Young Palestinians who cannot contain their anger turn themselves into bombs...suicide bombing is an act of individual despair.'[271] The sentimentalisation of suicide bombing as an act 1 of 'despair' fails so comprehensively to fit the political reality that it could only be employed as a result of ignorance, or as a piece of propaganda in an attempt to influence some other reality.

And so it was no surprise when the ignorant sentimentalisation of the Palestinian cause conflated with equivalencing over the slaughter of Jews and accelerated within months of 9/11 into the open acclaim of jihad and the 'intifada' on British and western streets. For neocons, Netanyahu's warnings had proved accurate. 'The democracies have wasted much time in addressing the question of resurgent Islamic terror', Netanyahu had warned in 1995. 'They are approaching the twelfth hour. They can wait no longer.'[272] Yet wait they did, and the twelfth hour arrived in the skies of New York, Washington and Pennsylvania. For the opposition, those acts of terror were not an extension of the hatred being inflicted on the Israeli people, but a reaction to Israel's self-defence. Neocons knew that the events were linked in a different way. The attacks on Jews in Israel had long been permissible in the West because the attacks were meant to be on the state, not on its people. This ongoing piece of casuistry is seen as a clear lie by neocons, who know the attacks for what they are: attacks on the Jews because they are Jews, attacks on the free West because it is the free West, and attacks on democracies because the perpetrators hate democracy. The inability of western governments to call Islamic terror by its name and root it out as the absolute enemy of the free West cost thousands of lives on 9/11. Political correctness, moral equivocation and the notion that Israel's experience of terror might be unique to Israel all assisted on the path to inaction and unpreparedness. But neocons learned from Israel's lessons, knowing that Israel was our ally, not our enemy. Israel, America and next Europe, were under attack from the same enemy. The enemies and guilty parties were those who were perpetrating the attacks, and no amount of equivalencing could change that.

If this line was simplistic, neoconservatism's opponents were perfectly happy to repeat a far more blithe and simplistic mantra: 'Peace in Israel/Palestine is the key.' Neoconservatives always knew that this line was not only simplistic, but that it was - and remains - disingenuous. The ignorant do not mean what they say: they merely repeat a slogan. But those who are acquainted with the situation know something else, which is that, if peace does come to Israel/Palestine, it is not coming any time soon. They know that calling for a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict before waging another war is like calling for postponement until the seas run dry. One must then ask why they are stalling like this; why they are opposed to the West acting.

Plainly it is a tactic to prevent action by America, Britain and their allies; an attempt to neuter us into inaction. But when some of the perpetrators saw this was not working, they became more fevered, more desperate, and many of those involved in the stalling game came out into the open. In Britain, from the start of the Afghan war it became clear that many of those who, we thought, were equivalencers were no such thing. It was not that they were interested in peace, or committed to justice, or any other such slogan. These were distractions and alibis. The fact was that they were dedicated to defending the causes and actions of Islamic terrorism.

THE NEW COUNTER-CULTURE

On 28 September 2002, a year after the violence inflicted on the American people, London saw the first of a set of large anti-war marches. Around a quarter of a million people turned out under the slogan 'Not In My Name'. That exquisite formula of arrogance and ignorance was rightly described by Julie Burchill as 'an unholy alliance of Oprahism and Meldrewism in which you think you're scum, but also that you're terribly important, too'.[273] And Patrick West hit the nail on the head when he wrote that 'The slogan...is fitting for a generation that comprehends global concerns in terms of choosy consumers.'[274]

Although there had been numerous demonstrations in Britain since 9/11 against the United States and its right to self defence, the September 2002 march was not only the largest so far but also a foretaste of things to come. It was jointly organised by two groups: the Stop the War Coalition and the Muslim Association of Britain (MAB). The former (a socialist coalition, spearheaded by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) claimed that its aim was to march against the war in Afghanistan, and any war in Iraq or elsewhere. But the Muslim Association of Britain had other ideas, and is quite a different beast.

This organisation is the loudest of the proselytising and campaigning Muslim associations in Britain. It is not merely linked with, but is effectively the UK arm of, the widely banned extremist group called the Muslim Brotherhood. MAB spokesman and one-time president, Anas Altikriti, is the son of Osama al-Tikriti, the head of the Muslim Brotherhood's Iraq branch. Its executive members include Azzam al-Tamimi, who could most charitably be described - like MAB - as an 'apologist' for suicide bombing, and is, specifically, a supporter of the tactics of Hamas.

What sort of weapons does Hamas use? It's the human being. The courage of one man. It is the most valuable of resources. As for some of the operations, the suicidal operations, they require volunteers but the cost in money is near zero...Israel has no defense against Hamas.[275]

In October 2003 he boasted on Al Jazeera television:

Don't forget, in the long-term the outcome of this conflict isn't about how many Palestinians die, it is about how many Israelis die. The Israelis can't fight or match the willingness of the Palestinian people to sacrifice their lives.[276]

The coalition between these people (al-Tamimi and his associates co-organised and spoke at every London anti-war demonstration post 9/11) and British socialists caused barely any comment or condemnation. Yet speaking after the march in 2002, Altikriti confirmed that he and his organisation had, for their part, organised the march to celebrate the second anniversary of the current Palestinian intifada.[277] It was a claim of which the Stop the War Coalition maintained it was ignorant. If they ever were ignorant of it, then it certainly did not affect their decision once they had been informed, and they never viewed MAB's aims and activities as repulsive enough to break what became an increasingly useful alliance.

The marches organised by this pairing amply reflected the view of those involved. In September 2002 in London, young Muslims paraded dressed as suicide bombers; anti-Israeli placards abounded, as did open anti-Semitic attacks. Swastikas and Stars of David were superimposed onto one another to accompany the most offensive chants and slurs against the Jewish people. A number of Jews on the march, who had been protesting against the possibility of war in Iraq, left horrified at the 'hate-filled chanting and images in which anti-Israel and anti-Jewish imagery were blurred [leaving] us feeling deeply alienated'.[278] What they learned, and what many others would subsequently learn, was that the British anti-war movement's prime target was not Saddam Hussein (indeed it remained entirely silent on him). Its first target was not even George Bush or Tony Blair. Its first target was the Jewish state, and its right to exist. Its secondary targets were Britain and America.

MAB's posters at all UK protests carried an anti-Iraq war slogan on one side and a 'Freedom for Palestine' slogan on the other. The result was that, from the very beginning, the antiwar movement in Britain was characterised by overtly socialist and anti-Israeli propaganda. MAB was delighted and emboldened by its success. In a lengthy and furious denunciation of a Times piece that had dared to criticise it, MAB wrote: 'Zionism is a movement which was until recently condemned by the International Community and the United Nations as a racist ideology.'[279] Even a quarter of a century after his notorious UN resolution, Idi Amin was still giving them hope.

The anti-war coalition went on to gain the support of the British National Party (which agreed with Muslim and socialist organisations that world policy was being dictated by Jews) and also of Colonel Gadaffi. It also earned the thanks of Saddam Hussein himself, who described the support of the anti-war demonstrations as a victory for the Iraqi people.

There is no doubt that the period leading up to war in Iraq included much of the most divisive debate in Britain for a generation. The fact that, for most people living in Britain, there would be no physical impact on their lives, whether or not British troops fought, seemed if anything to heighten emotions. The problem with this was not just that much of this protesting was cheap - but that it came free. With conscription a thing of the past, and the prospect of multiple suicide bombings in Britain still only a possibility, there was - physically - nothing much to play for. Yet many went along with the antagonists, and were swept up in the chants of the anti-war movement not from convictions that could withstand any form of test, but from a form of moral laziness. It is worrying when swathes of people are hostile to the British government; but it is more worrying still when ordinary British people are hostile to Britain as their default mode. When the first or second instinct of a citizen is to lambaste his own, then we know that there is a wider rot that has set in, albeit a rot that can be righted.

There was no more conspicuous 'bravery' in opposing the conflict than there was in supporting it. The matter was simply one of morality and philosophy. In February 2003, when more than a million (by the organisers' naturally inflated estimation, around two million) protestors marched through London, it was clear that there were many who felt angry about the prospect of war, but who were neither socialists nor Islamists.

Some were objecting to war in general. Others had specific reasons for objecting to this war in particular. Yet 60 million or so people did not march, many taking the view that, on matters of intelligence, threat and statecraft, their government knew better than they did. Of course, the frivolity, self-absorption and comprehensive lack of constructive opposition offered by the anti-war movement was most reminiscent of another movement that had left its mark on British culture. The legacy of the sixties, and specifically the legacy of the Vietnam anti-war protests, persuaded the remnants of a nostalgic generation, as well as a generation eager for its own great cause, to have a go at being anti-warriors. Once again, this was not a debate about war abroad, but a debate founded in a war at home - a culture war impelled by those antagonistic to British society and those pursuing a nostalgic search for meaning in an age even more morally confused than that of the sixties. The legacy of Vietnam was a legacy of division and misrepresentation; a legacy that a new anti-war conglomeration now picked up and took to its own illogical conclusions.

During the 2002-3 demonstrations, London streets were turned not just into a theatre of anti-Semitism and its pretty indistinguishable twin anti-Zionism. They were also turned into the clearest demonstration yet of the feeling of contempt and antipathy held by many socialists and Muslims in Britain towards Britain's government and British society. When young Muslim children were chanting hate-slogans at the Prime Minister, taught to them by their parents outside Downing Street, some people realised that this was not only a demonstration of hatred for the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan. When pro-Palestinian terror activists scorned the reasons for war in Iraq or Afghanistan, some people realised that they were opposed not only to these specific wars, but to the actions and defence of both the Jewish state and the British state - the very state that harboured them.

Since the events of 2001, Britain has seen many mass mobilisations of people on the streets of its cities. It has learned of specific cases of treachery among British citizens who have left to fight British forces overseas and plotted acts of terror at home. It has read of the encouragement in this of Imams in British cities and organisations based on our shores. Britain has also seen, in the pages of the Guardian and Independent, among other publications, the encouragement of a movement not merely critical of British interests, but specifically opposed to those interests. This movement arose and became prominent thanks to the attacks of 9/11, but it represents forces that have existed in Britain for many years. The important point about what has happened since 2001 is that foreign ideologies and ideologies that cannot be assimilated have found common cause with socialists who were left causeless by the disintegration of their communist idol. And both 1 have found a sympathetic ear among the British mainstream because, by 2001, the British people and their intellectual and political leaders were apparently incapable of speaking or thinking plainly in defence of their own society. With their learned presumption that 'liberalism' was the right, as well as the nice, position to adopt, publications and politicians proved all but incapable of facing down their enemies.

What Britain has seen over these years has been the emergence of a new counter-culture. Like the first counter-culture, this movement is not merely an alternative culture, or a culture that is critical of British culture, but an assemblage of people specifically and consistently opposed to our culture. They are opposed to British interests, and bitterly sarcastic about the notion that any such thing exists. Its immoral members openly celebrate violent attacks on western society; its more moral members are simply incapable of coming up with any but the most hollow reasons for why such attacks are wrong. The bad among them desire caliphates or socialist dystopias, while the better talk of newly invented international courts and supranational institutions. In other words, all of them dream and plan the end of Britain as a sovereign democracy. None have come up with any serious propositions for toppling tyrants. All expend their considerable venom on the elected leaders of Britain and America and have none left to express even formulaic distaste for dictators. Their employment of relativism has sapped their one historical allusion, the holocaust, of its moral impact, and they are now dulled to the possibility that any difference exists between absolute evil and British and US policy.

None consider defence of Britain and its way of life to be a serious priority. They regard the appalling and pressing problems of our time as some kind of smokescreen constructed by Tony Blair and George Bush - a grotesquely flippant charge which also happens to absolve them of any serious consideration of the issues. The movement combines antipathy towards British society with - at best - apathy towards terrorism and terrorism's supporting tyrannies. Since 'liberals' have crumpled before this counter-culture (when they haven't joined it), the task of defending our culture against this creeping nihilism falls to conservatives, and it is they who must, once again, be strident in defence of what they know to be right and good.

THE IRAQ WAR

It is possible that the war in Iraq will be the last major intervention of its kind for some years. There is little stomach for any further such intervention (for instance, in Iran or Syria). For this reason, among others, it is still possible that many people will persist in regarding our objective in Iraq as having failed. It is worth explaining frankly why the war was necessary, and why it remains right.

It is a fact of life that in politics there is a difference between what one would like to do and what one can do. In an ideal society, the government is restrained but not shackled, and there is a relationship of trust between the people and government that permits the government, on occasion, to take decisions that may be unpopular and occasionally inexplicable to the public. The Iraq conflict was just such a conflict. As Kristol and Kagan discuss in their contribution to Present Dangers, it was spurred by reasons either too numerous or too opaque for large proportions of the western, and especially the European, populations to go along with.

What occurred over Iraq - and in particular over the issue of WMD - was certainly not, as the neocon-bashers have tried to label it, a 'noble lie'. This accusation has, for some time, been the calumny of choice for discerning critics. Yet the accusation is ignorant. The notion of the 'noble lie' certainly arises in Plato, and it is true that Strauss and many neoconservatives admire Plato. But what Plato described (in his Republic) was that, on occasion, leaders have to conceal truths from the masses in order to lead them most wisely. He certainly did not (as one commentator put it with wild hyperbole) claim that 'it is practically a duty to lie to the masses'.[280] Still less did Strauss, or his most direct pupils, believe any such thing. Plato described how, in matters of grave importance, occasions arise in which a leader will know best, and in which the less well informed masses, if given the opportunity to decide on a specific matter, might decide wrongly. There are very few who 1 would disagree with this, and the profession of outrage at the very notion of the 'noble lie' is, to put it kindly, an example of faked outrage.

But the allegation that neocons, or anyone else in either the UK or US administrations, told a 'noble lie' over Iraq to achieve their goals is not merely (as the Economist put it) 'stretching it':[281] it is glib and offensive nonsense. And it is nonsense not merely because those who have peddled the line (such as Geoffrey Wheatcroft in the Guardian[282]) have misrepresented their Plato, and not read their Strauss. It is not even nonsense simply because the accusation is a further blithe attempt by members of the press to claim that prominent politicians are liars. No, it is wrong because, far from concealing anything from their people, the governments of the US and the UK told their people everything they knew. If they did make a mistake it was that they provided the people with every complicated and messy truth that they possessed at the time. And in telling everything they knew at the time (and in the case of the UK government, publishing single-source intelligence which should never have been disseminated) they discussed and made available intelligence that was incorrect, information that was unclear, and a certain amount of raw intelligence that may turn out to have been comprehensively mistaken.

The government's fault was not in 'lying' to the people, but in telling the people too much, revealing information that no previous government would have revealed, and, through this process, seriously compromising and embarrassing the security services. In their thorough investigation into the matter, Anthony Glees and Philip Davies quoted the observation of Daphne Park (former senior controller at MI6) that the government's fundamental error was its wish to share intelligence with the public - a public 'who were increasingly anxious about government "spin" and "sleaze"'. The mistake of Tony Blair and the British government was not a desire to lie or dissemble, but to be 'too ready to pander to public opinion'.[283] Had the public not been deluged with a vast quantity of information, plus numerous additional reports into the matter, then the accusations and counter-accusations would have been proportionately fewer, less confused, and less bitter. Government openness, both in providing information, and in providing opinion before the Iraq war, was more comprehensive than at any other time in British or American political history. Talk of lies, cover-ups and neocon-led conspiracies is a diversion - a diversion created by the sinister and agenda-laden, and carried on by the confused. The facts about why the war in Iraq took place are really far clearer than any conspiracy theorists or Strauss-fingerers would have us believe, and neocons have laid them out perfectly openly, time and time again, in print, in public speeches and through an unashamedly consistent public record.

The truth - which, as Paul Wolfowitz noted, so many people are unwilling to acknowledge - is that 9/11 changed things. It may not have changed the nature of America, but it changed its dynamic. When administration figures who had never been neoconservative seemed to come over all neocon, it was because neoconservatism represented, on one level, a form of exuberant Republicanism that many on Capitol Hill had either forgotten or were new to. But the Iraq war was not led by neocons - not even by the highest-ranking neocon, Paul Wolfowitz. Deputy defence secretaries do not create US foreign policy. Neocons had already provided much of the background, the explanations for the moral imperative of action, and much-needed clarity throughout a situation mired in unworkable status quos. But the conflict was decided on, and led by, non-neocon Republicans who had come to realise, as the neocons had realised years before, that the old way of doing things had failed them. To the extent that they became opponents of a status quo that was damaging America, Iraq and the Middle East, the highest members of government, including Tony Blair in London, became foreign policy neoconservatives.

An opportunity arose in the wake of 9/11 - an opportunity for change. All the neoconservative complaints during the previous decades over the preservation of a status quo that was hostile to American interests were starkly highlighted that day. Countries that were meant to be America's allies turned out to have had a hand in events; countries that were allegedly 'contained' were harbouring supporters of those who committed the atrocity and others who aimed to carry out similar atrocities. This status quo was being sustained at a colossal cost not only in dollars and global respect, but now also in American lives. This status quo had been called 'realism', but as Muravchik had said years before, 'Just what is realistic about it?'[284]

The outrages of 9/11 demonstrated the need for a shake up in the world, and specifically a shake-up of the role in the world of America and her powerful allies. The impetus provided by the atrocity made it possible to confront a number of the lingering global nightmares to which the weary post-Cold War world had turned a blind eye. What this impetus allowed were confrontations with regimes that needed to be confronted, but which, under the status quo, had not only gone un-confronted but (for America and the UN) often humiliatingly so. The new opportunity was amply summed up by Tony Blair in a conversation in Downing Street a few days before the Iraq war began. It is an ideal neoconservative expression - a perfect blend of humanitarianism, national interest and hyper-realism:

What amazes me is how many people are happy for Saddam to stay. They ask why we don't get rid of Mugabe, why not the Burmese lot. Yes, let's get rid of them all.

I don't because I can't, but when you can, you should.[285]

After 9/11 the 'can' was there; the 'should' was clear in Washington and London; and if the status quo was ever to be broken for the better, now was the time.

The war to topple the Taliban and dismantle al-Qaeda's Afghan infrastructure was by no means as unopposed at the time as many now pretend, but people broadly understood that America had the right to at least return fire on those who had attacked its cities. But when the opportunity to overthrow another threatening tyranny arose, this time in Iraq, confusion reigned. It is worth explaining frankly, then, the first truth of the Iraq war, which is that it was - and though the phrase is callous, it cannot be avoided - a 'free war'. That is, after 9/11 and after Afghanistan there was still the momentum, within government and American society, for one further act against those who represented a world in which such atrocities could be carried out.

With the Taliban out of the way, there was no government left in the world that openly harboured so many participating al-Qaeda operatives. But one government did remain that had openly celebrated the acts of 2001 and that had long been a magnet in the region and the world for anti-western aggression and anti-western defiance. Particularly since, by turning his defeat in the first Gulf War into an opportunistic imitation of 'holy war', Saddam Hussein had encouraged and given assistance to anti-western Islamic terrorists of all shades.

One of the examples Paul Wolfowitz often quotes is the case of Abdul Rahman Yassin, one of those indicted for the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, which killed six people and injured around one thousand others. Yassin was the only one of the 1993 WTC perpetrators at large. After escaping US jurisdiction he headed straight for Baghdad, where he was given sanctuary for the next ten years.[286] The case of Yassin is not exceptional; it is representative. Abu Abbas, the Palestinian terrorist who had led the hijacking of the Acbille Lauro in 1985, received sanctuary in Iraq, and the terrorist organisation he headed, the Palestine Liberation Front, moved its headquarters with Abbas from Tunisia to Baghdad after their murderous hijacking of the Italian ship. There are many similar examples, such as Abu Nidal, of a community of committed terrorists being welcomed and encouraged by the Ba'athist regime. This, combined with the Hussein regime's financial rewarding of Palestinian suicide terrorism (a reward provocatively upped by Hussein, in March 2002, to $25,000 for the family of each man or woman who went out to kill Israelis), served to ensure that, with or without card-carrying al-Qaeda members, after the fall of the Taliban, Iraq became the most prominent haven for Islamic terrorists. That is also why Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and his 'al-Qaeda in Iraq' group moved to Iraq. After fighting in, and fleeing from, 1 Afghanistan, al-Zarqawi and his terrorist group sought sanctuary in Ira - Qbefore the war in Iraq began. By 2002 it was the only country in the world to assure them a warm and supportive welcome. This is a world away from the peaceniks' ill informed and repetitive cry that Islamic militants and Saddam Hussein somehow 'didn't get on'. In the years after the invasion of Kuwait, Hussein had made every effort - and with considerable success - to appear as the religious and military leader of the anti-western jihad. He had become the terrorists' magnet, and their patron.

Hussein's heroic image in certain parts of the Muslim world was, of course, grotesquely far removed from reality. No dictator in modern times has slaughtered more Muslims, both in genocides perpetrated in his own country, and in wars against his neighbours. America and her allies knew that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction because (uniquely among modern tyrants) Hussein had used them in attacks - like that on Halabja - of which the whole world knew. Yet he retained a degree of, if not popularity, then respect among the 'brother' Arabs and Muslims of those he had slaughtered. His country may have been cowed by his regime of torture, mass execution and fear, but what respect and admiration he was held in throughout the region - despite his genocidal habits - was entirely due to his defiance and resistance to the West. This was his salient position (in a period in which his personal power should have been diminishing): he was the totem of anti-western hatred, and the meeting-point for anti-western forces. Under any circumstances this should have been unacceptable to Britain, America and the West. Yet the situation was allowed to continue, and for more than a decade after his forcible and humiliating expulsion from Kuwait, the West played a largely soft-power game with Iraq. Sanctions imposed by the West were manipulated by Hussein to terrorise 'his' people, keep his family and favourites in luxury, and - as we now know - buy and bribe those politicians and others in the West and elsewhere who were willing to be bought.

Even before 9/11, this situation was unappealing to all parties. Sanctions were crumbling, and since 1997 France, China and Russia on the UN Security Council had been pressing for a relaxation and eventual lifting of sanctions.[287] In each case the attraction was not just that each country would be able to benefit from the increased oil trade, but also that they would be able to recommence the arms trade with Ira. Saddam Hussein himself knew which way the wind was blowing, declaring in 2000, 'We have said with certainty that the embargo will not be lifted by a Security Council resolution, but will corrode by itself.'[288] Neoconservatives and realists of all shades knew that when sanctions ended the world would see - and this could be foreseen with absolute certainty - the re-arming of the Iraqi dictator by regimes that wished to benefit financially.

France, with its President Jacques Chirac, enjoyed a particularly close relationship with the Hussein regime and its arms interests, and was among the nations most eager to see a lifting of sanctions. France's pose as a peacenik in the run-up to war was not only an act of retrogressive opportunism, but a continuation of its role as an ally of Hussein. France's supporters among the street protestors enjoyed making jokes about American and British arms sales to Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war (when both had rightly regarded Iranian dominance in the region as the principal threat), yet it is no thanks to Jacques Chirac that America, Britain and their allies had not met a nuclear Iraq in 1991, never mind 2003.

It was after a triumphant visit to Paris in 1975 to see President Giscard d'Estaing and Prime Minister Chirac, that Saddam Hussein was offered a French nuclear reactor for $300 million. Though this was twice the 'list' price, the deal was accepted and the French reactor paid for. 'We were happy to pay', recalled one of the Iraqi nuclear team, adding, 'After all, who else was going to sell us a nuclear reactor?'[289] The French-supplied nuclear reactor at Osirak had money poured into it by Hussein, in his desperate bid to become the holder of the first 'Arab bomb', and thus the pre-eminent Arab leader. But the effects of such a destabilisation in the region's politics, even in those days before Hussein had become an explicit threat to the wider world, was recognised by Israel. Before the 1 reactor went 'hot', the Israeli government ordered its destruction. The raid (on 7 June 1981) was mounted in the crucial period before the reactor was able to create the materials which - if they leaked out - could destroy the surrounding area after a hit. This model pre-emptive attack was highly controversial. Every single one of Israel's friends and allies condemned the attack. Yet time proved how right the Israelis had been. Had they waited until the reactor could supply bomb making material, the destruction of the facility would have had disastrous consequences in the region. Had they waited until the bomb had actually been made, an attack would have been unfeasible, and would have led to nuclear conflict. By attacking in this window of opportunity they forestalled a nightmare possibility ten years on - something America was to recognise when Dick Cheney (then Secretary of Defense) acknowledged, with great understatement, 'You made our job easier in Desert Storm.'[290] Not so much 'easier' as 'possible'. Had Hussein been armed with a nuclear bomb in 1991, there is little doubt that he would have been able to keep Kuwait, and anything else he liked.

The prospect of a resurgent nuclear Hussein was not one that the United States was willing to contemplate, and after 9/11 it was a prospect that it knew it had to act on. Reports from British intelligence (reiterated in President Bush's January 2003 State of the Union address) of Iraqi officials shopping for uranium in Niger were widely dismissed after the invasion, but found by Lord Butler, in 2004, to have been 'well founded'.[291] Other intelligence pointed to diverse renewed efforts by Hussein, though many of the details were not to emerge until after the invasion. But if British and American intelligence was concerned about a resurgent Saddam Hussein seeking and acquiring weapons of mass destruction, certain other western governments hardly seemed bothered.

Within months of 9/11, German intelligence informed Gerhard Schroder that they believed Saddam Hussein's quest for nuclear power had restarted. The chief of the BND (the German intelligence agency), August Hanning, stated plainly, 'It is our estimate that Iraq will have an atomic bomb in three years.'[292] It would be untrue to say that the German government under-reacted to this information - it didn't react at all. Even informed that Iraq was within reach of having the bomb, Gerhard Schroder continued to oppose regime change in Ira.

Then, in the summer of 2002, while UN inspectors were still in Iraq, German officials received new information indicating that Iraq had previously unknown stockpiles of the smallpox virus. Instead of taking any action, or passing the information on, the German government kept silent on the matter - indeed covered it up completely. Gerhard Schroder had run his re-election campaign (in a very marginal race) on a populist platform, during which, as William Shawcross wrote, 'the German Chancellor deliberately created an atmosphere of anti-Americanism'.[293] In an atmosphere where the German government was scrabbling for every vote to stay in office, it was unsurprising that Schroeder's Justice Minister, Herta Daubler Gmelin, should have taken the opportunity a few days before voters went to the polls in September 2002, to publicly compare President Bush to her country's very own Adolf Hitler. In this situation, the German government decided it was best not to throw away the anti-American course of their election by revealing evidence of Iraqi WMD, which could only bolster the case for war, and so the details of the smallpox discovery were kept quiet, both from the country and from the UN.

When the story finally broke in February 2003, the German press was awash with reports of how, if targeted, 25 million Germans could be killed by the smallpox virus.[294] German papers began debating how and when Islamic terrorists might try to wreak this terror on the German people. In an attempt to quell the public fear, two government ministers claimed that there was little likelihood of 'American-hating' terrorists attacking Germany with the smallpox virus: Germany was, after all, against any war.[295] A further underlying motive of France and Germany in opposing the war became clear: appease the threat, and let America and Britain take whatever came. As Andrew Sullivan wrote, 'by taking the anti-American line, they risk nothing. They know the U.S. will deal with the threat; but by appeasing the Islamo-fascists, 1 the Franco-German axis hopes to avoid any blowback.'[296] If Germany kept its head down, it would avoid the kind of provocation that might lead to an attack: after all, if America was going to be targeted anyway, why get in the way?

This 'let them take care of it, while we keep our hands clean' attitude permeated the thinking of certain countries that had once been US/UK allies. It could also be heard throughout the streets of Europe, where civilians, who had no answer to the threat of Saddam Hussein, nor any sensible notion of how to deal with him, loudly demonstrated to keep their consciences 'clean', even if this meant allowing Hussein to keep WMD (which they generally believed he held, even if they now ridicule governments for having believed likewise). Just as the equivalencing that had spread throughout the continent reached its zenith in the echelons of the German cabinet, so renunciation of personal and global responsibility stretched from the streets of London to the cabinet rooms of Europe. A popular determination to confront a present and growing threat was, at best, lacking. This moral and political failing was partly the result of Europe's peculiar post-war belief that, because it was bad, war should be avoided at all costs. But it was also the result of immediate strategic convenience. In 2003, William Kristol and Lawrence Kaplan criticised those European allies of America who 'spend on social programs and allow the United States to guarantee their security, and then condemn their American cousin for being too aggressive'[297] Not only were countries like Germany unwilling to act, they were also largely incapable of acting. In that situation, inaction was strategically, financially and 'morally' advantageous. The UN had proved incapable, unwilling, and (necessarily considering its constituencies) antagonistic towards the idea of removing this enduring threat. But someone had to stop the re-emergent menace of Saddam Hussein, and in 2003 America and Britain led the way.

Because of the failure to locate the stockpiles of WMD, which every intelligence agency in the world believed Iraq to possess, many British civilians think they were fed a not-so noble lie by their government. They were not, but for the press in Britain (largely as a result of a vendetta demonstrated and reinvigorated by the Hutton report) the claim that the government lied became a matter not of copy, but of pride. A standoff ensued between government and the media. In these circumstances, the British media skewed, misread and wilfully failed to report aspects of the story that did not accord with its argument. This situation (analysed with great brilliance at book length in 2004 by John Lloyd in What the Media Are Doing to Our Politics) led to the unhealthy situation of a rapacious media setting out to be a hostile opposition to the government. Thus it gave itself over to moral arbitration rather than to gathering facts. So the Mirror ran (before the start of the conflict) a front-page photo of Tony Blair with red hands and the caption 'blood on his hands'. Inside was the full, demented 'story' from that Australian arbiter of morality, John Pilger. In the article (described by the editors as 'his most damning verdict on Tony Blair') the not noticeably butch Pilger attacked Tony Blair as 'effete', compared him and George Bush with Adolf Hitler and those tried at Nuremberg, and then described the American administration as 'the Third Reich of our times'.[298] This was the level at which much of the British media conducted its coverage.

Of course, the media is not only unelected, but grossly unrepresentative of the political leanings of the majority in the country: its moment of ultimate rage emerged not over events in Iraq, but over the carefully considered verdict of one of Britain's most eminent judges. When Lord Hutton's inquiry into the Gilligan affair came back with a report that did not fit with the press's preordained version of events, it was Lord Hutton and the government who were condemned. 'Whitewash' screamed the front-page headline of the Independent,[299] going straight for the reputation of a distinguished judge, and trying to pull down his noble record of public service.[300] 'Enter Lord Cover-up' headlined the Mail as its reaction to the appointment of Lord Butler to head yet another intelligence inquiry.[301]

Such pride, self-absorption and political wrong-headedness became not just widespread, but endemic in the British papers and on the BBC before and after the war in Iraq. Before the invasion, the UK media's reactions to events on the ground in Iraq were misinformed and unrepresentative, but by the end of the conflict the most gaping biases had emerged. Partly due to the security situation, most of the press remained within the walls of the Al-Hamra and Palestine hotels. As one of the most admirable reporters confessed, 'The dirty little secret is that the endless "stand-ups" you see on your screens are based on no reporting at all.'[302] What was incredible about this, though, was not that the reporting from many journalists abandoned any pretence at reportage, pitching straight for positions as the next crusading Pilger-figure, but rather that such a large proportion of the free press was perfectly open in its desire for American and British interests to fail. Some declared these wishes only in private, hoping for more casualties, so that George Bush's re-election could be derailed.[303] Others openly declared themselves for the other side.

'It is to be hoped', wrote Tariq Ali, 'that the invaders of Iraq will eventually be harried out of the country by a growing national reaction to the occupation regime they install, and that their collaborators may meet the fate of Nuri Said before them.'[304] Ali was not alone in hoping for the execution of those Iraqis who 'collaborated' with American and British forces, and the 'occupation' equivalence became useful for those opposed to British and American interests. On BBC's Newsnight, George Galloway MP, friend of the genocidal Tariq Aziz and the late terrorist Yasser Arafat, was asked whether there was any difference between Nazi occupation of France and the Allied occupation of Iraq: 'no difference at all', he replied. Galloway was speaking not only as an enemy of British troops, but as an apologist for the terrorists. Curiously ignoring the murderers who were targeting men, women and children across the country, Galloway lied that 'Actually, the Iraqi Resistance does not target its own civilians.' He went on to pretend that the 'resistance' was only attacking 'people who are working for the occupation'.[305]

This sort of lie became common among socialists and throughout the anti-war movement. Some of it was caused by self-hatred; some of it was simply open proselytising for terror. In September 2004, Naomi Klein reacted to the 'uprising' against American forces in Najaf by using the pages of the New York Nation magazine to declare, 'It's time to bring Najaf to New York.'[306] Three years was all it had taken for New York to turn from a city shocked by terrorist outrages, to a city in which journalists like Klein were openly calling for more jihad. Creeping equivalence was leading to its natural end points. What this represented was not merely fallout from a controversial conflict, but the counter-culture generation expressing, with spite and racism, their hatred of British and American society, and their desire for the troops and civilians of those societies to be taught a brutal lesson.

But in Washington, the knowledge that the right thing was being done did not change. Donald Rumsfeld wrote of a meeting before the Iraq war with a South Korean journalist, who had asked him: 'Why should Koreans send their young people halfway around the globe to be killed or wounded in Iraq?' 'It's a fair question', Rumsfeld replied. 'And it would have been fair for an American to ask, 50 years ago, "Why should young Americans go halfway around the world to be killed or wounded in Korea?"' Rumsfeld, who had lost friends in the Korean war, continued:

Korean freedom was won at a terrible cost - tens of thousands of lives, including more than 33,000 Americans killed in action. Was it worth it? You bet. Just as it was worth it in Germany and France and Italy and in the Pacific in World War II. And just as it is worth it in Afghanistan and Iraq today...Today, as we think about the tens of thousands of United States soldiers in Ira - and in Afghanistan and elsewhere around the world fighting the global war on terrorism - we should say to all of them: 'You join a long line of generations of Americans who have fought freedom's fight. Thank you.'[307]

But the press, and much of the public for whom it was the sole source of information, were not only unwilling to feel gratitude to the US and UK soldiers dying in the cause of Iraqi freedom; they were actually willing more of them to die. And they were more than willing to scoff and ignore the sacrifice taking place - which is why, when the Abu Ghraib scandal erupted in April/May 2003, the press not only covered it, but relished and savoured it.

The events in Abu Ghraib received the UK coverage they did because they fitted into the British press's ideas and agenda. Terrible though the events were, the glee with which they were picked up on displayed once again the press's desire to see the Allied efforts in Iraq fail. Once again, the combination of equivalence and grand displays of outrage and 'compassion' ruled the day. The investigative reporter Robert Fisk (famous for having been beaten up in Afghanistan and for declaring that - as a Westerner - he had deserved it) led the Independent's front page with a pornographic display of pseudo-moral self flagellation. 'Take a close look at the leather strap, the pain on the prisoner's face', Fisk enticed his readers, in an article intriguingly entitled 'An illegal and immoral war, betrayed by images that reveal our racism'. 'No sadistic movie could outdo the damage of this image', he went on. 'In September 2001, the planes smashed in to the buildings; today, Lynndie smashes to pieces our entire morality with just one tug on the leash', he wrote of one picture.[308] It is a sign of just how degraded and barely defended British public morality has become that a national newspaper could blithely make such an untrue claim. Fisk went on to proclaim absolute equivalence between suicide bombers and Lynndie England and her fellow abusers, because the latter were 'church-goers'.

While Fisk and others made spurious comparisons with Nazis from their ever-limited range of historical equivalences, Abu Ghraib also allowed some among the British press who had professed to support the war, to change their minds. What this displayed was not only their lack of seriousness from the outset, but the fantastic pitch of self-absorption at which the debate was being carried on. 'Tony Blair fooled me', wrote Tony Parsons, with awesome self-pity. 'He told us we were fighting for freedom, democracy and national security in Ira. I see now it was a pack of lies.'[309] Mary Ann Sieghart wrote in The Times, 'That's it! I've had enough. I'm fed up with justifying the war in Iraq to sceptical friends, family and acquaintances.'[310] As Mark Steyn responded, 'The standard rap against us armchair warriors is that we can't stand the heat of real war, but poor Mary Ann can't stand the heat of real armchairs.'[311] Abu Ghraib provided those who had never understood the urgent and compelling necessities for going into Iraq with an excuse to jump off the smallest of bandwagons. Those who had been opposed to the war from the outset, meanwhile, were given another opportunity to show their true colours.

What the Abu Ghraib scandal, and all the other great and small setbacks in Iraq, displayed was a retrospective version of the gleeful quagmire and 'gates of hell' predictions before the war. The hopeful pre-war talk of massive British and American casualties was off key because the propagandists of the theories wanted them to be true. So it was with Abu Ghraib. And so it was when, in October 2004, grateful anti-war types seized on a dodgy Lancet survey, which declared that 100,000 Iraqis had been killed by the conflict. They seized on this, the highest figure provided, because they wanted 100,000 Iraqis to have been killed. Because, if 100,000 Iraqis had been killed, then they could pretend that they had been right all along. Again, modern rage and self-absorption - the desire to be proved right triumphing over the desire for 90,000 more people not to be dead - plunges not so much into 'activism' or 'compassion' as into out-and-out nihilism.

Which is why, when George Bush declared that he had sent American troops into Iraq 'to make its people free, not to make them American'[312] these same people either ignored what he said or were overcome with sarcasm and irony. But by the time the war was over and the choice for the Iraqi people was between democracy and terror, it was a little late for sarcasm, and a little late for irony. And when Bush spoke of the way in which a democratic Iraq would 'serve as a dramatic and inspiring example of freedom for other nations in the region', much of the media saw not an opportunity to report or support the democratic sacrifices taking place in Iraq, but just another amusing opportunity to hit Bush. When Bush 1 continued that 'it is presumptuous and insulting to suggest that a whole region of the world or the one-fifth of humanity that is Muslim is somehow untouched by the most basic aspirations of life',[313] they avoided taking on the question, felt some outrage at their own insults being used against them, and continued to pretend this was a personality-led PR battle. When, in early 2005, even die-hard opponents of American policy began to concede that democracy spread appeared to be happening in the Middle East, BBC and UK print journalists soldiered on, like Japanese troops sticking in the jungle long after 1945, waging their own particular brand of sardonic warfare on the aspirations not only of the US and UK governments, but by that time - and unforgivably - on the Iraqi people themselves. A brutally serious and seismic moment in a people's history was treated with unimaginably sustained vanity, levity and small-mindedness by those not so much expected, as employed, to know better.

The press, and therefore much of the public to which it was preaching, believed what it wanted to believe. And what it wanted to believe was the 'liberal' consensus opinion - that the war in Iraq had been something to do with oil and abusing Iraqis. They wanted British and American troops to die, and they wanted them to have killed 100,000 Iraqis because that would prove them right in their perverse beliefs about British and American society. What they showed was their nihilistic hatred of the society in which they were fortunate enough to live.

Naturally, there are elements of bias in all journalism. But what was significant about this bias was that it was bias against our side - against Britain and against British troops. The press was trapped in a self-absorbed world of dossiers, superstar screw-up colleagues, and faked pity for sources chewed up, spat out, and then buck-passed onto someone else. Yet the media continued to miss the big stories. They entirely missed, until elections in January 2005, the story of Iraq's brave movement towards democracy - indeed it was a movement towards which the BBC and others seemed not only sceptical, but actively hostile. If Iraq turned out to be a success, then they would have to concede that George Bush and the neoconservatives had got the war right, and that the people of the Middle East were indeed ready for democracy. In its desperation to prove the neoconservatives wrong, the British press even missed out any story that might appear to back up the case for war. The discovery of mass graves in Iraq was given scant attention compared with front page after front page on dossiers, memos and the like, which might absolve Gilligan and, by solidarity, his profession. And of the unreported stories, two startling examples remain. Because they don't fit into the 'Iraq had no WMD' argument, they went all but unreported in Britain.

The first is the story of Mahdi Obeidi, who came forward shortly after Allied troops arrived in Baghdad. Obeidi had been high up in Saddam Hussein's military-industrial projects, and one of those who had been repeatedly questioned by UN teams investigating Iraq's WMD capabilities. He had never revealed a thing. Under a regime of fear, and with his family held hostage by the tyrant, Mahdi Obeidi never would have said anything. But once the liberation of Iraq was complete, Obeidi came forward, led American officials to the garden of his own house, and pointed them in the direction of a rose bush. Hidden for twelve years under that rose bush were the components of a nuclear centrifuge for enriching uranium - the very piece of equipment that is central to making a nuclear bomb. Buried with the components were the blueprints and instructions for assembling the materials to create the bomb. The 'bomb in his garden' was buried by Mahdi Obeidi under the direct orders of Saddam's son, Qusay Hussein, and, throughout a decade of sanctions and inspections, the secret had been kept by a scientist terrorised by the regime into silence and cooperation.[314] And of course it wasn't only Obeidi who had worked on the Iraq bomb. As he wrote in 2004, 'Hundreds of my former staff members and fellow scientists possess knowledge that could be useful to a rogue nation eager for a covert nuclear weapons program.'[315]

As former weapons inspector David Kay told CNN of the Obeidi discovery, 'There's no way that that would have been 1 discovered by normal international inspections. I couldn't have done it. My successors couldn't have done it.'[316] Though Obeidi's revelation did not mean Iraq had a nuclear capability by 2003, it certainly demonstrated something that both the British and American governments were unaware of, and that inspections would not have found even if they had continued for another decade. The Hussein regime had successfully, and silently, retained the capability to assemble a nuclear bomb. With sanctions slipping, and the impetus for continued isolation of Iraq eroding, there is no doubt that, in the very near future, facilities like those in Mr Obeidi's garden would have been dug up and put to use.

Just one other example of a Hussein-threat story ignored by the British press was the discovery - thanks to post-war investigations - of the trading links between members of the much-derided 'axis of evil'. In the colossal Duelfer report it was revealed that, as late as 2003, Saddam Hussein was in the process of buying long-range missiles direct, 'off the shelf', from North Korea. He was also negotiating for further military technologies that were banned under sanctions but purchasable in fellow isolated axis-member North Korea. By 2001 Iraq had made down payments of $10 million to North Korea, signed contracts and arranged meetings with suppliers from the country. In addition to meetings in Damascus, North Korean firms visited Iraq in 2001.[317] Clearly, even if the unanimously unsatisfactory sanctions had remained in place, the Ba'athists in Baghdad would still have explored every avenue until they achieved the capabilities they dreamed of.

Ignoring stories that do not fit in with the pre-agreed narrative is a problem for the British press that should be addressed; a problem that only a fundamental wake-up call can reverse. Though the Hutton report should have been such a call, it now seems that something larger is needed. A culture exists in which reporters are not content with merely being reporters, but wish also to be commentators on the story. But there is an orthodoxy as to what is legitimate 'comment' on the BBC and elsewhere. Being a commentator means approaching each story from the same angle - hostile and cynical of government, in favour of the rights of the Palestinian peoples over those of the Israelis, anti-war and so on. In other words, 'establishment' commentators possess every routine trope of foreign and domestic radicals. It is in every way a lazy culture - one in which a BBC journalist can sit in his pyjamas and accuse a Prime Minister of lying, and in which the BBC will angrily stand by such a flippant and unjustifiable accusation. It is a culture in which cartoonists across the broadsheet papers casually, ignorantly, and without censure, portray the elected leaders of Britain and America as genocidists and war criminals.[318] It is a culture in which the person who makes the most extreme and untrue claim - far from being shunned - is the one who becomes famous, and whose career advances.[319] A media which is meant to inform has repositioned itself as a moral arbiter. Yet it has not the foundations, knowledge, or accountability to perform such a task. Its behaviour during the Iraq war shows not only that its credo is the propagation and promotion of the self, and that its only final measure is its own ego, but that its morality is the morality of nothingness. This is a status quo that is emblematic and needs to be removed.

The force and entrenched nature of this status quo is rooted in the counter-cultural. This is a modern problem, which has grown up because those who absorbed the counter-culture did not. An anti-conservative status quo is in power in the media and swathes of political governance. It revels in a mode of consensus which behaves as though it is brave and outspoken, but is truly not just powerful, but all-pervasive. Privileged insiders behave as though they are fascinating and dangerous outsiders. This is a status quo that is lazy and immoral, for it is a status quo that permits people to think they are brave for walking down a London street with two million other people, or dissident because they attack the President of the United States. It is a status quo rife, from the top down, with what Oriana Fallaci rightly terms 'phoney revolutionaries'[320] - the sort of people who seriously believe that they are outside the establishment (and pathetically try to demonstrate as much) even when they are the Chancellor of the Exchequer or Prime Minister in waiting.

These are deep and complex social problems that need addressing. But what is neither deep nor complex, and can be addressed easily, are those people who have surfaced, thanks to the Iraq war, not as critics, but as opponents of British and western society. These are people whom we should now discount. All societies have their enemies, but the pervasive methods of political correctness, equivalence and relativism have allowed these opponents of our society to become absorbed into the status quo and cosseted within our midst. Whether it is in the House of Commons, the BBC and British press, or in society at large, neoconservatives should lead the way in pointing the finger and isolating those who have, for too long, been allowed to get away with being traitors and opponents of the very country which gives them sanctuary.

Writing of an anti-British critique by an especially unpleasant Scots socialist, Roger Scruton once noted that the deliberate faults and excessive bitternesses in the man's work brought home a clear if uncomfortable fact - that the writer in question was 'writing as an enemy'.[321] Moral and practical problems emerge from this, but Scruton has hit on the only possible explanation and way of dealing with the extremes of violent hatred now routinely expressed in our newspapers, on our televisions and on our streets against the country itself.

Many of the people who equivalence and fudge their way through second-hand expressions of rage against Britain and America do so from an elementary attempt at moral seriousness, or as a first confused step through the mire of a moral landscape in which relativism seems the only creed. But many others, and those that lead such people, are simply haters of our society. They are haters for one of two reasons, neither of which is often expressed, but both of which are often thought. Firstly, there are those who attack the British way of life, and who desire the deaths and destruction of British people and the abnegation of Britain's responsibilities in the world because their ideology is socialist or some other variation of the communist idol they do not believe yet to be totally dead. Secondly, there are those who attack us because they feel no loyalty to the country: they are not a part of it, and do not truly desire to be so. The most interesting and revealing aspect of the Iraq war is that it has flushed out certain publications, which - if they are to continue being tolerated - must be read in the full knowledge that they harbour and publish Britain's enemies.

Of all the guilty mainstream organs, the Guardian is the one that most regularly publishes pieces which spiral ever lower into the moral cesspit. Its pages repeatedly host writers like the socialist Terry Eagleton, who (in an article entitled 'A Different Way of Death') has tried to absolve Palestinian suicide bombers of moral culpability for their murders by equating the manner of their deaths with that of the victims who leapt from the World Trade Center on 9/11, claiming that both killed themselves only because they have no other option.[322] Though Eagleton is only a socialist, fellow Guardian contributors have even plainer loyalties to justify their equivalences. Richard Gott was brought in by the Guardian on the eve of the British general election to proclaim Tony Blair a 'war criminal' and to denounce the United States as a country 'that presents a global threat similar to Germany in the 1930s'.[323] What the Guardian did not, and would not, reveal, is that its columnist Gott is not simply a fellow-travelling socialist and Stalinist. When Gott is permitted the pages of the Guardian to lambaste Blair for allying with 'the evil empire' of America, it is not only equivalencing - it is active propaganda. For Richard Gott was outed by Oleg Gordievsky as a Soviet agent in the pay of the KGB. The Guardian did not, and would not, reveal such information when it published his anti-Bush and Blair piece. But it is worth reflecting that a major British newspaper thus covered for a KGB spy, allowing him to accuse Britain and America of being an 'evil empire', even though it was aware that same writer had spent his life extolling the virtues of his paymaster, the real 'evil empire'. Since the Guardian would not have Nazi agents on its pay lists, the only conclusion to be drawn is that the newspaper approves of people such as Gott, and of the genocidal regime they propped up. This is significant, because it allows us to reflect that this is not a paper that engages in legitimate criti1 cism, but rather one that is bent on propaganda, on the dissemination of attacks on our country and our country's allies, and on the financing of those who have acted on behalf of one of the twin evils of the twentieth century. Through such acts as allowing communist stooges to libel elected democrats, the end point of relativism can be seen, and the need to uproot illegitimate sources of moral preaching becomes ever more urgent.

Among those who have been consistently hostile over the war in Iraq are people whose criticisms of British interests are not only ideological, but racial. When Arundhati Roy criticises Britain and America, we should note her descriptions of what Britain has done to 'us natives'.[324] She is showing us that she is an opponent of us, because we are people she regards as colonialists and different to her. Likewise, the Independent columnist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown. When the handover of Iraqi sovereignty took place in June 2004, Alibhai-Brown confessed that 'there have been times when I wanted more chaos, more shocks, more disorder to teach our side a lesson. On Monday I found myself again hoping that this handover proves a failure because it has been orchestrated by the Americans.'[325] Alibhai-Brown is at least being honest in admitting that she wants more British and American troops and Iraqi civilians to die, and that the vindication of her own opinion is of more importance to her than the lives of these people. But her dishonesty in the passage comes in referring to 'our' side. It is clear from this passage, and many others throughout her career, that Alibhai-Brown is someone who dislikes Britain, and who is antagonistic to Britain. She believes us to be a country of racists and xenophobes, and remains discontent with her adopted country when it is not going in the awful direction in which she wants it to go. In her desire for more of our soldiers to die, she demonstrates that, even though she lives in this country, she is not a part of it, but, rather, an opponent of it.

This monumental modern confusion of morality, pseudery and lies is not helping Britain to get onto the right track. I said at the beginning of this chapter that the problem - the very starting point for this confusion - lies in the 'tyranny of relativism'. This tyranny, which mocks those who speak in absolutes, has demonstrated through the period of the years since 9/11 that relativism is not simply a game to sound clever, as some would have it, but the road to nihilism. It is the road along which the confused, the lost and the wicked have travelled for a generation. And it is a road that today has led many people to absolute hatred of the West, inversion of morality, and comprehensive nihilism.

The Mirror writer John Pilger was asked, in February 2004, which side those who opposed the war should be on, now that the Iraqi regime had been defeated. As someone who had built his career on moral judgements consisting of equivalences against the West, Pilger was faced with a simple choice - the armed forces of Britain and America, or the so-called 'insurgents', a collection of gangs of remnant Ba'athist thugs, al-Qaeda terrorists, bandits, head-hackers, assassins of men, women and children. His answer could not have been clearer. 'Do you think the anti-war movement should be supporting Iraq's anti-occupation resistance?' he was asked. 'Yes, I do', Pilger answered. 'We cannot afford to be choosy.'[326]

In May 2005 Amnesty International, an organisation that has morphed since its founding from a human rights organisation into a politically slanted campaigning group, described Guantanamo Bay as 'the gulag of our times'.[327] Nothing could be done to persuade the organisation that equating Guantanamo, where nobody had been killed, with the Soviet gulag, in which 15-30 million people were killed, was wrong or offensive. They did not mind that the claim was offensive to the families of the millions of innocent Russians murdered, and they certainly did not mind that they were telling a flagrant lie about America.

And in the same month, the British press became aware of government plans to update Britain's Trident nuclear devices. The £10 billion bill was widely criticised, with many decrying such lavish outlay on modernising Britain's defence capability. But others went further. The Mirror published an article in which it was claimed that 're-arming on a grand scale after attacking Saddam Hussein over mythical weapons of mass 1 destruction will reek of hypocrisy'.[328] This is where relativism has led. It starts by encouraging the perception that Britain and her allies have no moral authority over terrorists, tyrants and genocidal dictatorships. It continues by excusing and then supporting the terrorists and tyrants. It finishes by saying why the terrorists and tyrants must win over us, and finally why we, as a nation, do not have the right to conquer evil or even defend ourselves. That is, it culminates with the desire that the terrorists should win and that evil should triumph.

CHAPTER 4

NEOCONSERVATISM FOR BRITAIN

Why Britain needs neoconservatism - How it can be adopted - Advancing freedom and democracy - Neoconservative domestic policy - Neoconservative foreign policy - Winning the war at home and abroad

In the United States it was, as we have seen, by no means inevitable that neoconservatism would find its home within the Republican party. During the early years, the Democrats provided a good and solid home for some neoconservative thinking.

In Britain, neoconservatism's most significant outlet to date has - perhaps surprisingly - been found in the Labour party. But the outlet has been restricted to the government's foreign policy. It is inconceivable that the Labour party would adopt neoconservative principles on domestic policy, such as lower taxation, reduced state interference and more successful social justice measures. Furthermore, there is no point in pretending that the neoconservative measures that the Labour government has adopted are in any way due to a widespread appetite within the Labour party for a forceful realist-humanitarian foreign policy. Indeed, as a party, Labour commonly seems as suspicious of neoconservative foreign policy ideas as many members of the Conservative party, albeit for different reasons. In the same way as many Conservatives object to neocon foreign policy because of its humanitarian impetus (worrying that the British armed forces will become the armed wing of Oxfam), so many Labourites see in it purely militaristic expressions of self-interest (in which only 'convenient' humanitarian catastrophes are addressed).

In any case, it is useless to pretend that any neoconservative foreign policy would have found its way into the Labour party's orbit had it not been for the personal conviction and advocacy of Prime Minister Blair. Furthermore, and as proof of his conviction, Tony Blair's distinctively neoconservative foreign policy preceded that of the Bush administration - it did not follow it. His leadership on air strikes against Saddam Hussein in 1998, the turning-point interventions in Kosovo and Sierra Leone, and the post-9/11 conflicts of Afghanistan and Iraq have been - from the point of view of neoconservatism - exemplary. He has shown from the outset that there is another way in which to run Britain's foreign policy - one markedly different from that typified in the 1990s by the Conservative administration's baleful unwillingness to intervene in the Balkans crisis. What Blair has resuscitated (particularly during Kosovo and Sierra Leone) is the sense that Britain can lead, not follow, global trends in foreign affairs - that, as a global power, Britain's interests are best served not by selfish isolationism or abnegation of responsibility, but by being a world leader with a humanitarian urge. It may therefore be said that only in the realm of foreign policy did Blair ever find the 'third way' he so desperately sought. The third way that he found, intentionally or otherwise, was neoconservative.

But this forceful humanitarianism is unlikely to outlive Blair's premiership. All possible successors, and indeed the majority of his parliamentary party, lack the stomach for further forceful intervention. The difference between those Labourites who perpetually call for action in failed states, and neoconservatives who call for action in failed states, is that neoconservatives actually want troops deployed and are prepared to see through the conflicts that will arise. The most verbal humanitarianism often loses its stomach the moment conflict is involved, and sometimes a long time before. Without the enforcing knowledge that self-interest is also at stake, the desire to cut and run will always arise, the humanitarian instinct softening amid moral confusion and war's fallout. The parliamentary Labour party's rebellions, both before and after the second Iraq war, make it clear not only that they are unlikely to agree to such a conflict in the near future, but - more damagingly - that they won't be led into one either.

The Conservative party has large swathes of MPs and members hostile to the precepts of interventionism, but it will certainly provide a safer home to neoconservatism. To begin with, national self-interest - though shyly uttered in Conservative circles today - remains a deep-seated Conservative instinct. With time and argument, there is no reason why hostile Conservatives might not come round to the idea that the welfare and security of fellow democracies always has been and always will be directly in the interests of Great Britain. If that argument can be more comprehensively enshrined, then half of the impetus for neoconservative action is already there. From the party's majority support during the Blair-led interventions of 1998-2003, it is clear that, with the appropriate explanation and justification, Conservative MPs are at least equally amenable to arguments from humanitarian angles and more amenable to arguments from self-interest than their Labour colleagues.

But there is another reason why the Conservative party will inevitably provide the better home for neocons, and that is its willingness to adopt the harsher policies of domestic neoconservatism. Certain of those policies will be new to a current generation of Conservative MPs, but none will be as indigestible to them as they would be to most Labour members. For many Conservatives, neocon attitudes may be adopted with a sense of homecoming. Having been wooed onto Labour's ground, Conservatives have spent nearly a decade shying away from strong conservative issues - issues which neoconservatism refuses to side-step. Neoconservatism argues for, and provides intellectual justification for, a raft of policies which Conservatives have of late been too fearful to utter. But it is also a form of conservatism that has made its peace with much of the modern world, including the welfare state; that accepts the existence of the welfare state, and criticises it as a friend bent on helping.

But we should begin with the why. Why is it that Britain deserves and is ripe for its own neoconservative moment?

WHY?

It was clear from his election in 1997 that Tony Blair is among those who firmly believe in the Fukuyama principle of the 'End of History'. He has spoken of the 'echoes that remain' of the old battles between socialists and conservatives, and has claimed that the great debate itself is over, with liberal democracy triumphant.[329] In that situation, it is still vital that Britain knows where it is in such a world, and can forge its place in it. In a speech before the 1997 election - his only election campaign speech on foreign policy - Tony Blair declared that 'Century upon century it has been the destiny of Britain to lead other nations.' He continued:

That should not be a destiny that is part of our history.

It should be part of our future. We are a leader of nations or nothing.[330]

These were exceedingly untypical words for a future Labour Prime Minister, though they were words guaranteed to encourage voters concerned about voting Labour back into power. Tony Blair's much-commented closet-conservatism was never more out in the open than at this moment.

And, of course, he was right. Britain was and is a world power. It remains among the largest and most powerful economies in the world. Our armed forces are unequalled in skill, and equalled in technological capability only by our American ally. Our position in the international community is of unequalled significance and respect. Why, then, do so many of the British people persistently appear to consider their nation as a third-rate, past-it power?

The last decade has seen a number of powerful arguments put forward to the effect that Britain itself is lost, that all that was good has been destroyed. These tracts have ranged from the forceful and declamatory (Peter Hitchens, The Abolition of Britain) to the persuasively elegiac (Roger Scruton, England: An Elegy). But all have assumed that what has been lost cannot be regained. This is not the case, and I would argue that even much of the premise is wrong. Much of the social and economic injustice that has been left in the past, and that was often concomitant with that past, goes unmissed. Many of the barriers that held people back are hardly desirable things or a reason for nostalgia. What we are doing when we lament the loss of the past is lamenting specific things that have been lost along the way. That is, we are lamenting the things that were cast aside too lightly. These are things that we can regain. Neoconservatism does not want to return to the past; it simply wants to pick up those things that were wilfully discarded, and take us to a better and more hopeful future.

So why the national glumness? The truth is that there are two reasons: an attitude, and a fact.

The attitude is easier to identify, though not necessarily any less intractable. What we need to address in it is whether the trope of Britain's decline has not itself become an attitude. We should ask whether we don't like just a little too much the idea of a glorious past from which we are slipping; whether claiming that the country is going to the dogs and to hell in a handcart has not simply become a useful way of absolving ourselves from involvement in the tough action required to abort such a change. Just as the counter-culture spawned the unsavoury sight of nihilism adopted as an attitude among the 'radicals' and the socialists, so, one should ask, has not the myth of decline become a free acquisition of conservatism? Has 'Owl of Minerva-ism' - the heady idea that we are living in the fading light - become the conservative nihilism? More than one generation of conservatives have been born and have come to maturity since the high-point of Britain's Empire, yet conservatives continue to be born who, from their earliest days, spout the mantras of collapse and decay. Neoconservatism would argue that we have a national duty to wake from this nostalgic reverie and start fighting again for what is right and good.

A revival of forceful conservatism is today long overdue, and more necessary than ever before. What is not required is the sort of response typified by the segments of 'Conservative youth' who revel in archaism, cliquey anachronism and snobbery. Conservatism can no longer afford to adopt such attitudes, which, while sometimes fun to hold, are damaging to the causes of conservatism and the cause of Britain.

Which brings us to the fact that underlies the British attitude of national slump. It is something that may understandably be held up as justification for the view of decline - the unarguable fact that portions of British life are gross and affect the life of the nation to its detriment: yob culture, high crime rates, excessive levels of immigration. All are examples that those who hold the attitude of decline might cite to justify their stance.

But the examples would be wrong. Conservatism's job is to preserve that which is good in the nation, as well as to fight and get rid of that which is bad. The preserving is still periodically done, but the offensive position seems to have been forgotten by British conservatism. In part this is because socialists have preached their gospel of irrevocability to the people: the pretence that immigration must necessarily continue rising, that yob culture and soaring crime rates have something to do with liberality, or are the unsavoury but inevitable side-shows of greater 'freedom' and less 'oppression'. Conservatism must not just expose these myths; it must shatter them. The offensive position must be resumed, and if socialists say that these methods are methods of the past, or unsavoury methods of the present, we must not give them their pyrrhic PR victories, but must press ahead, because we know that what we believe is not only for the good, but is right.

CHANGING THE STATUS QUO

The rest of this chapter sets out some of the neoconservative based attitudes which the Conservative party might adopt if it is once again to become a strong and powerful voice for freedom, liberty and justice. Some of these suggestions may seem to British readers to be impractical, impossible or unimaginable: they are not. In any case, the assumption in socialist-driven British politics that great and sweeping change cannot occur is the single aspect of politics that most disenfranchises the electorate. Where there is a problem, that problem must be addressed. The electorate know that, and it is time their political representatives realised it. We should address our concerns by doing whatever is necessary to solve them, not by considering whether we have the right tools at our disposal, or by trying to find a way to pretend that the problem is not a problem. We should decide what we want, and then work out how to achieve it.

When government officials insinuate that taxes are always going to rise, the British people are entitled to ask 'why?' When politicians and policy pundits tell people that immigration cannot be halted, the British people have a right to demand 'why?' And if, in answer, they are told that this or that has already been decided upon and nothing can be done, then the British people should boot that politician or government out of office.

Many people seem to think that we live in an age in which nothing is sacred. That is not true - twenty-first century Britain has a fantastically lengthy bible of things deemed untouchable. It is time that these newly invented taboos were eradicated.

The myth of decline is a self-fulfilling prophecy. A new conservatism will help eradicate the myth and improve the reality. This is not about halting progress: it is about recognising that the 'progress' we have been force-fed is a fallacy. It is about turning the tide away from the corrosive 'progress' of socialism. It is about once again giving hope and ambition to the conservative cause, and recognising that, in the drive to make people's lives better, government must never say that something cannot be done. Neoconservatism can provide the impetus to begin this process, and, like all good things, neoconservatism starts in the home.

TAX

The first principle of any Conservative government should be not to reduce, but to slash taxes. In the years since Labour came to office, each household and family in Britain has had to face - not simply as a policy, but as a policy presented under the guise of inevitability - a rise in the basic rate of tax, constant increases in National Insurance and stratospheric rises in council tax. In the wake of Gordon Brown's 2002 budget, average household incomes fell for the first time in nearly 15 years. A couple who both work, have two children, and a combined income of £60,000 became £841.25 a year 1 (or 1.9 per cent of income) worse off.[331] This high-taxing principle is becoming unpopular. Yet the Liberal Democrat party consistently campaigns on the social-envy policy of 50 per cent taxation for higher earners (a policy which the Labour government is not far off implementing anyway), and between them the two socialist-based parties dominate the argument on taxation. They have managed this because both claim that taxation must inevitably rise in order to continually improve the provision of public services, including health care. This argument has become so predominant that in 2005 the Conservatives talked of the red tape they would trim, but dared not talk of public services they would cut.

But public services should be cut, and again not just cut, but slashed. While the Conservative party should, like neocons,[332] make their peace with the concept of the welfare state, they should detest and attack the welfare society or 'welfarism' itself. Furthermore, they should deem the current state of the NHS unacceptable. Who could seriously justify the present state of an organisation which, by some figures, now has more bureaucrats and 'administrators' than beds, and more managers than nurses?[333] A comprehensive shake-up of the service is long overdue. But though the NHS may be the largest and most wasteful of the public services, it is at least a necessary one. There are plenty of public services that the public can perfectly well do without.

The grotesque costs of establishing and sustaining two extra tiers of government - at sub-national level (in Wales, Scotland and London) and at supranational level (in Brussels) - have yielded no discernible financial benefit to the people of Britain, but have institutionalised wasteful and spend-thrift structures which, unless stopped, will leach money in perpetuity. Each of these extra layers of government has to justify its existence by inventing a steady stream of diktats great and small. The results are morally demeaning and financially wasteful. A Conservative government should dismantle these infrastructures, centralise representative power in Westminster, cut the taxes necessitated by such experiments, and by so doing palpably enrich the people.

Likewise, no one will be anything but richer if the government's vast payroll expansion were curtailed. The Labour government spent £1.9 billion on 'consultants' in 2004. That same year, Gordon Brown's Treasury spent six times more on consultants than the department had before his arrival in 1997.[334] This is a government that spends money and enlarges its non vital payroll from habit, idly permitting the ballooning of job justifying posts. Targets, quotas - all are means by which government can expand the state's payroll and diminish the independence and reach of the private sector. Such meddlesome expansionism ossifies the public health service and all government services. The further adoption of multiculturalism advisers, equality advisers and all manner of other social-policy advisers speaks of an administration pasting over the holes in their thought with other people's money.

Government-employed public relations advisers, such as those employed to persuade the public of the need for ID cards, cost a grotesque amount. This is, among stiff competition, the most vapid waste of money of all. Government is not a brand, and government's job is not to win PR battles.

Government's job is to govern. If the people do not agree with a policy, and if, after the government has tried through debate to persuade them of the policy's merits, the public remains unconvinced, then government should either give up an unpopular measure, or forge ahead and risk losing seats or power for its principles. It is not government's job to use taxpayers' money to tell the taxpayer what he should do. Conservatives of all stripes must regain the initiative. To begin with, we must abandon as demeaning, and ultimately self destructive, the PR obsession of the present government.

In this spirit, conservatives must firstly get away entirely from the European social-democrat philosophy, by which, in return for providing the citizen with a good life, the state presumes to have the right to all of a citizen's money, generously allowing him to retain a portion. This social-democrat dream is a nightmare, and a nightmare whose end can never be reached. Government cannot make people happy. It should stop its people from being killed, and sustain a limited number of other duties, but for the rest it should keep clean out of the way. It should try to hold people back from degradation, but in the knowledge that it can never do this comprehensively, and can only do it palpably through limited and clear social structures, within a financial environment that permits people to be free to fulfil their highest potential. The opposite (and still prevalent) idea in Europe - that the state knows better than both the people and the markets - is dangerous nonsense that finds its end point in communism. As a fundamental, collectivism has been utterly shown up, appropriately described by Robert Skidelsky as 'the most egregious error of the twentieth century'.[335] It is arrogant and extraordinary that governments today believe they can manage people's earnings any better than their predecessors did.

Avoiding collectivism, the British government should institute supply-side economics. That is, it should not provide a benefits-rich society, in which the priority is keeping inflation low, but rather a benefits-poor society, in which full employment, individual liberty and self-advancement are the aims. The situation of those out of work in Britain, as in other European countries, is currently alleviated - as though there were no other option - through benefits. Huge bureaucratic and financial investment now sustains what is, in some areas, an entire underclass of people (often more than one generation of the same family) permanently out of work. We must make a priority once again of returning all people to any work by any possible means.

The first means to impel people back into work is to reject the notion that a high-taxing state can deal on its own with unemployment. The only solution for unemployment is employment: no mid-way alternative exists. Futile jobs created by the government cost the nation twice over: in supplying them, and in shoring them up in the face of lack of demand. To encourage proper investment in the jobs market, and the creation of businesses to provide jobs, a Conservative administration should begin, as Irving Kristol has helpfully suggested, by cutting taxes by 10 per cent.[336] A cut significantly above 10 per cent should then be assessed for desirability. Conservatives know that when people have more money in their pockets they are freer to exercise their choices and ambitions. They are also freer to invest in their own society, and to use their earnings in the way they believe will best increase their earnings. Better prospects for employers mean more opportunities for employees. Government should be restricted, and the jobs market boosted. Yet Gordon Brown and many of his Labour colleagues simply do not understand the limits of government. Brown, in particular, is one of those who, as Irwin Stelzer has put it, give us 'government-sponsored design centres, rather than lower taxes to encourage designers to work harder and take chances'.[337] This is not just government interference, but costly socialist interference.

What we have come to under Labour, and what we would most certainly face under any Liberal Democrat government, is the prevalence of the socialist ideal - the opposite of the correct conservative position. The state should be permitted a small portion of the money citizens earn, in return for providing the basic needs that only the state can provide. So, for instance, the state is there to provide military security, not social security. Evidence that the wrong approach is now ingrained comes every time a Labour Chancellor dupes people into believing that he is giving them money when he grants them a token allowance. This is not the government giving something to the people, but the government handing back a tiny portion of the money it has taken from the people. People must be encouraged to recognise the difference.

Conservatives must restate and reclaim their ground on taxation. Their ground starts with a public acceptance of the fact that politicians do not know best how to spend other people's money - indeed, evidence suggests that they are more than usually bad at it. Taxation should cover the cost of a limited government, sturdy defence, a solid health service and other very limited public services. Few other aspects of government expenditure should be safe from the neoconservative scalpel. After all, what are people getting for their vastly increased expenditure? Do they feel any more secure and happy, or are they merely worse off?

Neoconservative economic policies have already found their way into economic policy in countries other than the US (notably Australia[338]) and it is time the same happened here. Taxes must be reduced drastically, and this can be done, because conservatives will spend money only on the things the country needs. To do this, conservatives must agree on what they need, and spend accordingly.

EDUCATION

In education, conservatives must argue for two primary policies. The first is the abolition of all quotas for university attendance or the make-up of universities. The universities should provide the country with an elite; one that should feel sufficiently privileged to know that it is its duty to reciprocate the country's investment in it. The Labour government's figure - plucked from the air - of a target of 50 per cent of students entering higher education has had a disastrous effect. It has devalued degrees and tricked students, who would have been better off going straight to work, into incurring massive debts doing a useless university course. By creating abysmal universities, in which students study courses of no possible value to them or society, government has also nominally overqualified a generation of students, who now shun labour-based work. The disastrous reliance on immigrant labour that this causes has, in turn, impelled the nonsensical and genuinely racist idea that there are jobs that British people can't or won't do.

The 50 per cent drive has coincided with appalling pressure on the great universities to introduce quotas. As with the identical counter-cultural attempts in America, such quotas not only highlight (rather than cover over) ethnic and societal differences, but they also drag down the quality of the universities. We need graduates to be the best possible graduates, not merely people who have jumped through the modish hoops of the day. The universities must be freed from government interference, their only job being to do the best job possible. The best universities will work best if government keeps away. The great universities are the treasures of the nation, not the playthings of a transient administration. What is happening at the moment is a prime example of government's unwieldy and unnecessary interference costing the country twice over - once in the short term, and again in the long term.

But the position of the universities should be directly relevant only to the small percentage of the population who go to them. What is of direct consequence to everyone is the standard of schooling and general education. In this, as in everything else, conservatives must stand up for what they believe in again, ignoring the flak they will receive from implementing controversial moves and saying things that currently cannot be said.

There is no doubt that the disastrous effects of the counterculture are felt most acutely among the young - a generation brought up in an environment which so denies the notion of natural right or cultural difference that many people are incapable of recognising good from bad. The perfect example of this lies in so-called 'black culture' (which is not only not culture, but a gross dishonour to culture that is 'black'). 'Black culture' is currently running rampant. Celebrated by the BBC, lauded in the national press, and pandered to by government, no one dares stop it, or speak out against it, because to do so would be 'elitist' or 'prejudiced'. It is time this field of nonsense was cut through. Black culture, as it is currently presented, is a cesspit of degradation, violence and nihilism. Tolerance of it demonstrates relativism's awful appeal to the populace. As Fukuyama writes, 'Relativism...does not lead to the liberation of the great or strong, but of the mediocre, who were told they had nothing of which to be ashamed.[339]

But 'black culture' is far worse than mediocre. It is the epitome of the low and the destructive. Young people exposed to it without being aware of its idiocies and pitfalls, enter a world in which women are debased, casual and cowardly violence is glorified, and absurd machismo goes not only unsatirised, but unchallenged. Populist comedians and media figures, who pretend to be brave by satirising those who defend or do not threaten our culture, dare not even attempt to challenge this destructive movement. This nihilistic societal tendency is allowed to spread precisely because it goes unchallenged. Britain and other western cultures can overcome such movements only by being clear from the outset that they are unappetising, unworthy and beneath us - not because they are alien, but because they are unfulfilling and nihilistic. As Irving Kristol wrote in another context, 'Different gardeners will have different ideas, of course, but there will be a limit to this variety. The idea of a garden does not, for instance, include an expanse of weeds or of poison ivy.'[340] Until a stand is made against a culture that glorifies and encourages rape, murder, gun crime, hate crimes and grotesquely unchecked materialism, that culture will continue to cause palpable and visible damage to British society.

Since many of the problems in our society arise from the outset directly because of a lack of ethics, or because of nihilistic ethics, conservatives of all persuasions must argue for and implement a vast increase, rather than a decline, in faith schools. Their waiting lists and popularity even among non-believing parents are testament to their success. Such schools invariably produce better educated pupils, and consistently turn out better behaved pupils. Society owes a great debt to these schools, to their teachers and staff, and it is time we started acknowledging that debt and repeating our successes. Certainly, we should not avoid repeating our successes simply for fear of upsetting our failures. Such a pandering to the lowest denominator is a recipe for national degradation, and a vanity for which future generations should not forgive us.

And we should be clear what we mean by faith-based schools. It does not mean the introduction of a marketplace of faiths, or the institutionalisation of the idea that any faith will do. Government-funded state schools should, with the exception of a small number of Jewish schools, be Christian, and of those the great majority should be Anglican. This should be the case not only because it is the right thing to do, and the best way of securing the finest possible education for our children, but because it is our duty to continue and further the inherited faith of our country. Both believing and non-believing neoconservatives agree that Judaeo-Christian values should pervade our actions. As Richard John Neuhaus put it, 'politics is chiefly a function of culture, at the heart of culture is morality, and at the heart of morality is religion'.[341]

The government should finally repay the largely unrecognised work of the Church of England by spreading its mission throughout the state sector. Increasing year on year the number of children able to benefit from a traditional-values Anglican education will allow a new generation to reconnect with their cultural and spiritual heritage. It will allow them to grow within a moral and religious framework, and set them up in the best possible way for their lives as free and responsible citizens. There are many benefits from education within the Judaeo-Christian tradition: not only are children allowed to start off from the right moral place, but they are also provided with the earliest - and for many of them, the only - opportunity to understand the basis of western art, history and philosophy. Children ignorant of their nation's faith are most likely to feel alienated from the country they live in, precisely because, from the earliest age, they have been denied an opportunity to feel part of it. Their civilisation's literature becomes opaque, and walking around a great art gallery is all but meaningless.

None of what has been said means enforcing religious observance on adults, or any other such thing. It should be recognised that, while adults are free to make their own decisions, children should not be treated in the same way. The best way to bring up a child in Britain is to bring it up in the tradition of Judaeo-Christian ethics and morals, with the benefits of the great books this entails. The effects of taking these morals away can be seen every day among the young on Britain's streets. We should recall Eliot's warning from 1934:

Do you need to be told that even such modest attainments

As you can boast in the way of polite society

Will hardly survive the Faith to which they owe their significance?[342]

It is time that grown-ups owned up to their most fundamental duty to the young, and once again gave them the best possible start in life.

The attitude towards Muslim schools should be exceptional. Islamic extremism is today the most explicit enemy of our society. It is the declared intention of Islamic extremists to undermine the traditions of this country and replace them with subservience to the dar el-Islam. Though the number of people intent on violent jihad against Britain may currently be small, we must also take into account those intent on jihad by other means. Islam is a proselytising faith, and one that is incompatible with British history, British law and British society.[343] With nearly two million Muslims currently living within Britain's borders, no risk whatsoever should be taken. Exclusively Muslim, madrasah-like schools are a breeding ground for segregation and anti-western hate, and even many within the Muslim community acknowledge this. If any Muslim academies are allowed to exist, they should be funded entirely privately, with no taxpayer assistance, and should be subject to uniquely strict regulation and inspection. If such conditions are considered unbearable, then Muslims will have to try their luck in other countries. Britain has no obligation to entertain peoples opposed to or antagonistic to our way of life. The hatred expressed not towards our government, but towards our society by Muslims since the war on terror began is ample evidence that the Muslim community in Britain is innately hostile and opposed to any integration within British society. Britain must start implementing its response.

For we have allowed the Straussian-nightmare end point of relativism to arrive, in which intolerance towards our society is treated as a value 'equal in dignity' to tolerance.[344] Our only reaction to this situation is not to allow our tolerance to destroy us - we must not allow tolerance to prove the Achilles heel of our freedom. To defend our tolerance we must be intolerant to those who are opposed to us, even when we express tolerance. We must not tolerate them. Some people will claim this is racism, but it is not - it is not about race, but about ideology, and about protecting our own. If people wish to say this is racist, then there is no way of stopping them: they will merely devalue the word further.

Recent years have shown that the threat of Islam on the streets of Europe is real. Throughout our cities, Muslims have been allowed to preach a variant gospel of hatred towards our society. And we have funded them: we have paid for their mosques; we have paid welfare to their people. Yet even after the first attacks on the British mainland, the British government's reaction has lacked seriousness. In the wake of the first London bombings, police were dispatched to protect mosques, as though violence against Islam, and not the violence of Islam, were the problem. These are the early signs of societal suicide. Dole-reliant Imams have been financed by our state, and their murderous disciples have, with savagery and cowardice, attacked us. The government remains unwilling - because scared - to recognise that its immigration and multiculturalism policies have allowed this threat within our society. The moves to counter it must be harsh, and mosques and centres that have been preaching hatred must be closed down entirely. Treating the Islamist threat seriously means being wary of allowing the Trojan horse into our midst. At the very least it means ensuring that the Trojan horse is not built from our own materials of tolerance and fairness.

Our failure to defend ourselves and stand up to our enemies is founded in our relativism. British schools and universities should begin the fight-back against relativism and the other forces hostile to our society by rooting themselves in our nation's faith. But they should also be rooted in a proper understanding of our nation's past. The teaching of history in schools in particular must be radically altered, not only in order to teach British children what it is that makes them British, and why they should be proud of their identity, but in order to strengthen their ability to stand against the forces of relativism and Islamism.

A young journalist writing in 2003 single-handedly demonstrated the ignorance of a generation that has too often been brought up on narcissism and nothingness. Confessing that he and his fellow university-educated friends had no idea who had won the battle of Waterloo, he quite rightly used the opportunity to criticise the teaching of history in British schools. But he went on to say that, though he was entirely 1 ignorant of British history before the Second World War, and critical of the education system for letting him down, he was 'not one of those people who think we should go back to teaching "our proud island history" and all that propaganda'.[345] This is a perfect representation of the effect of an abysmal historical and moral education. The young may be so ignorant of their country's history that they do not know whether Britain won or lost Waterloo, but they have an opinion about what they are ignorant of. They may not know anything about the past, but they don't like what they don't know.

The presumption that teaching British history would constitute 'propaganda' is an ingrained attitude of a poorly educated generation. They may know very little about their country, but they know that to appear clever or sympathetic they should be cynical, critical and hostile to the past they don't know. As in the case of Allan Bloom's pupils in Chapter 1, this is an attitude assumed for free. Criticism of one's own and one's culture's past has become a short-cut to giving off an appearance of learning and moral seriousness: it assumes the rest is all known. Cultural relativism and an unwillingness to celebrate one's own culture have spurred this particularly modish form of vanity, which is not just a vanity of outlook, but a vanity of moral and intellectual presumption.

Of course, this is not a serious attitude; it is a false and frivolous set of opinions, cheaply assumed to be a demonstration of sophistication, but truly a veneer covering acres of ignorance and self-doubt. People have jumped to this end point without either the vital labour or the absorption of knowledge that true learning entails. Pupils in this situation are not merely likely to grow into bad citizens. Because they have left themselves open to it, they are more likely to be converted to all sorts of violent and vile creeds - political, spiritual and feral - that cannot be absorbed.

They have arrived in an end-place of sorts, but have not done the journeying, and so have neither sympathy nor understanding. What they have instead is a proportionately increased sense of rage and indignation. Children who take days off school to demonstrate against wars with countries they cannot find on a map are useless citizens, all emoting and no understanding. They are what this society needs least.

And of course they are the pupils of the counter-cultural generation who now lead British educational institutions, giving their own peculiar spin on world affairs to a generation of children now worse educated in the basics of their own country's history than any previous school-educated generation in Britain. When a strong dose of post-imperial 'guilt' is added to a class of students who know nothing of empire, the inevitable result is a morally skewed product. Teach a generation of children to 'feel' the burden of slavery without teaching them the origins of the trade or ever suggesting that pupils might feel concomitant cultural pride in its abolition, and it is no wonder you get a generation whose persistent reflex reaction as a society is to ask self-absorbedly, 'What did we do wrong?'

This lack of knowledge is yielding morally, as well as intellectually, impoverished results, for there is a meeting-point here of ignorance, nihilism and the cult of 'self-esteem'. The education system in Britain has, for a generation, cultivated the nurturing of esteem over the nurturing of knowledge and expertise.[346] Concern that some pupils may feel loss of esteem if they are tested on facts has meant that much of the school curriculum (notably in history and English) has become little more than an empathy test. To begin to overcome this, we should start caring less about how people feel, and judge students on what they know. The nurturing of self-esteem is clearly a problem, not the solution, when that self-esteem smothers the teaching of productive competitiveness and excellence. As Irving Kristol wrote thirty years ago, 'The only authentic criterion for judging any economic or political system, or any set of social institutions, is this: what kind of people emerge from them?'[347] As anyone walking through a town centre today can testify, a large proportion of the people our educational systems are producing are not very nice. This is not something that is inevitable, and nor is it the result of a freakish nationwide coincidence. It is the direct result of cultural relativism, society's modish unwillingness to defend the supremacy of its values, and an unwillingness, from the top down, to resist lesser and expressly obnoxious creeds.

In his portrait of his friend Allan Bloom, Saul Bellow described how:

He didn't ask, 'Where will you spend eternity?' as religious the-end-is-near picketers did, but rather, 'With what, in this modern democracy, will you meet the demands of your soul?'[348]

This, at least, is the question we must be asking of - and answering with - our young. Nearly forty years ago Leo Strauss wrote: 'Liberal education reminds those members of a mass democracy who have ears to hear, of human greatness.'[349] That greatness is what the young must once again be encouraged to aim for and extol. To do the opposite - to elevate the pedestrian and encourage the base - is not just to do a disservice to a generation: it is to abandon them, from the beginning of their lives, to thwarted existences of bafflement, ignorance and rage. With no light to climb to, they will not simply remain in the cave - they will see no reason why they should wish to leave it.

SOCIAL POLICY

Neoconservatism holds that people are most able to achieve their potential when they are free and able to be heard within a genuinely democratic society. They do not believe that it is society's business to inject itself into people's lives as a matter of course, as socialists do, but on the other hand neither do they believe, as many conservatives do, that society can take absolutely no responsibility for the well-being of individuals. To this extent, neoconservatives are the only conservatives who formally recognise that there are limits to what can be achieved without the state.

Alone among contemporary political philosophies, neoconservatism is 'liberal' on issues of personal freedom, without allowing personal freedom to trespass on society's well-being. The problem of contemporary liberalism is that it can find no rational reason for preventing the extremes to which unchecked 'liberalism' has taken people. So, though neoconservatives are among those who believe innately in racial equality, they certainly do not believe that racial equality is best served by, for instance, the introduction of segregationist all-black schools (as do some among the 'equality' lobby) or any special treatment because of skin colour. The negative policy of 'positive discrimination' is absolute anathema to neoconservatism. Likewise, while obviously believing absolutely in sexual equality, they believe that women find neither equality nor freedom by being freed to ape the lowliest male thugs on a night out. And neoconservatives' attitude to homosexuals may be said to be along the same lines. Neoconservatives have absolutely no issue with gay rights. But they would say that gay rights do not include, and do not stretch to, rights that heterosexuals do not possess, or practices that would be criticised in heterosexuals. In other words, neoconservatives believe, on all such issues, that the wars of rights are won, but that the war to keep 'rights' within the acceptable limits of civilised society remains very much alive. Without any restraints on liberalism, the culture itself, as one neocon has put it, begins to 'unravel'.[350] 'For those who see in modernity admirable principles but also worrisome tendencies', writes Adam Wolfson, 'their persuasion will be neoconservatism.'[351]

Like all conservatives, neocons recognise the individual as uniquely valuable - the test of political order, not a mere cog in its machinery. For this reason, individuals must be free - not free to do absolutely anything they wish (the end point of 'liberalism'[352]) - but safely free so as to avoid anarchy or tyranny. To achieve this, the institutions that safeguard and protect us must be strong. All conservatives would agree on that. But neoconservatives recognise the particular manner in which institutions must be safeguarded. With an emphasis on individual responsibility, neoconservatives recognise that people should be held directly responsible for their misdemeanours, just as for their achievements. In recent years, conservatives have too often talked the socialist language of opt-out and blame-spread. Since neoconservatives hold individual liberty sacred for its ability to free people, so they hold that, if individuals are to be treated with respect, they must be held responsible for all of their behaviour. So neoconservatives must, for instance, lead a radical overhaul of the British benefits system. One example may suffice.

Britain currently has the highest teenage pregnancy rates in Europe, and we should draw from this not simply that our system for combating teenage pregnancy is not working, but that there is something actively wrong with it. Neoconservatives might be said to believe that people should never be penalised or praised for those things over which they have no control. So, for instance, people should not be singled out for either negative or favourable discrimination because of the colour of their skin. Likewise, people should be given the same opportunities for educational advancement, and not be penalised if they are bright and come from a low rather than average income family. But if people are rightly not to be held responsible or judged on what they cannot affect, it is only right that they are held responsible for those things that definitely do result from their own decisions and actions. In Britain the difference between the two is blurred, and often oddly inverted.

Neoconservatives suggest that within the benefits system, while mothers who have babies early and become single mothers are not to be 'punished', neither does society obviously owe them special support. Whatever we ourselves think of the notion, in Britain the perception persists among many that a life of ease begins once the welfare life has been embarked upon. The only way to change the situation is to take away that perception. Whether the young girls involved intend to become welfare mothers or not, it cannot be denied that the consequences of their actions are insufficiently dissuasive. This should change. As Irving Kristol has suggested, 'These girls should be made to look upon welfare not as an opportunity, but as a frightening possibility.'[353] It is, as Gertrude Himmelfarb noted of the Victorians, more important to do good to others than to feel good oneself. For all its faults, Victorian society was at least aware that people sometimes needed to 'restrain their benevolent impulses in the best interests of those they were trying to serve'.[354]

While society should always provide welfare support for children, and ensure that they have the best opportunity to escape from the unfortunate environment into which their mothers have brought them, the mothers themselves should be compelled to live with partners, parents or other relatives. In other words, the prospect of life-long support and accommodation should be withdrawn. People who enter such a life should do so in the full knowledge that they do so of their own free will, and that they, and not the state, are responsible for their future. Certainly there will be shrieks of protest when such a policy begins, but the effects of the removal of the welfare incentive will have palpable effects on teenage pregnancy rates within a small number of years, and society as a whole will benefit.

This is just an expression of the neoconservative philosophy that the era of 'rights' without 'responsibilities' must end. The present generation has done nothing to earn the rights it believes it possesses, and furthermore it remains ignorant of the origins of those rights. Neoconservatives make the case much more simply. They believe, like Locke and Hobbes, that the fundamental right is the individual's right to life. Other rights can and should be argued for, but the rights boom over the last generation has produced a raft of laws that are both 'ambiguous in their social content and mutually contradictory'.[355] There is no innate right to a flat, free flow of free money, or never-ending welfare. Society needs, from the top down, to re-evaluate its priorities. At the moment it is selling itself wrongly: as an endlessly beneficent cash-point rather than as an occasionally charitable donor.

Those reliant on welfarism are a drain on the country for more reasons than their mere lack of productivity, for this underclass is responsible for numerous societal defects.[356] One such associated problem is crime, a matter that is rightly one of the greatest concerns of British voters. Crime is the place where the effects of the counter-culture and other societal misjudgements are directly felt by the public. So, for instance, there would be no obvious reason why neoconservatives would be more than usually hostile to the private use of drugs. Except that neoconservatives know that this is not simply a matter of private arrangements between consenting adults. They know that the drug problem, and the post-sixties acceptance of it, is a scourge that directly impacts on the public experience, for it lies at the root of a majority of burglaries, muggings and other crimes. A user's habit is a problem for society, not just for the user, because society pays, through colossal increases in crime, for what is often misguidedly presented as an issue of individual 'liberty' or 'liberalism'.

The method of dealing with the drug problem in Britain comes under the neoconservative policy on crime and policing, as expressed by James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling in the 'broken windows' approach. It was this approach that was famously - and successfully - adopted in New York by Mayor Giuliani. It suggests, and Britain could do with absorbing more of this, that areas become crime ridden and unsafe for the free citizen because untended aspects of a neighbourhood spread. The 'broken windows' policy suggests that when, for instance, a window is broken and goes unmended, other unsavoury aspects of society have the opportunity to encroach. Slowly people take less care of their environment because it seems hardly worth taking care of, and soon no one does anything good because a gargantuan effort would be needed to effect an overhaul. Property is abandoned and left derelict as people move out.

Many areas in Britain - inner cities and outskirts - experience the reality of this theory. The neighbourhood declines and, as it looks more and more shabby, good families and good people do not want to live there. It is then that drug dealers, gangs and other criminals can create the sort of environment many decent people in Britain know only too well. People who are not rich enough to move out of the area have no option but to remain; and in order to remain they must keep clear of areas of their neighbourhood, and avoid intervening if there is any trouble. In other words, to remain safe the good people are forced into the position of having to do nothing.[357] This is a microcosm of societal breakdown, where the criminal dictate to the decent how the decent must live. Government in Britain has put up with this situation for too long, introducing rafts of measures that fail to tackle the nub of the matter.

The first thing needed to combat this situation is a strong police force, freed from restraints and governmental undermining, and able to use any force it deems appropriate to deal with the situation. Only the police fully know what is required on our streets - the government has proved itself desperately out of touch. The concept of the police, and the concept of the law as a whole, is fatally undermined when the government sends thousands of the fatuously titled 'Community Support Officers' out onto streets on which violent crime and gun crime are soaring. It is no use sending out representatives of the law who have no power of detention or the physical ability to deal with gangs and armed criminals. It is time the government trusted the police again.

The root of the present shackling of the police force lies, of course, in the destruction wrought by the infamous and shoddy Macpherson report. That report introduced and made acceptable the slur on the police force, and other great British institutions, of 'institutional racism', ingraining the notion that 'institutional racism' not only delegitimises the authority of the police, but requires them to continually justify their PC as well as their law-keeping credentials.[358] Since Macpherson, the police have themselves become the story - it is their failings that have become the stuff of endless exposes, reviews and reports. The report bolstered the assumption that multicultural credentials are of primary importance in tackling crime. Eager white, British recruits must often wait years before they can undergo even basic training, because the police force is compelled to spend time (and millions of pounds) on initiatives to attract minorities to fill positions in their new ethnic quotas. And then all recruits are put through insultingly banal and pointless multiculturalism sessions, as though police recruits are just waiting to get out there and discriminate violently. None of this does anything to improve the police force, or law and order in general. The police force's only job is to police successfully.

It is time a dose of realism was reintroduced in the matter of law-enforcement in Britain. By having to tip-toe around the issue of race and bend over backwards so as not to offend, the police are having their job made not just harder, but impossible. For as long as a disproportionate amount of crime is committed by young black males, young black males should be disproportionately targeted by police. For as long as Muslims, largely of Arab stock, commit terrorist acts within western society, the British police should disproportionately target young Middle Eastern-looking men for stop-and-search. This is not racist - it is responsible policing, and the least that is required to make British subjects safe. As soon as middle-aged British women start committing a disproportionate quantity of crimes, then they should be disproportionately targeted by police. As soon as blond Swedish men get into the habit of plotting and committing acts of terrorism against western society, then blond Swedish men should be repeatedly stopped and searched.

The restraining of the police force through the tyranny of 'racism' accusations puts the British public at considerable risk. Our police must target those who have committed, and those who are most likely to commit, crimes. The criminals brought to trial or apprehended should not be 'representative' of any class: they must simply be the people committing the crimes. And the police should not be 'sensitive to ethnic concerns', but should simply do whatever they have to in order to prevent crime. Any ethnic or religious group likely to be turned against the state because they have been, for instance, stopped and searched, is a group whose loyalty to this country is clearly not even skin deep. In the wake of the first London terror bombs, police spent much of their news conferences acting as the PR wing of Islam in Britain, while threatening the populace in a manner that suggested the British people could barely be restrained from carrying out retaliatory attacks on Muslims. This was all the direct result of Macpherson's absurd judgement: the British police ended up acting as spokespeople for the minority from which the terrorists came, and as the antagonists of the British majority. This was 'outreach', not anti-terror. The fact that a swathe of law-makers and opinion formers in our country are willing to risk the lives and property of millions of British people for the sake of the feelings of minorities within British society is demonstration of how little the counter-cultural forces in Britain actually care for our society.

To care more for an ideal than for a population is strangely reminiscent of a political creed that had been presumed dead.

IMMIGRATION AND NATIONAL IDENTITY

In all domestic decisions, neoconservatism offers a refreshing clarity. This does not mean that all decisions or all issues become easy, but what neoconservatism offers (and what mainstream conservatism still dare not) is clarity on where we are coming from, as well as where we should be going. The immigration debate is a good example of what happens when that clarity is missing. Immigration rightly preoccupies many Britons, yet successive Labour and Conservative governments have been unable to deal with it because the natural argument has become unacceptable to them. As Bloom and Fukuyama highlighted, the western elites cannot find a 'logical' reason why they should not let anyone and everyone into their countries. Though it has bypassed the attention of the political class, it has not bypassed the notice of the public that the 'morality' of immigration 'works in only one direction' (the multiculturalism enthusiasts still seem strangely unwilling to 'diversify' Saudi Arabia or Yemen).[359] As we explain to the people why they are right, and to the 'liberal' status quo why they are wrong, neoconservatives understand that the reason we have for closing the immigration floodgates is eminently rational - a reason which the public knows and which the politicians try to hush up. It is simple: Britain does not want unstoppable immigration across its borders because it wants to remain Britain; to remain identifiably British; and to remain so in perpetuity.

Only those who dislike our culture or feel envy or malice towards it wish the submergence of British culture. But even now it is not they who have the upper hand. The debate is dominated by people who feel ambivalent about British culture, not sure if they can express pride in it, and unwilling to declare 'for' this particular side. This is vain foolishness, and a foolishness that neoconservatism must cut through. Traditional conservatism, from the post-war Churchill administration onwards, has proved incapable of even beginning to grapple with this problem, a problem which Andrew Roberts correctly identified as having originated in 'the Conservatives' initial lack of energy and focus' during the first large waves of immigration.[360] A nation that dares not mention matters of race and culture is a nation that lacks the confidence needed to survive, let alone be a global leader. And it is a country that leaves itself open not only to the strongest, but also to the weakest of alien creeds. The prevalence of the vacuous and indefensible creed of multiculturalism is a manifestation of this. This multiculturalism, which has become such a rampaging force that it can close chapels, end careers, and force the populace as a whole to live under a petty tyranny of political correctness, is a barren creed, and not one to which we should pay any dues. Our society is right to welcome and encourage the benefits that limited immigration has brought, but multiculturalism is different, and is a creed that is disastrous for our way of life. As Samuel Huntington has put it, 'Multiculturalism is in its essence anti-European civilization...an anti-Western ideology',[361] a point Irving Kristol absolutely agrees with, adding that multiculturalism is 'as much a "war against the West" as Nazism and Stalinism ever were'.[362] We must become absolutist again - for our own good.

Once we are secure in the knowledge of who we are, and unashamed to declare that it is a good thing, we can begin to have a sensible debate about asylum and immigration. Only when the populace know that the government will never allow their country to be turned into a caliphate or ghetto will Muslims, blacks, and the concept of immigration as a whole stop being threatening to Britons. There are many ways in which government can contain immigration, and every way in which it can halt it. Any government that says otherwise is simply repeating banal and weak-willed lies. They are also storing up problems. The only way to create a satisfactory and humane immigration policy is to combine it with a policy that is unbending in its belief in the desirability of the nation's continuance.

The resurrection of our sense of national identity and pride is a vital step in Britain's progress towards greater global responsibility and influence. Our job is, as Tony Blair observed in 1997, to lead the world. But to take our place fully in the world, we must be confident of who we are. We must face down our enemies by declaring for ourselves. We must not allow those who dislike us to make us a test case for a fantasy society, in which all races are equally represented and all faiths and beliefs equally valid. Nor should the presumption that Britain's population must inevitably keep growing be allowed to persist.[363] We need to open out this debate more honestly if we are going to sort out this issue. Above all, we need to say once again that 'This is Britain, this is what we stand for, and beyond this line we will not budge.’

DEVOLUTION

Historians will one day wonder that Britain was persuaded into fracturing itself into a set of states at the same time as it was sucked further into an infinitely more cumbersome larger union of nation states. This simultaneous separation and integration epitomises the weak thinking behind much of the British 'liberal' establishment's views on Britain and its future. Petty nationalists have been elevated to positions of power, at the same time as nationalism in Europe is viewed with distrust and worse.

Any conservative must notice that the fracturing of Britain is an appalling development for the country, its cohesion and, by extension, its place in the world. But what neoconservatives also notice is how abysmal it is for democracy. Welsh devolution was brought in on such a pitiful turn-out and majority that its legitimacy must always remain in doubt. The case of Northern Ireland presents unique difficulties, which require a separate book. But Scottish devolution is the worst imaginable business.

Both Scottish and Welsh devolution are disasters. In both cases, the concerns of a minority, voted for by a minority, now detrimentally affect the majority, not just in their own countries, but in Britain as a whole. Even before a pound of the cost is counted, devolution can be said to have had a profoundly negative effect on the coherence of Britain and the British people. As Andrew Neil has observed, 'Those of us who are proud to be Scottish and British have become strangers in our own land.'[364] Devolution is an example of what can happen when a nation is whipped into a freshly reinvented frenzy by second-raters at home and sinister hate-mongers abroad. In the case of Scotland, devolution was whipped along not only by ugly zealots and petty nationalists, but by the racist fantasies of the film-maker Mel Gibson: the Scottish National Party (SNP) jumped undreamt-of percentage points in the polls after the release of Gibson's fantasy picture Braveheart (a filmic text-book example of incitement to racial hatred). The result is that the Scots are now lumbered with a monstrosity of a Parliament building, which has cost British (not Scottish) taxpayers just short of half a billion pounds, to house a petty and leaden executive. This 'Parliament' must now prove how vitally necessary it is by spending its time issuing edicts of the kind cited earlier, meddling with hospital chapels and people's real freedom of worship. Busybodies with a lot of money being wasted on them are more inclined than anyone to prove just how busy they can be.

Of course, this sub-Parliament puts Scotland and the UK in a uniquely difficult position. Devolution encouraged in the Scottish majority the appetite for complete independence (the inevitable result of granting a neutered Parliament was to encourage the desire for a real one). And south of the border, the price of encouraging the nationalistic posturings of Alex Salmond and co. has been that an increasing number of English taxpayers now call for the Scots to sleep in the bed they've made - if they can. But Scotland cannot pay for itself, and is currently using its limited autonomy to buy perks exclusive to Scots. When students north of the border avoid tuition fees for university, and pensioners get superior health care and financial allowances than their contemporaries south of the border, it is not the Scots who are paying for these treats, but the English - overwhelmingly taxpayers in the South East of England. This subsidising of Scottish citizens rightly causes resentment.[365] To avoid an eventual split, the prospect of abolishing even limited autonomy for Scotland and Wales must be considered. The eyesore in Edinburgh is too costly a disaster to be pulled down, but it could certainly be preserved as a monument and testament to outstanding human folly.

Scottish devolution as it currently stands is unworkable, unfair, and - were the effects not so culturally and economically damaging - only just short of laughable. Far from 'cementing the union' as New Labour claimed it would, a little bit of devolution has opened up the real prospect of complete independence for Scotland and the resultant complete break-up of the Union. The only way to avoid this appalling eventuality is for the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly to be gradually eradicated. Doing so overnight might prove unnecessarily contentious, but in time the popular appetite may be whetted for a recentralisation of power in Westminster. Neoconservatives must argue the case for this.

The Labour government, by acceding to demands for devolution, has created the wedge to split the Union. For the sake of Britain, British identity, and the British economy, Scotland must be reintegrated into the Westminster Parliament, and the devolved Parliament wound down. This can happen either sooner, by agreement, or later, once the Scottish Parliament has been allowed to muck up catastrophically. In all likelihood, we will need some such tangible demonstration of why the Union should not be split. In the meantime, Scotland will be largely in the hands of the unseemly pseudo statesmen and unreconstructed socialists who constitute its Parliament. Thanks to them, in 2004 alone, the Scottish executive added a further 11,000 jobs to the government payroll, at a further cost of £1 billion to the taxpayer. Only one in four of these new employees is a nurse, a teacher or a doctor. Scotland is in an unenviable position, with a quarter of its workers now employed by the increasingly turgid and unwieldy state.[366]

But the overall cost may be more than just billions of pounds, and Scottish voters may care to ruminate on the extent of this devolved folly. For though Salmond and co. claim to give their political life-blood to winning independence for Scotland, there will not be any recognisable Scotland in even fifty years if their immigration policy is adopted. Salmond claims that Scotland requires ever-increasing numbers of foreign workers to sustain its ageing population, assuming that an ever-increasing population is a good thing per se. Thus he advocates allowing larger and larger waves of immigrants into Scotland to shore up an easy life for its ageing present population. Basic equations on the ever escalating scale of immigration required for such a scheme have passed Mr. Salmond by. But since nationalism is the supposed aim, Scots should reflect that their leaders are currently preparing to make Scotland independent, for a future in which it will be overwhelmed by people with far less Scottish blood than most English, and with creeds that are far less easy to assimilate.

We can only hope that in time Scots and others recognise that, though we all benefit strategically from the Union, financially Scotland does disproportionately well out of it. To save the Union, the Scots must go no further, and the English must be restrained from a political backlash caused by a desire to teach the Scots a lesson. Neoconservatives, like all people whose primary concern is the welfare of the United Kingdom, must debate and argue the Unionist case, and show up the separatists for the destructive fools they are.

EUROPE

What is strange about this devolution habit is that it should coincide with the presumption of 'progress' towards a European super-state. If all European national identities are a thing of the past, as EU Commissioners believe, then Scotland and Wales are prehistoric.

Both Scotland and Wales have, of course, periodically done very well from the European hardship fund, but now these hand-outs have dried up. With Brussels' carrot-and-stick technique having moved east, it is time to re-evaluate what Britain actually gets out of this social experiment, which costs us billions of pounds a year.

It is no secret that the European Union presents problems for conservatives. Most are opposed to this new status quo, but have still not identified just where the problem lies. This matters, because a generation is in power - or is coming to power - that is busily steamrollering ahead with the creation of an entirely new society. It is a society that is hostile to our past, and capriciously inventive with our future.

The society that the professional EU politicians wish to create is woefully ill-conceived, a Utopia based on school-boyishly simple and long-disproved presumptions about human nature and the course of our future. They are perpetuating the most dangerous of contemporary myths - a myth many of them inherited from their days as fellow-travellers of communist ideologies. Reformed or closet socialists may not talk today of socialism, Marxism or communism, but instead of the more pleasant-sounding 'integration', 'unity' and 'perpetual peace'. But they are, nevertheless, spreading the most socialist trope of all - the myth of human perfectibility; a myth that not only led to the twentieth century's camps and gulags, but that has always led such ways. In persistently seizing on simplified notions of collective guilt for the Nazi horror, they are in danger of entirely overlooking the root causes of the other evil ideology.

The notion of human and societal perfectibility exists as a replacement for faith in humankind, not as an expression of it.

At its root lies an idea and a myth that are, as Irving Kristol would have it, 'woefully blind to human and political reality'. Even as they scoff at the simple neoconservative idea that freedom and democracy are things that could belong to all people, the socialists of Europe drag us towards a far more impractical 'post-historical' state entirely of their own imagination.

But if their vision of a peaceful, harmonious, state-free, multicultural future is inevitable, then why is it so? And who made it inevitable? Do they have an answer that suggests anything other than that these individuals are both the inventors and propellers of this 'inevitability'? This is not a 'progressive' or inevitable course of human history, but a means of inflicting alien ideology on the people of this country. Conservatives must expose this and explain how and why an ideology that is spurred on by personal nihilism and relativism must never be permitted to set up a new order. Foundationless 'progressive' politics is vacuity in search of meaning. To criticise the philosophy is to criticise the inventors of it, because the 'liberal'/socialists have only got the philosophy to fill a personal philosophical void. This is why the EU godfathers weep when referendums do not go their way, and viciously attack those who do not think as they do. The itinerary of this socialist agenda must be stopped at the same time as its lack of philosophy is exposed. Their agenda starts with the nation state, and so should ours.

An undoubted effect of the Second World War was that a certain English embarrassment at nationalism (famously identified in 1941 by George Orwell in 'The Lion and the Unicorn') gave way to a wider distrust and outright suspicion of nationhood. 'Nationalism' was identified as the problem, and as the 'nation' was responsible for nationalism, it was obviously the cause of the problem. At the time of the 60th anniversary of VE Day this argument was baldly stated by EU Commissioner Margot Wallstrom, who claimed that the war had been caused simply by 'nationalistic pride and greed, and...international rivalry for wealth and power'. Ms Wallstrom was joined by her fellow Commissioners in restating the modern EU's basic presumption: that the way to avoid an otherwise inevitable second holocaust is ratification of the draft constitution of the European state and the abolition of the nation state.[367] Before Holland's vote on the EU constitution, the Dutch government bombarded the people with television 'Yes'-campaign adverts filled with footage of Nazi concentration camps. 'If you say "No" to the European project, this is what you will go back to', they said, apparently with so little faith in the people of Europe that they are convinced they will engage in genocide, given the slightest opportunity.

The lesson went that, since nation states had gone to war, war could not happen if you got rid of nation states, or created really big nation states.[368] This is the ideological twin of the presumption voiced by proselytising atheism that 'bad things have been done in the name of all faiths, therefore all faith is bad'. These instances of reductio ad absurdum are entirely based in relativism. Besides, without relativism, perpetrators could not have assumed the role of victim, and from there, leadership. This is not worthy thought, let alone leadership, from the continent with some of human history's great civilisations. Others (not least America[369]) have revered what we have learned here, and what our past offers. The banalities of Brussels should be beneath us.

Roger Scruton recently noted that 'those who believe that the division of Europe into nations has been the primary cause of European wars should remember the devastating wars of religion that national loyalties finally brought to an end'.[370] But to remember such wars, of course, one would first have to know of them, and for too many Europeans historical reference begins and ends with the Nazis.

No wonder that under such circumstances one might consider the state to be the problem. Sixty years after the war, German public figures are persistent in their attempts to explain why Germany is once again uniquely wise, and its vision of the future superior. The German ambassador to London has complained that Germans are misunderstood and that the British are 'obsessed' with the Nazi period,[371] but his brother (Matthias Matussek of Der Spiegel) takes the argument a step further by claiming that: 'We have learnt the meaning of mourning and have a determination never to allow another genocide. In contrast, our British neighbours have not learnt much more than the triumphalist trumpeting of the victor.'[372] Never mind, for the moment, that this claim is both a lie, and a fantastical moral inversion, enabling Germans to portray themselves not merely as victims, but as uniquely wise because of that. The assumption of personal guilt under these circumstances becomes not just simple, but beneficial, and so it is no coincidence that Germans are prominent among those pushing for a super-state. For understandable reasons, the best of them have no faith in their own country's ability to remain 1 within its own borders. But that is no reason to impel a loss of faith in the state across the board. To read the German experience as a lesson to be taught to other European states - let alone those who put an end to German aggression - is to indulge not in victor's, but loser's justice. As Leo Strauss observed in a related context, 'It would not be the first time that a nation, defeated on the battlefield and, as it were, annihilated as a political being, has deprived its conquerors of the most sublime fruit of victory by imposing on them the yoke of its own thought.'[373]

There are great and urgent problems for Britain in this. To begin with, the twin mistakes of devolution and Eurocentrism have, between them, added two further obfuscating layers to UK government. This process is suffocating and damaging democracy - not least by eroding the vital necessity of democratic accountability.

It seems to have escaped the notice of the government in Westminster that the more elections the British people get, the fewer of them turn out to vote. With votes for MSPs, MPs, MEPs and local councils, people are right to raise the question, 'Who is representing me?' The answer is, increasingly, 'Nobody'. Certainly there are hosts of people representing areas, and representing interests. But the crucial quality of democracy is accountability. If the citizen has a problem, and that problem is not solved, he can use his vote to boot out the politician who has failed him. Under the multi-tiered form of government that has now arisen, no one knows who represents what. Your MP may be unable to act because of legislation an MEP has passed in Brussels. Your MSP may be unable to act because only an MP can sort out the particular issue (or so they will say). The country may all vote in a general election for one political persuasion, and Brussels can roll merrily along, unaffected. This multi-tiered government, from local to regional, national, and finally supranational representation not only permits, but encourages a culture in which buck-passing is commonplace and where genuine accountability is slipping ever further away.

But these are the most obvious reasons why people in general should be against European super-statism. Why neoconservatives should be particularly opposed to it is that Europe resembles a prototype of anti-democracy. Britain had one referendum on the Common Market, and from that it has been strong-armed into (and has been too weak-willed to resist) a raft of legislation, which today has a practical impact on the life of every Briton. The aim of the EU in passing its laws is, as George F. Will has observed, 'to put as many matters as possible beyond debate. Beyond the reach of majorities.

Beyond democracy.'[374] The elite is not only not keen to seek the opinion of the people - it is actively finding ways in which it can avoid hearing the opinions of the people.

If the governments of France and the Netherlands had decided, like many of their European colleagues, not to give their electorates the chance to say 'Non' or 'Nee', the progress towards super-statism may have proceeded unchecked. But Brussels now works on the presumption that electorates are holding back 'progress'. These are the foundations of tyranny. Of course, Europe is not going to have another holocaust like the last one. If anyone starts dressing troops in storm trooper outfits and herding Jews onto trains, Europeans will not permit it any more than will Americans. But totalitarianism mutates, changes and adapts: evil never returns in the same guise. In obsessing over the fire last time, Europe has taken its eye off the next storm. It is time to return to the Europe of the Common Market, to the Europe which believes its countries should live in peace with their neighbours, not under the same roof and the same rules. Slashing the bureaucracy of Brussels would certainly save money, but it is also a certain way to save freedom. There is no reason to wait. The UK economy is doing well enough not to have to be dragged down in a union with second-world states collated under the gaze of third-rate politicians.

Crucially, Europe must reject any attempt by Turkey to join the European Union. This issue may yet provide the death knell of the enterprise. With Turkish entry, under open borders, any terrorist (or non-terrorist) would be able to enter the EU merely by crossing from Iraq or Syria into Turkey. Offence will have to be given. Even a common-trading Europe must be a Christian club, a meeting place of Christian-based states with a common cultural interest. The Turks should be courted and afforded courtesy as friends and allies, but their entry into Europe in the twenty-first century is no more desirable than it was three hundred years ago.

In addition to Europe's damage to Britain's financial, cultural and defence interests, Europe has persistently caused Britain unwonted legal harm. Its courts have repeatedly delivered verdicts against the interests of Britain, most notably in the case of Kelly and Others v. The United Kingdom[375] where families of IRA terrorists killed by SAS soldiers (while the terrorists were on a murder and terror mission) were awarded massive compensation by Strasbourg on the presumption that British forces should have arrested the armed terrorists as they advanced with their bomb set. The soldiers, in other words, infringed the terrorists' Article 2 'right to life'. Terrorists do not have a right to life. Such judgements comprehensively strip Strasbourg of the right to have any say in Britain. If they are so lacking in care for Britain's right to defend itself from terrorism, then they obviously do not have our interests at heart. We should neither listen to them, nor contribute to this court of relativism - a court where terrorists become victims, and brave soldiers become guilty parties.

THE UN

In the run-up to the Iraq war one overwhelming presumption prevailed in the West among those who opposed the war - and even among some who were in favour. This presumption was that the UN had at least some authority to say whether the war was justified or not, and - even more strangely - whether it was 'just' or not. This last fallacy took in a good many who should have known better. The Bishop of Oxford stated that 'there was never enough international consensus' for the Iraq war, and Anglican bishops seriously debated the international legal conditions necessary for a war to be 'just'.[376] This is not, perhaps, what Thomas Aquinas had in mind. As they are among the few people able to pronounce doctrinally on just war, it is greatly disappointing to see bishops talking of UN mandates. The UN has no spiritual authority, no legal authority, and not even any very impressive track record in getting such things right. In truth, what has happened in recent years (as David Frum and Richard Perle have observed) is that, in Britain and elsewhere, the UN has become 'exactly what it pretends to be: the parliament of the world'.[377] The UN is not the parliament of the world. And it is certainly not an organisation that can deliver a balanced - let alone a truthful - opinion to Britain and her allies.

In 2003, on the eve of the liberation of Iraq, the UN was displaying qualities that would have been familiar to Jeane Kirkpatrick and Daniel Patrick Moynihan. For instance, the rogue state Libya was elected at this time to chair the UN Commission on Human Rights. Libya may be temporarily back in the fold, but Britons should not be quick to forget Libya's years, under its current ruler, of terroristic antagonism towards Britain. We should not forget the Pan Am terrorist attack over Lockerbie. We should not forget the assassination, from within the Libyan embassy in London, of PC Yvonne Fletcher. And we should not forget the years in which Libya lauded, funded and armed the IRA in the latter's murderous terrorist attacks against Britain. Libya holding any position, let alone that of chair, on a commission on human rights is an idiocy only possible at the UN.

In another UN coup, May 2003 was meant to see Saddam Hussein's Iraq (the only regime in existence to have used weapons of mass destruction) assume the presidency of the UN Conference on Disarmament. The fact that Saddam Hussein did not assume this position was only thanks to the removal of his regime by force in an action of which the UN (as with the Kosovo conflict) did not approve. Meanwhile Syria continues to sit on the Security Council, despite its rightful designation as a linchpin member of the axis of evil. This is a country which until recently occupied one of its neighbours, is led by an inherited dictatorship, and currently provides a training ground for terrorists preparing to cross the border into Iraq.

The UN's inability to recognise right and wrong, or to discern any moral distinction between the two, is not its only failing. Its failings are practical as well as moral. Too often it resembles the League of Nations, an organisation that led Niebuhr to write 'the prestige of the international community is not great enough...to achieve a communal spirit sufficiently unified, to discipline recalcitrant nations'.[378] And no wonder that prestige is still lacking when the UN fails as signally as it did in Bosnia, in Rwanda and in the Congo. All speak of an institution which, even if it means well, is hopelessly inept in acting on such good intentions as it has.

In 1995, inaction in the Balkans led a number of neocons to sign a broad coalition statement declaring that refusal to use force 'has relegated the U.N. to irrelevancy at best and complicity at worst'.[379] Examples of its ineptitude abound, even when non-military aid is called for. The UN response to the Asian Tsunami in 2004 was woefully slow and weighed down by procedure. Comparisons with the swift humanitarian responses of, for instance, the American and Australian armed forces, are not merely unflattering - they are shaming. For the UN to act more effectively, it will demand more power, more backing and more money. None of these could possibly be given to the UN in its current state.

Conservatives of all creeds must explain why the UN is a false construct and not what it pretends to be. The UN is a nice idea: it is an organisation founded on hopefulness and good intent. But the League of Nations was built on the same principles. Things do not become true because they are well meaning, or become right because they seem nice. The UN does provide a useful focal point for some global discussion. It does provide a physical symbol of international striving. But as the diplomat Robert Cooper has observed, the UN was founded in order 'to defend the status quo and not to create a new order'.[380] It is neither democratic, nor representative of our interests. Resolutions passed by the UN are significant, but must not dictate to us when they are wrong and influenced by tyrannies. To be dictated to by UN resolutions is to accept that we have offered up some of our sovereignty, or that our sovereign status has changed on the say-so of people who are unelected by, and unanswerable to, the people of Britain, and many of whom represent governments that are neither free nor democratic.

As a country, we must realise that the UN in its current form will never represent the interests of Britain or our allies. The organisation is weighted against us. The interests of the community of nations are not always our interests, any more than are the interests of the EU courts. But our interests and the interests of the UN will often coincide, and hopefully coincide more often than they diverge. It should be a source of interest and satisfaction to us when we are in agreement with the UN, but we should not consider ourselves ruled by the reactions of the body, nor seek its praise. We should not assume that our compatibility with it will grow, any more than we should assume that it will significantly decline.

We should certainly not withdraw from the UN, and neither should the US, as some have argued.[381] We should make the argument - and make others see - that the UN is a dream, not a reality. It should gain no more power than it has, because it is unelected, undemocratic and as such uniquely prone to misguidedness and tyranny. And it should receive no more financial assistance than it does: money paid to the UN is money siphoned off to causes that would better benefit from direct assistance. Most importantly, it must be shown that neither our national interests, nor the interests of the world as a whole, are best served by an organisation whose record has consistently been one of sinking to the lowest moral denominator on the grandest of scales. The UN cannot define 'just war', and it certainly cannot define, or pretend that it especially cares for, our specific national interest. An organisation that presumes to represent the interests of hostile dictatorships cannot ever represent the interests of great democracies. A generation disposed to view the UN's verdict as binding is a generation disposed to global relativism and one attracted by merely a more pleasant-looking form of unrepresentative tyranny.

THE WAR ON TERROR

Europe is still basking in its post-World War Two peace dividend, and trying all it can to prolong it. The desperate final phase of this flight from reality is epitomised by the attempt to abolish the nation state. The European assault on national identity has always intended to persuade the populace that - as Roger Scruton has put it - lay[ing] down one's life for a collection of strangers begins to border on the absurd'.[382] The experiment was planned that way, to make war illogical, indefensible and impossible. But this is a tremendous mistake on the part of the European project. It has relied on the possibility that the peace dividend can be eternal at the very moment that it has run out. Since 9/11 the gulf between America and Europe has been between a people who recognise that a newly re-emerged threat to our civilisation exists, and a people who live in the fond hope that it does not. For some people, none of the wake-up calls from the jihadists have had any effect - neither the foiled atrocities, nor those that have succeeded.

In Holland, two prominent figures, the politician Pim Fortuyn and the film director Theo van Gogh, who addressed the problem of Islamic terrorists in Europe, were both, and separately, assassinated in broad daylight on Dutch streets. In both the Netherlands and Belgium, politicians like the brave Hirsi Ali, Mimount Bousakla and Geert Wilders, who have spoken out against the jihadists, are now forced to live on army bases and require round-the-clock police protection. As with the assassinations, responses to such intimidation across the European press range from the silent to the celebratory (with Index on Censorship shaming themselves utterly by lauding this particular form of censorship on van Gogh[383]). The 'liberal' press and the 'liberal' establishment have been silent - not relatively silent, but utterly silent. It has all been reminiscent of that earlier collapse of 'liberalism' in the face of black violence on the campuses during 1968-9. Just as then (as Muravchik observed) 'Liberals just collapsed...I didn't understand it then, I don't understand it now.'[384]

Van Gogh was not a conservative, but it was only conservatives that spoke out against his murder. The 'liberals', the mouthy celebrities and politicians who had spent the previous years shouting and demonstrating against the use of force in liberating Afghanistan and Iraq, had between them not one word to say when the jihad arrived on Europe's streets. In a number of cases, they had worse than nothing to say. The Guardian and other papers implied that van Gogh had brought his killing on himself, and should not have been so 'provocative' against Islam. In Rotterdam, a local artist who painted a mural of a dove and the legend 'thou shalt not kill' as a protest against the killing of van Gogh was ordered by the local police to remove his work, after complaints from the local mosque that the message was an incitement and racist. Meanwhile, Hamas supporters were allowed to gather on the streets cheering the bloodletting. Cowed by political correctness, Dutch reporters stated not that the groups were Islamists, but that they were 'Moroccans', as if their nationality and not their religion was the nub of the matter. Though there have been moments of tough talking, the general reaction of the Netherlands authorities has been that of a child who believes that, if it closes its eyes hard enough, the bogey-man will go away.

A similar but even worse phenomenon occurred in Spain after March 2004, when Islamic militant immigrants (paying their way in Spain as drug dealers) killed two hundred people and injured many more when they bombed the morning commuter trains of Madrid. This was strategically planned to affect the outcome of the election later that week, and the Spanish electorate duly responded by voting out their government and electing the opposition socialists, who had promised (and were true to their word) that if elected they would order a Spanish retreat from Iraq. Despite this appeasement of the terrorists, more bombs (fortunately discovered and defused) were planted later. Yet, not content with its servile attitude to terror, the new socialist government in Spain spent the year after its surprise election waging war on the Roman Catholic Church in Spain, slashing funding of the Church, and simultaneously funding massive increases in the state teaching of Islam. Even though terrorists have attempted to bomb Spain 1 again since his election, the socialist Mr Zapatero remains convinced that the problem is with his people, not the terrorists, and that the Spanish terrorist swamps must be placated rather than drained.

We have seen how Germany tried to respond to Islamic fundamentalist attack by diverting attention towards America. A similar trick was performed by France. Having done everything they could not to engage in the war in Iraq, the French still found that it was an oil tanker of theirs that was attacked off the coast of Yemen in October 2002. Europe still does not get it. Trying desperately to pretend that there is no jihad and no problem of millions of dissident, angry Islamists inside its borders, Europe is still asking: 'What did we do?' and 'Was it something we said?' The terrorist war against the West may only be in its earliest stages, but Europe's first reactions are unpromising. Its governments are favouring opt-out when it is clear that opt-out from terrorist attack is not an option. In the ultimate gesture of ultra-appeasement, some Europhiles, like the serially wrong Timothy Garton-Ash, even believe that the terrorist attacks demonstrate a need to let more Muslims into Europe, as a gesture of goodwill or, amazingly, penance.[385]

So the question for Britain is 'Whither Britain?' Do we keep ourselves allied with America, or go the way of Europe? Or do we try a freestyle approach somewhere in the middle? The answer is obvious, and our American allies know how important it is that Britain should make the right choice. The only possible choice is that we maintain our distance from the disastrous politics and military of Europe, and re-arm for a new and strategically challenging conflict.[386] In 2002, and many times since, Condoleezza Rice has 'exhort[ed] our freedom loving allies, such as those in Europe, to increase their military capabilities'.[387] Our European allies are not taking these warnings seriously, seeming to believe that some elaborate and expensive game of bluff is being played by Washington. But just as, in their early days, it was the neocons that were most aware of the communist threat, so now they are more in tune with the seriousness of the current situation.

Re-armament, including the development of increasingly high-tech missile technology, is vital if Britain is going to continue to be able to participate in the targeted warfare of the new century. We are entering a time when regimes could be deposed by the use of a single missile, and widespread 'collateral damage' could become a thing of the past. To meet such needs, we should, as Richard Perle and David Frum have suggested, form a new coalition, in which a closed circle of allies forms a mutually beneficial defence-procurement market. Perle and Frum suggest that Britain, America, Canada and Australia could form such a club - each benefiting from the advances made by the others.[388] To this list we should add Israel, which is as much at the front line of the war on terror now as it has always been. This would not merely enhance the development of advanced weaponry on our side, but would solidify an axis, and highlight to our erstwhile allies the immediate consequences of appeasement, buck-passing and attempts at opt-out.

As regards our European neighbours, greater co-operation in the war on terror should begin with a pilot project to see how successfully European police forces can pool information on terrorists and terrorist suspects. If the data-sharing pilot is a success, then the feasibility of co-operation in other areas might be assessed and taken forward within certain limits.

The wars of the new century will necessarily be pre-emptive, localised and require shifting coalitions. There is nothing new in any of this. As Michael Gove has argued persuasively, one can even contend that this allegedly 'illegal' policy of pre-emption is historically a solid British policy, having, on a number of occasions, saved a world 'where international law could still be practised'.[389] There is nothing new in this policy, and in an age of WMD proliferation, where western cities can be targeted by rogue regimes or stateless terrorist groups, pre-emption is the only possible policy. Even Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) is no deterrent to the enemies we now face, and so there is no room for benefit of the doubt.

It is in such a situation that we, together with our allies - principally in America and Israel - must keep a close eye on Iran's nuclear project. Iran looks likely to provoke the Osirak moment of this decade. Neoconservatives and others should be clear: Iran must not be allowed to develop a nuclear device. This is not just because the nuclear spread is already too wide; that Iran is, with North Korea, the foreign regime most hostile to the West; or that Iran has extensive links with every terrorist network in the region. It must be prevented from developing a bomb because, uniquely, Iran has expressed (not least in the words of Mr Rafsanjani[390]) the desire to use it. Iran's intention to strike Israel and wipe it off the map has emboldened Iranians to believe they would only need one bomb. And they are right. No such attack on a democratic ally by a regime like Iran can be contemplated. Israel, America, Great Britain and other powers must use whatever force is necessary to dissuade Tehran from developing nuclear weaponry. Tehran is no ally. A pre-emptive strike on its nuclear facilities must be planned and welcomed, unless Iran can prove beyond any doubt that it is not developing nuclear energy for a missile. Those who think such a strike immoral or hawkish must simply state why they would be content and secure in a world living with the threat of a Tehran bomb.

On Britain's course of action there is, in truth, no choice. Britain's only decision is whether we want to work with a country intent on prosecuting the war against the terrorists and tyrannies, or sit it out with those intent on policies of inaction. Europe's display (with noble exceptions, such as Italy) of 'kicking the ball down the field' shows little determination to deal with the root problem or its effects. Too many Europeans believe that history has stopped for them. A 2003 poll revealed that fewer than half of all Europeans believe that any war at all can be just.[391] They are dreaming of a peace that they are no longer willing to protect. With European countries' combined military spending less than half that of the US, it is again no wonder that inaction seems financially attractive to the governments of Europe, as it did to the German government when it kept quiet on WMD before the Iraq war. If European countries do not vastly increase the percentage of their budgets spent on defence, their armies will not only remain dwarfed; they will lag behind technologically and become all but inconsequential on the battlefields of the twenty-first century.

If many European governments were truly honest, they would have to admit that the reason they do not support the war on terror fully is not just because they cannot afford it, or know that they can leave America to deal with it. Their inaction is largely due to the fact that they are scared of it - and rightly so, because the war is not on their horizon, or on their borders, but in their towns and streets. The inaction of Europe is caused not just by a laziness or stupor, but by the numbed realisation that it might be too late to take any but the most drastic measures to clear its countries of hostile terrorist cells and populations. The stomach for these drastic measures is only slowly emerging in the populace, and principally in the country most demographically threatened - the Netherlands. The Netherlands will have Muslim majority cities within this generation, and the Dutch people are beginning to wake up to the fact that they never asked for this, and do not want it. This may not be where multiculturalism was meant to lead, but it is certainly where it has led. It has led to host countries being unable to stop Hamas, Hezbollah and al-Qaeda demonstrations and supporters, because they have given such people rights that cannot be breached.

Multiculturalism and the rule of 'rights' are now used as weapons to beat us - demonstrations of our weakness, not our sophistication. An al-Qaeda training manual found in Manchester in 2003 had as its Rule 18 that their terrorists, if captured, 'must insist on proving that torture was inflicted on them' and 'complain to the court of mistreatment while in prison'.[392] Such has been their tactics - they have used it in Guantanamo and they have used it in Belmarsh. Meanwhile, characters like the head of the Islamic Human Rights Commission have repeatedly condemned and expressed concern over the arrest of any Muslims in Britain.[393] We are allowing the advances that our society has fought for to be used against us, and used to drag us into darkness.

Britain cannot afford to let the threat continue. Britain's jihadists were already at work here, even before the first major assault on British soil. In writing (in 2003) that London is 'the real bridgehead of terrorism in Europe,' Bernard-Henri Levy was only giving voice to a well-known fact in the intelligence and policing communities of Europe.[394] Levy was writing in his book on the killing of the Jewish Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, beheaded in Pakistan in 2002 by a graduate of the London School of Economics, Omar Sheikh. By the time Sheikh murdered Daniel Pearl, the London college had supplied Osama bin Laden's service with three of its graduates.[395] That's three that we know of. Richard Reid, the 'shoe bomber' who tried to blow up and murder the passengers on a flight from Paris to Miami in December 2001, went to school in London. Asif Mohammed Hanif and Omar Khan Sharif were granted every luxury of the British welfare state before they flew to Israel in April 2003 to murder Jews outside a Tel Aviv bar. And there are the numberless others who have flown to join the jihads in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

And of course on 7 July 2005 the plotters finally succeeded in launching a wave of suicide bombings against the people of London. Before those attacks, many people in Britain had become sanguine about the terror threat, preached to by the BBC's The Power of Nightmares and other lies that there was no threat - that it had all been made up by neocons. But this line was as unsustainable after 7 July as it had always been. For too long certain Britons had decided they did not need to worry about the jihad, and ignored Britain's use as a base from which terrorists worked, and as a breeding ground from which terrorists were sent out to murder people abroad. For four years dozens of Islamist terror attacks on Britain were foiled by the police and security services, and the glad fools of the anti-war-on-terror lobby continued attacking the security services, interpreting news of security successes as government propaganda and evidence that there was no terrorist threat.[396] And as long as British Muslims only killed Jews in Israel, or British servicemen in Iraq, their crimes were forgiven, excused and equivalenced around by the British Muslim 'community' and their voluntary apologists on the 'left'. After the London bombings all the old faces like Tariq Ali and new faces like the Guardian's very own openly Islamo-fascist intern explained that Britain (the country which hosts them) deserved these attacks.[397] When they and others of their ilk equivalenced an attack on London with the attack on the terrorist stronghold of Falluja, not merely did they betray where their sympathies lay, they also performed the final prostration before the jihadists by claiming that terror is caused by reacting to terror - by prosecuting and punishing terror.

Not everyone, mercifully, is under the impression that Britain's response to terror should be to cower and ensure that in future it does not even offend the terrorists. Many Brits still have enough self-respect not to live their lives at the behest of the new fascists and their creed. But surrender is not the only wrong path: to be on the defensive in this situation is also to commit suicide. The only response to terror is attack, and the only viable plan of attack is the neoconservative one. By this formula, Iraq, as much as Afghanistan, was a test of our seriousness; a test (as Frum and Perle have put it) of 'whether we truly intended to wage war against our enemies - or whether we would revert to the pin-prick tactics of the past'.[398] The 9/11 atrocity was a wake-up call to the West that we could no longer tolerate the terrorists breeding in our midst or massing under hostile foreign dictatorships. And, just as 9/11 woke us up, the overthrow of Saddam Hussein was, as Niall Ferguson put it, 'the mother of all wake-up calls' to the enemy[399] - proof that the war would be dictated on our terms, not on theirs.

As Spain has proven, the terrorists cannot be appeased, and their cause cannot be negotiated with. When Osama bin Laden rails of 'the tragedy of Andalusia' he is talking of a deed carried out in 1492, some time before even Giscard d'Estaing first rose to power. When former Hezbollah leader Hussein Massawi tells us 'We are not fighting so that you offer us something. We are fighting to eliminate you', there are still people, even now, who think perhaps he's bluffing, or that he'll come around if we give him a few more centuries to get over Cordova. This is madness, self-delusion, and an invitation to destruction. No accommodation can be made with these people. They are not after a political settlement, but after an absolute military and religious conquest.

The fact that portions of the West cannot muster the energy even to fight a verbal war with the jihadists is an appalling fact we currently face. This is not a war in which every family is giving up its sons. Contrary to Norman Podhoretz's claims, it does not deserve to be called a 'World War', because it is a war currently waged by a professional army only.[400] The enemy is clear. Yet, even though the enemy presently in Iraq are the sub-bandit thugs of Zarqawi and co., the West is still replete with public and private figures who silently or openly desire the victory of what they (and the BBC) call the 'insurgents' - terrorists. When the choice is clear - victory for the Iraqi people, the US-UK armies and our allies, or for the terrorists - it takes an elaborately wicked enemy of western society to wish victory for the terrorists, people who daily target women, children and pensioners in Iraq. It takes a wicked relativist to condone terrorism, but in this so far largely armchair conflict, the number of armchair terrorists across government, public life, and especially the media - both before and after the first London attacks - bodes exceedingly ill for Britain's future well-being.

SO WHAT SHOULD WE DO?

The terrorists must be attacked wherever they are. The government should ignore how minority communities 'feel' about the war, and prosecute the war as best it can. This is war, not PR, and the prosecution of this war contains two strands. The first is here at home, where we must no longer tolerate those who plot within our society. Detention and imprisonment are our strongest weapons, but we have other tactics that we fail to use, such as deportation of culprits and suspects to their countries of origin, or to countries where they will face charges. Currently Britain cannot send immigrants plotting against British society back to their country of origin if the country seeking them is likely to harm or execute them. That is why the notorious cleric of Finsbury Park Mosque, Abu Hamza, and his numerous colleagues have been allowed to continue preaching jihad against the West and indoctrinating young men in the way of terror on the streets of London. Under Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights, Britain is forbidden from deporting or rendering culprits if their lives may then be in danger. But the lives of terrorists and inciters to terrorism should be considered as pitilessly on our streets and within our society as they are on foreign battlefields. The 'human rights' amnesty must end. Under current procedure, even extraditing terrorists to stand trial in the United States - our greatest ally - is made near-impossible by 'human rights' objections.

It is time for Britain to withdraw from the European Convention on account of its interference in our laws - the multiple obstacles it puts in the way of justice. Britain is still a sovereign country, and if we cannot protect ourselves, then we need to find out who is stopping us and act accordingly. The rights of the British people override those of the Islamists in our midst. If Abu Hamza - or anybody else who incites others to murder our people and culture - were aware that the choice is between us and Yemen, they might be less abusive of our hospitality. But if that abuse continues, we should not extend the rights we cherish to those who neither earned nor believe in them, yet daily abuse them. Britain has fought and earned many rights, but these are rights that we must refuse to give terrorists and terrorist-sympathisers who come here.

But the terrorists and the terrorist-inspirers who come to Britain do not only come in secretively. Britain's most amazing failing has been its willingness to welcome those who despise us. The socialist Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, spoke after the July 2005 London bombings of how appalling the attacks were. Yet in 2004 Livingstone entertained and welcomed at public expense one of the greatest inspirations to jihadists and suicide-murderers, Sheikh Yusef al-Qaradawi. Livingstone, like so many socialists, has throughout his career sided with terrorists and their masterminds because of his own political persuasions, and in 2004 he defended his entertaining of al-Qaradawi by compiling (at public expense) a dossier attacking and libelling his critics - a dossier which inexplicably discussed the 'crimes' of Zionism and the Bush administration. Yet Livingstone's pandering to extremism and uninformed flattery of Islamists cannot co-exist with condemnation of the bombers.

Clerics and 'community leaders' who claim (as the leaders of nearly all Muslim organisations in Britain still do) that suicide bombings targeted at Jews are legitimate, but that those targeted at Brits are not, must be exposed to the contempt and trial they deserve. Subsidiaries of Hamas and Hezbollah must be pursued with as much fervour and conviction as al-Qaeda. Yet it is not enough only for the terrorists to be removed from our society - the preachers must be removed too. For this to happen we must extradite, render and imprison. But we must also be unsparing in our criticism of those who have put the lives of British people at risk in their quest to fulfil an unsupportable and naive belief in multiculturalism. In other words, time must be called on the period in which Britain became the guinea-pig for an experiment with no justification or support, but every conceivable risk.

Abroad, Britain's course for the foreseeable future is to work as a valued ally of the United States. This does not mean that we are the mini-me of the States. On the contrary, there will be many occasions, as in Sierra Leone in 2000, when British troops lead the way. Our duties are neither to America nor to any other country: our duty is to freedom, security and democracy. The spread of democratic liberal states is our best hope for a world genuinely free from tyranny and from the threats to our security that hateful, unstable and hostile regimes pose.

The success of our mission is still far off, and there are many both within and without our society who wish that mission to fail. They have consistently crowed over the slow progress in Iraq and scorned the neoconservative belief that democracy, once encouraged in Iraq, would spread in the region. 'The promised democratic domino effect...shows no sign of materializing', claimed Halper and Clarke in 2004.[401] Yet if they had held publication for a year they might have seen the beginnings of that very effect.

In an extraordinary set of events after the Iraqi election in January 2005, Paul Wolfowitz's Iraqi vision began to be vindicated. As he wrote in 2003, 'Terrorists recognize that Iraq is on a course towards self-government that is irreversible and, once achieved, will be an example to all in the Muslim world who desire freedom.'[402] Syrian troops were peacefully forced out of their occupation of the Lebanon, and elections were then held. The death of Yasser Arafat allowed the Palestinian people the chance to take part in their own democratic elections, in which they voted in a leader with whom the West can at least talk. And Condoleezza Rice's tough style of diplomacy in her new role as Secretary of State has led to the promise of greater democracy in elections in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and other countries of the region. The Lebanese Druze Muslim leader Walid Jumblatt, no crony of the West, put it plainly in February 2005:

It's strange for me to say it, but this process of change has started because of the American invasion of Iraq. I was cynical about Iraq. But when I saw the Iraqi people voting three weeks ago, 8 million of them, it was the start of a new Arab world. The Syrian people, the Egyptian people, all say that something is changing. The Berlin Wall has fallen. We can see it.[403]

It is a Berlin Wall that has fallen despite, not thanks to, the hordes of free people in the West who turned out to be all noise, and who possess not a quarter of the courage of those who took their chance to vote in January 2005 in Ira.

Those who deny that change is happening are looking more and more desperate, and are ever more openly eager for the terrorists to defeat the free people of Iraq. That misguided and appalling hope flows from a simple, perverted desire to prove George Bush and the neocons wrong.

Therefore our fight should be prosecuted not only by the army and police forces, but by the general public, intellectuals, politicians and all those with any sense of civic responsibility. For most of us, this is mercifully a conflict without continuous civilian death tolls. This war is, for most people, still a war in 1 the world of ideas and abstractions. But this matters. For, as Irving Kristol has said, 'What rules the world is ideas, because ideas define the way reality is perceived; and, in the absence of religion, it is out of culture - pictures, poems, songs, philosophy - that these ideas are born.'[404] It is as a direct result of our rotten thought-culture, our relativism, and our inability to defend the good, that the war against western civilisation has won so many associates, converts and sympathisers.

In events such as the Bigley kidnapping (during which al Zarqawi and his terrorists inflicted significant damage on the British government by manipulating the British public's 'feelings'[405]) our enemies have shown that they know us better than some within our own society know themselves. A culture that has forgotten about war, or believes it is a thing of the past, can neither imagine, nor imagine the need for, conflict. Their societies are rich in accountants and bankers, but 'lacking in princes and demagogues'.[406] Though they cannot imagine the apocalypse, only a generation brought up on self-esteem would draw from that the conclusion that the apocalypse cannot therefore happen.

We know that other prosperous societies do not want to lose the privileges they possess any more than we do. We understand each other in this. But, though this pacific standoff is all very well for the moment in Europe, where the knowledge of our unwillingness to act is agreed on by the similarly inert, the same reciprocal understanding cannot exist with our enemies. Our present enemy cannot be negotiated with; our success in defeating that enemy will only be assured by the force with which we unite against it and the fire with which we fight it. If we forget that, or ignore it, then our peace and the future of liberal democracy will be in real danger.

Many in the West believe there is no danger: they have been told as much by munificent propagandists and agenda filled media outlets. Others support the danger threatening us. Yet others fulfil Fukuyama's 'Last Man' thesis, where people become enraged because they have nothing against which to struggle, and so struggle 'against the just cause' and 'struggle for the sake of struggle'. In this scenario, 'if the greater part of the world in which they live is characterized by peaceful and prosperous liberal democracy, then they will struggle against that peace and prosperity, and against democracy'.[407] You do not have to watch the ugly hordes protesting against meetings of the world's democratic leaders to see that this movement is now growing unchecked. And you do not have to single out the July 2005 London bombings - during the G8 meeting in Gleneagles - to notice how practically useful, as well as morally supportive, the anti-globalisation lobby has now become to the terrorists.

Some talk, and always will talk, of ulterior motives in the new world conflicts. They will talk of profits and undeclared agendas. They will talk of oil pipelines, even when such pipelines do not exist. And, of course, they will talk of Semitic conspiracies in the new century, as surely as they did in the old. They will say that we invaded Iraq, or toppled the Taliban, as part of a Jewish conspiracy, just as some of them claimed the war against Nazism was a Jewish-led war, and just as others saw the world war before that one as organised by and for Jews. The accusation is perennial, and as wrong now as it was then. Jews have always provided a scapegoat for those intent on attacking freedom and democracy by other means. It is not surprising that this age-old defect continues, but it is saddening and surprising to hear it taken up again in its latest guise with such vigour and bile by a generation brought up on racial equality - by people who turn out to believe in the concept completely, with the acceptable exception of one race.

All these ways of criticising our society are caused by the paucity of public and educational morality, the denial of natural right, and lack of awareness of the weaknesses within a culture we have taken for granted for so long that we are now unable to defend it. But the choice is clear: it is, as President Bush has it, 'us or them'. We will certainly go on arguing about tactics and approaches, but to deny that there is a conflict, or to claim that that conflict is other than it is, is to be either ignorant and lazy or wilfully mendacious.

This conflict did not start at home, but its destructiveness, 1 its amazing possibility to harm us, is caused not by the strength of our opponents' arguments or their strength of arms, but by the weakness within our own society. Many people have stated that militant Islamism cannot possibly provide the coherent ideological threat that, for instance, communism did.[408] Though there is truth in this, it is mistaken on two levels. Firstly, you can never predict (as I hope was shown in Chapter 3) what depths of shocking contrariness socialists are capable of: they will always surprise even the most profound pessimist. Secondly, though the current alliance between the forces of jihad and the forces of anti-globalisation and socialist reaction has been neither inevitable nor entirely comfortable, the experience of observing it over recent years confirms that it is the product of two groups playing good old realpolitik in a combined attempt to attack our culture.[409] They and their colleagues cannot win unless we allow them to. We are allowing them to by not adopting a rigorous enough stance in defence of ourselves and against them.

In his second inaugural address, in 2005, President Bush spelt out the neocon dream:

We are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion: The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.

America's vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one. From the day of our Founding, we have proclaimed that every man and woman on this earth has rights, and dignity, and matchless value, because they bear the image of the Maker of Heaven and earth. Across the generations we have proclaimed the imperative of self-government, because no one is fit to be a master, and no one deserves to be a slave. Advancing these ideals is the mission that created our Nation. It is the honorable achievement of our fathers. Now it is the urgent requirement of our nation's security, and the calling of our time.[410]

That calling is one in which Britain has nobly joined, and one in which we should persist. It is the sum of our inheritance, our faith and our responsibility.

Flush with success from Kosovo, in 1999 Tony Blair set out five precepts for humanitarian intervention: sureness of case, exhaustion of diplomatic options, practical plausibility, willingness to endure in the long term, and national interest.[411]

It was and is a perfect neoconservative list. Intervention and, where necessary, pre-emption must become the certainties of British foreign policy whatever the government. As the strong, we have a duty to defend the weak - but we can only do that if we remain strong. We must be forceful in our own authority and in the resulting assertions that human rights are something for which we are willing to fight, and that any tyranny is a regime we should aim to topple. This is not some new imperialism; it is, as Tony Blair put it, an expression of 'the universal values of the human spirit...freedom, not tyranny; democracy, not dictatorship; the rule of law, not the rule of the secret police'.[412]

Nor is it a new doctrine - it is the expression of forces of right and justice, which have always been the aim of British society and British law. For most of us, our responsibility is not on the battlefield; it is in taking part, whatever we do, in a society with everything to offer. If we fail to defend it, if we even become lax, or petty or absent-minded about our society, we sow the seeds of its loss. It does not seem, when set alongside what previous generations have done, to be such a challenging calling. But, as Pericles had it, though the threat may be less, that is not any reason to meet it any less vigorously.

Neoconservatism - whether or not it is called such - is the route back to the right path; the path by which true liberalism returns, strengthened and defended. Through it conservatism can regain the optimism, sense of purpose and mission that it has so long lacked - encouraging the good in the modern world and identifying, rejecting and fighting the bad. Through it we will show that the forces of counter-culture, which have so blighted our society, are not here to stay and are not any more inevitable than British decline or societal breakdown. Critics of neoconservatism claim that neoconservatism's time has passed.[413] We have been here before. The neoconservative moment - the conservative revolution - is not over. In Britain, at any rate, the forces that make it possible are awakening. With confidence in our power, and knowledge of a just cause, the myth of inevitable decline can be banished, the British people can regain ambition and hope, and the conservative revolution can truly begin.

THE AUTHOR

Born in 1979, Douglas Murray is a graduate of Magdalen College, Oxford. His first book, Bosie: A Biography of Lord Alfred Douglas, was published in 2000 by Hodder and Stoughton (UK) and Miramax Books (USA). Acclaimed on both sides of the Atlantic, the book became a bestseller, and was reissued in paperback in 2001 and 2002. While still at Oxford, Murray began reviewing for the Spectator. He has since written for many other publications, including the Observer and the New York Sun.

Since 2001, he has written widely in support of the US and UK-led wars of intervention. A columnist for, and formerly on the editorial staff of, the online magazine openDemocracy, he joined the Social Affairs Unit as a regular contributor in 2004.

He frequently lectures and debates in public, on television and radio, in support of the war in Iraq, and of neoconservative foreign policy in general.

Throughout 2003, Murray attended the Saville Inquiry into the Bloody Sunday shootings, to observe the evidence of the military witnesses. His interest in Northern Ireland, and the Bloody Sunday Inquiry in particular, is the basis for a new book due to be published after Lord Saville issues his final report.

Murray has been interviewed and profiled in the New York Times, the Daily Telegraph, Talk, the Guardian, the Scotsman, Vogue and many other publications.

He is also the author of a play, Nightfall, about the Swedish anti-Nazi hero Raoul Wallenberg.

ABOUT THE SOCIAL AFFAIRS UNIT

“Morals and manners for the new millennium...”

The Social Affairs Unit (www.socialaffairsunit.org.uk) addresses social, economic and cultural issues with an emphasis on the value of personal responsibility. We research, challenge and debate issues from welfare to warfare, always seeking to draw out the role of the individual’s obligations.

The Social Affairs Unit publishes books, reports, its web review and also the monthly cultural and political news-stand magazine Standpoint. (www.standpointmag.co.uk)

The SAU is a charity. This means that its role and ambitions are wholly unpolitical. So we don’t toe or promote any party line. More than that, we have no "corporate" party line of any kind of our own. We don’t "do" propaganda, but argument. The people who write our papers come from many backgrounds and disciplines. They are united in being interested in the value of personal responsibility to individuals and societies, but very diverse in their approaches.

The SAU is forward-looking. It does not favour the historic over the modern, nor the well-established over the innovative, nor the enduring over the fashionable, nor the traditional over the progressive.

Indeed, many SAU supporters are inclined to believe that the generation which fought the Second World War were rather too keen on social engineering over the goals of personal responsibility. That cherished tradition is now being reconsidered by people of every political party and none. People now young are likely to be reinventing the idea of welfare and we are interested to interrogate that process. Similarly, there is a long tradition of English disdain for entrepreneurship and affluence: that is now being challenged from all sides. The SAU is interested to investigate why the English have these mental habits, and what – if anything – we ought to do about them.

MORE FROM THE SOCIAL AFFAIRS UNIT

Thank you for reading ‘Neoconservatism.’

If you enjoyed it, you might like some of the other titles published by the Social Affairs Unit and available from Amazon as e-Books including:

Too 'nice' to be Tories?: How the Modernisers Have Damaged the Conservative Party

Anthony John Scholefield and Gerald Frost

It's nothing new for political parties to be out of favour, only for them to make remarkable recoveries. But in the curious mood of introspection and intellectual atrophy that followed its loss of power in 1997, the Conservative Party convinced itself that its 'brand' had become irredeemably tainted. It was so persuaded by self-styled Tory modernisers who seemed keener to embrace the accusation that their party was nasty, uncaring, out of touch, intolerant, selfish, indifferent to environmental concerns than they were to refute it.

The modernisers insisted that only a rebranding exercise, which would demonstrate that the party's character was undergoing a fundamental change, together with a resumption of the quest for the middle ground, could rescue the Conservative Party from a downward spiral of decline. The empirical basis for these assumptions was unsound: polling data, which was said to show that a policy became unpopular the moment it was seen as a Tory policy, was either flawed or misrepresented.

It is now clear that modernising programme has been a disaster. Despite the worst financial problems for decades and an increasingly unpopular incumbent Labour prime minister, the Party failed to win an overall majority in 2010, failed to eat into the LibDem vote, and also failed in most of its other declared aims. Mrs Thatcher had urged her colleagues to 'think the unthinkable'. The modernisation project, enthusiastically embraced by David Cameron, has stifled thought on the most pressing problems of the day. And it has badly-equipped the party to face changing political realities.

The final humiliation for those who remain loyal to core Tory values is to observe the rapid rise of new parties which declare their own beliefs in patriotism, the free market and social order.

About the Author

Anthony Scholefield is an economist and accountant who has been a self-employed businessman for many years. He co-founded the UK Independence Party in 1993; stood in various elections; was the Party Secretary and, for some years, the party operated from his office. He also worked closely with the NO Campaign; has written various studies and numerous articles on the EU, demography, public finance and immigration. His latest publication from the Social Affairs Unit is 'Warning: Immigration Can Seriously Damage Your Wealth'. Gerald Frost is a journalist who has written widely about domestic and international politics. He has been Director of the Centre for Policy Studies (1992-95), and head of the Institute of European Defence and Strategic Studies, which he founded in 1981. He has edited more than 70 books and monographs and has published In Search of Stability: Europe's Unfinished Revolution; Europe in Turmoil; Hubris: the Tempting of Modern Conservatives (with Digby Anderson); and, Not Fit to Fight: the cultural subversion of the armed forces in Britain and America. He has drafted speeches for Margaret Thatcher and Keith Joseph. His most recent book is Champion of Liberty, a biography of Sir Antony Fisher, the founder of the Institute of Economic Affairs, published by Profile in October 2002. He has contributed articles to a wide variety of British and US newspapers. From 2001 until 2009 he was editor of the fortnightly publication, eurofacts.

Coalition Government in British Politics: From Glorious Revolution to Cameron–Clegg

Edited by T.G. Otte and Jeremy Black

Single-party government, based on clear parliamentary majorities, is the norm of British politics or so conventional wisdom has it. History tells us otherwise. Coalitions have been a feature of British political life since the Glorious Revolution. And most of them were in office for long spells at a time. At different times, coalitions seemed preferable to single-party administrations, at others a vital prop to national unity in moments of acute national crisis; and sometimes they were seen as something best avoided. At all times, coalitions faced similar problems at their formation, during the lifetimes, and when they broke up, as they all eventually did. Frequently, they were the products of a national emergency. That in turn provided a strong, and convenient, political narrative.

The most notable coalitions were products of the necessities of war. In the twentieth century, the Lloyd George coalition in the First World War, transplanted into peacetime through a skilful blend of shrewd positioning and blatant corruption, was perhaps less obviously successful than its Churchillian successor between 1940 and 1945. Both, however, shaped British politics for years to come.

Regional devolution since the late 1990s, meanwhile, suggests that coalition politics have come to stay in one form or another. Indeed, future historians may well conclude that the alternate two-party majorities between 1945 and 1974, let alone the landslide majorities enjoyed by Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair, were something of an aberration.

Bringing together leading political historians, this book casts new light on past and present problems of coalition politics. It draws out broader lessons about the nature of British politics. Reassessing how and why previous associations between parties were formed and sustained, what undermined them, and which, if any, of its participants benefitted from them, helps to throw the problems of the present and the possibilities of the future into sharper relief. Coalition government in the twenty-first century faces the same challenges that past political leaders had to face; and that mostly defeated them.

About the Author:

Andrew Adonis, Baron Adonis of Camden Town, was Transport Secretary, 2007-10. He has written several books, including Making Aristocracy Work: The Peerage and the Political System, 1884-1914 (1993) and (co-ed.), Roy Jenkins (2004). Jeremy Black, MBE, is Professor of History at the University of Exeter and a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, Philadelphia, PA. He has published close to one hundred books, among them George III: The Last King of America (Yale 2007). John Charmley is Professor of Modern History at the University of East Anglia. A biographer of Duff Cooper and Winston Churchill, his latest book is The Princess and the Politicians: Sex, Intrigue and Diplomacy in Regency England (Hodder, 2005) and A History of the Conservative Party (2008). T.G. Otte is a Senior Lecturer in Diplomatic History at the University of East Anglia. He has been an adviser to the Foreign Office, and is the author or editor of a dozen books, among them The Foreign Office Mind: The Making of Foreign Policy, 1865-1914 (Cambridge University Press, 2011).

Mr Clarke's Modest Proposal

Theodore Dalrymple

The first duty of any government is to preserve the public peace and protect the law-abiding citizen. As the guardian of the public purse, and for the sake of the taxpayer, it should do so as cheaply as possible; and if its policy does not work, or provide value for public money, it is duty bound to change it. This is what Mr Clarke is preparing to do.

Crime rates in Britain have remained among the highest in Western Europe despite the fact that Britain also has one of the highest rates of imprisonment relative to its population in Western Europe. Moreover, the rate of recidivism among short-term prisoners remains intractably high. About seven out of ten prisoners given a short sentence are caught re-offending within two years of their release. Prison has thus failed to reform them, despite the high costs of imprisonment. The British criminal justice system taken as a whole, then, is not working very well. It is both costly and ineffective: the taxpayer gets the worst of both worlds. It therefore stands in need of reform and Mr Clarke has boldly seized the bit between his teeth. He thinks we ought to imprison fewer people and rehabilitate more.

Dr Dalrymple recently spent six weeks in Yeovil, in Somerset, a normal English town. This is an account of what he found there, and how well it supported Mr Clarke's reforming zeal. He discovered that there was indeed a need for reform; the system was not working. Whether Mr Clarke's reforms are the right ones is, perhaps, another question. If Dr Dalrymple is right, they will at least have the merit of making sure that policemen, lawyers, probation officers, insurance loss adjusters, hospital casualty officers and trauma surgeons will have plenty to do for the foreseeable future. There will be full employment and an expanding market for them, if for no one else.

About the Author:

Dr Dalrymple is a former prison doctor and psychiatrist of many years' experience. He wrote a column for The Spectator for many years. Among his books is Second Opinion in which he lays bare a secret, brutal world hidden to most of us.

Drug addicts and desperate drunks, battered wives and suicidal burglars, elderly Alzheimer's sufferers and teenage stabbing victims. They all pass through his surgery.

It’s the tragic world of ‘Baby P’ and Shannon Matthews – a place where the merest perceived insult leads to murder, where jealous men beat and strangle their women and where ‘anyone will do anything for ten bags of brown’.

In unflinchingly honest prose, shot through with insight, feeling and bleak humour, Dalrymple exposes the unseen horrors of modern Britain as never before.

Cold War

Jeremy Black

The term Cold War has had many meanings since it was used by George Orwell in 1945. Leading historian Jeremy Black offers a new, comprehensive and truly global interpretation of the Cold War. Professor Black dates the start of the Cold War not to 1945, but to 1917 and argues that China has played a much more central role in the Cold War than is often acknowledged. This book will serve as a powerful introduction to the Cold War whilst also offering many fresh insights to those who are familiar with its history.

Geopolitics

Jeremy Black

Addressing the role and understanding of geographical factors in international relations - past, present and future - Jeremy Black presents space, location and distance as key issues. As a field on which policy makers rest (or even unthinkingly base) their decisions, geopolitics calls attention to the context in which national security decisions are made and issues of war and peace are decided, and, more particularly, the relationship between strategy and geography. Classical geopolitics discusses the key importance of geography for statecraft and defines the relationships between the exercise of power, changing geographic constraints, and the opportunities for success and failure. Black considers not only geopolitics before the term was employed from 1899, but also the geopolitics of British power, the Age of Imperialism, the World Wars, the Cold War, and the situation since 1990. He also assesses the geopolitics of the future.

Politics of World War Two

Jeremy Black

Television and book, film and newspaper are full of images and accounts of the Second World War. Controversies are to the fore, as is blame. Should is the key term as far as much of the discussion is concerned, because the point is to blame. Thus, exposition and explanation generally find fault. The continuing overhang of the politics of the war is a key theme of this book, which aims to bring together two dimensions, those of the war as it occurred and its subsequent recollection. In doing so, there is an attempt to look for relationships that throw light on the conflict, on the processes by which events are understood, and on public history. An appreciation of the political issues of the time is important to an assessment of the subsequent politicisation of the discussion of the conflict.

About the Author

Jeremy Black is Professor of History at the University of Exeter and the author of The British Seaborne Empire, Maps and History, and War and the World, 1450-2000 (all published by Yale) and The Curse of History, What If? Counterfactualism and the Problem of History and War Since 1990 (all published by the Social Affairs Unit).

Criminal Justice Under Seige

By Jan Davies

British criminal justice is reputed to be the best in the world yet everywhere it is under threat from politicians, from bureaucrats, even from some members of the public who do not value its principles. By focusing on changes in some fundamental areas like the right to silence under police questioning, the treatment of witnesses, court procedures and sentencing practices this book shows how the principles of criminal justice are under attack. The discretion of judges and magistrates is being circumscribed. Juries are told what to think. Courts are given rigid guidelines for sentencing and told that they must be followed. Centuries of our Common Law are ignored in sweeping changes to the laws on evidence. Feminists threaten to distort the criminal courts' treatment of cases involving sexual misconduct and domestic violence, while draconian rules of procedure have been introduced in an attempt to increase the number of convictions. This is a practical book, of interest to lawyers but written in a style that should ensure it is accessible to interested citizens everywhere. British justice is a treasure that needs to be preserved. It is too important just to be left to politicians and legal bureaucrats and committees.

About the Author:

Jan Davies is a solicitor who has been practising in the criminal courts since 1983. She has been regularly advising in police stations and appearing in magistrates and crown courts, and spent five and a half years as a crown prosecutor. She is the author of The Reform of Criminal Legal Aid (published by the Social Affairs Unit), of The Criminal Advocate's Survival Guide and of numerous articles. An enthusiastic linguist, she speaks five European languages and is currently learning Polish. She is married and lives in Berkshire.

Inside

By Jane Kelly

In Inside, Jane Kelly vividly describes her daily life as a woman working inside Wormwood Scrubs, one of London’s toughest men’s prisons. She reveals the terrible world of prison which is based on containment rather than reform and results in a cataclysmic waste of human talent.

She also writes about her nights spent reporting for tabloid papers from inside the equally closed and nihilistic world of celebrity parties. She ran these two lives together for a year, with some flair until the prison authorities discovered she was a journalist.

This memoir covers her struggle to leave journalism where opinion is still freely given and provocative ideas are currency, to become a teacher, when she entered a culture befuddled and gagged by political correctness.

About the Author

After winning Cosmopolitan Magazine’s Young Journalist award, Jane Kelly arrived in London from the Midlands. She wrote for magazines including Company, Time Out, and The Spectator, whilst working as an auxiliary nurse in Lambeth. In 1983 she won a top prize in the Catherine Pakenham Award for women journalists and began working regularly for the Telegraph. Later she gained a staff job at the Mail on Sunday and Today. From 1989 – 2004 she was a staff writer on the Daily Mail.

Monarchy Matters

By Peter Whittle

2012 sees the Diamond Jubilee, the 60th anniversary of the Queen's accession. Such an important historical event will certainly be celebrated with the enthusiasm which greeted her Silver and Golden Jubilees - an enthusiasm which on those occasions took much of the country by surprise. Elizabeth II is now an institution in herself - widely respected, and held in great affection. It could be the biggest Jubilee yet. But what about the monarchy itself?

In this robust defence of the institution, Peter Whittle, the writer, broadcaster and director of the New Culture Forum looks at the continuing advantages of the monarchical system, and explores its current state of health. He describes its unique ability to act as a binding force in an increasingly fragmented society - a function which will surely grow in importance in the coming years. He explores the extent of public support for the institution, which, contrary to received wisdom, remains remarkably stable and unchanging despite what has become a largely antipathetic cultural atmosphere.

He argues that Bagehot's maxim that the monarchy couldn't survive if daylight were let in on magic has proved false, and that its survival after a period of unprecedented crises and media scrutiny is testament to its strength. He describes the ongoing benefits of a monarch as an impartial, non-political Head of State, at a time when the institution has been buffeted by a cultural onslaught from the left on one side and the impatience of free-marketeers on the other. He looks at the future, and the safety of a throne occupied by Charles III or a William V. Finally he makes some suggestions as to how the upcoming Diamond Jubilee might be celebrated - and why it offers a great opportunity for an increasingly atomized society to come together.

About the Author:

Peter Whittle is founder and director of the New Culture Forum. A writer and broadcaster, he has contributed to numerous newspapers and magazines, including the Sunday Times, the Sunday Telegraph and the Los Angeles Times. He is the film critic and a feature writer for Standpoint magazine. His extensive TV and radio work includes regular appearances on BBC 2's Newsnight Review and The Review Show, Radio 4's Moral Maze, and Sky News. He was the host of the UK's first internet cultural analysis show, Culture Clash. His books are Look at Me: Celebrating the Self in Modern Britain (Social Affairs Unit), Private Views: Voices from the Front Line of British Culture (Social Affairs Unit/NCF) and A Sorry State: Self-denigration in British Culture (NCF).

[1] Giuseppe Di Lampedusa, The Leopard, trans. Archibald Colquhoun (London: Collins and Harvill Press, 1960), p. 31

[2] David Brooks, 'The neocon cabal and other fantasies', International Herald Tribune, 7 January 2004, repr. Irwin Stelzer (ed.), Neoconservatism (London: Atlantic Books, 2004), p. 42

[3] Simon Heffer, 'What Enoch was really saying', Spectator, 24 November 2001.

[4] Leo Strauss, 'Relativism' in The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 13.

[5] Andrew Kenny, 'The end of left and right', Spectator, 5 February 2005.

[6] T. S. Eliot, Choruses from 'The Rock', VI.

[7] Peter Mandelson, The Blair Revolution Revisited (London: Politico's Publishing, 2002), p. xiii.

[8] Joshua Muravchik, 'The neoconservative cabal' in Irwin Stelzer (ed.), Neoconservatism (London: Atlantic Books, 2004), p. 245.

[9] Lyndon LaRouche, 'Insanity as geometry' in Children of Satan, 26 March 2003.

[10] Jeffrey Steinberg, 'The ignoble liars behind Bush's deadly Iraq war' in Children of Satan.

[11] Robert Bartley, 'Joining LaRouche in the fever swamps', Wall Street Journal, 9 June 2003.

[12] Jim Lobe, 'The strong must rule the weak: a philosopher for an Empire', Foreign Policy in Focus, 12 May 2003.

[13] See - or rather don't see - Tim Robbins' 'Embedded' and its inane caricatures of Strauss's thought.

[14] Mary Wakefield, 'I don't lie. Whoops, there I go again', Daily Telegraph, 9 January 2004.

[15] Will Hutton, The World We're In (London: Little, Brown, 2002), p. 96.

[16] Will Hutton, 'Time to stop being America's lap-dog', Observer, 17 February 2002.

[17] Will Hutton, 'A dark week for democracy', Observer, 10 November 2002.

[18] Hutton, Observer, 17 February 2002.

[19] Kenneth R. Weinstein, 'Philosophic roots, the role of Leo Strauss, and the war in Iraq' in Stelzer (ed.), Neoconservatism, p. 204.

[20] Jeet Heer, 'The philosopher', Boston Globe, 11 May 2003.

[21] Willian Pfaff, 'The long reach of Leo Strauss', International Herald Tribune, 15 May 2003.

[22] Muravchik, 'The neoconservative cabal', p. 247.

[23] Shadia Drury, 'Saving America: Leo Strauss and the neoconservatives', Evatt Foundation, online, 11 September 2004.

[24] Robert Locke, 'Leo Strauss, conservative mastermind', Frontpage Magazine, 31 May 2002.

[25] Weinstein, 'Philosophic roots', p. 204.

[26] 'Interview with Sam Tannenhaus', Vanity Fair, 15 May 2003. Complete transcript available from United States Department of Defense, 9 May 2003.

[27] Max Boot, 'Myths about neoconservatism' in Stelzer (ed.), Neoconservatism, p. 51.

[28] Werner J. Dannhauser, 'Strauss and the social scientist', Public Interest, Spring 2003.

[29] Werner J. Dannhauser, 'Allan Bloom: A reminiscence' in Michael Palmer and Thomas L. Pangle, (eds), Political Philosophy and the Human Soul: Essays in Memory of Allan Bloom (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1995), p. 5.

[30] Ibid. p. 4.

[31] Irving Kristol, Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea (Chicago: Elephant Paperbacks, 1999), p. 7.

[32] Anne Norton, Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004), p. 109.

[33] Letter from Werner J. Dannhauser to the Editors, New York Review of Books, 24 October 1985.

[34] Thomas L. Pangle, 'Introduction' to Leo Strauss, The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. viii.

[35] Leo Strauss, On Tyranny (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), p. 23.

[36] Kristol, Neoconservatism, pp. 7-8.

[37] Danny Postel, 'Noble lies and perpetual war: Leo Strauss, the neocons, and Iraq', an interview with Shadia Drury, openDemocracy, 16 October 2003.

[38] Pangle, 'Introduction' to The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, p. viii.

[39] Dannhauser, 'Strauss and the social scientist'.

[40] Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 93.

[41]Christopher Hitchens, 'Bloom's way', The Nation, 15 May 2000, repr.in Hitchens, Unacknowledged Legislation (London: Verso, 2000), p. 227.

[42] Strauss, Natural Right, p. 5.

[43] Nasser Behnegar, 'The liberal politics of Leo Strauss' in Palmer and Pangle (eds), Political Philosophy and the Human Soul, p. 255.

[44] Strauss, Natural Right, pp. 2-3.

[45] Ibid. p. 5.

[46] Leo Strauss, Liberalism: Ancient and Modern (New York: Basic Books, 1968), p. 5.

[47] Ibid. p. 5.

[48] Ibid. p. 24.

[49] Pangle, 'Introduction' to The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, p. xiii.

[50] Strauss, Natural Right, p. 34.

[51] Cited by Peter Berkowitz, 'What hath Strauss wrought?' The Weekly Standard, 2 June 2003.

[52] Published with On Tyranny, 2000.

[53] Allan Bloom, Giants and Dwarfs: Essays 1960-1990 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990), p. 11.

[54] Saul Bellow, Ravelstein (London: Viking, 2000).

[55] D. T. Max, 'With friends like Saul Bellow', New York Times Magazine, 16 April 2000.

[56] Martin Amis, Experience (New York: Talk Miramax Books, 2000), p. 225.

[57] Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), p. 17.

[58] Ibid. p. 19.

[59] Ibid. p. 25.

[60] Ibid. p. 25.

[61] Ibid. p. 26.

[62] Ibid. p. 27.

[63] Ibid. p. 38.

[64] Ibid. p. 40.

[65] Ibid. p. 40.

[66] Ibid. p. 60.

[67] Plato, The Republic, Book VII..

[68] Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind, p. 67

[69] Ibid. p. 67.

[70] Ibid. p. 85.

[71] Ibid. p. 192.

[72] Ibid. p. 80.

[73] Christopher Hitchens, 'The egg-head's egger-on', London Review of Books, 27 April 2000, repr. in Hitchens, Unacknowledged Legislation, p. 221.

[74] Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind, p. 74.

[75] Ibid. p. 226.

[76] Ibid. p. 147.

[77] Hitchens, 'The egg-head's egger-on', p. 221.

[78] Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind, p. 312.

[79] Ibid. p. 27.

[80] Ibid. p. 329.

[81] Ibid. p. 121.

[82] Ibid. p. 382.

[83] Ibid. p. 204.

[84] Palmer and Pangle (eds), Political Philosophy and the Human Soul, p. 5.

[85] Irving Kristol, Reflections of a Neoconservative: Looking Back, Looking Ahead (New York: Basic Books, 1983), pp. xiv-xv.

[86] Mark Gerson (ed.), The Essential Neoconservative Reader (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1996), p. xiii.

[87] Kristol, Neoconservatism, p. 6.

[88] See 'Memoirs of a "Cold Warrior'" in Kristol, Neoconservatism, p. 457.

[89] Irving Kristol, '"Civil Liberties," 1952 - a study in confusion', Commentary, March 1952.

[90] Irving Kristol, 'On "Negative Liberalism'", Encounter, January 1954.

[91] Irving Kristol, 'My Cold War', The National Interest, Spring 1993, republished in Kristol, Neoconservatism, p. 485.

[92] Kristol, Neoconservatism, p. x.

[93] Irving Kristol, 'Confessions of a true, self-confessed - perhaps the only - "neoconservative'", Public Opinion, October/November, 1979, p. 50.

[94] Quoted in Michael S. Joyce, 'The common man's uncommon intellectual' in Christopher DeMuth and William Kristol (eds), The Neoconservative Imagination: Essays in Honor of Irving Kristol (Washington: The AEI Press, 1995), p. 66.

[95] Kristol, 'My Cold War', p. 486.

[96] Interview with Mark Gerson, quoted in Gerson, The Neoconservative Vision (Lanham, MD: Madison Books, 1997), p. 7.

[97] Kristol, 'My Cold War', p. 486.

[98] Ibid. p. 486.

[99] Philip Selznick, 'Irving Kristol's moral realism' in DeMuth and Kristol (eds), The Neoconservative Imagination, p. 19 ff.

[100] Kristol, 'My Cold War', p. 484.

[101] Cited in Gerson, The Neoconservative Vision, p. 17. Niebuhr quote, in The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness (New York: Scribner's, 1944), p. xi.

[102] See Leon R. Kass, 'The need for piety and law: A Kristol-clear case' in DeMuth and Kristol, The Neoconservative Imagination, p. 112.

[103] Robert Glasgow, 'An interview with Irving Kristol', Psychology Today, February 1974.

[104] Irving Kristol, 'Spiritual roots of capitalism and socialism' in Michael Novak (ed.), Capitalism and Socialism: A Theological Inquiry (Washington: AEI, 1991).

[105] Interviewed on The Power of Nightmares, aired on BBC2, 27 October 2004.

[106] Kristol, Neoconservatism, p. 34.

[107] Michael Novak, 'Review of "Two Cheers for Capitalism'", Commentary, July 1978.

[108] Irving Kristol, Two Cheers for Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 1978), p. 90.

[109] Ibid. p. 91.

[110] Irwin Stelzer, 'A third cheer for capitalism' in DeMuth and Kristol (eds), The Neoconservative Imagination, p. 105 ff.

[111] Kristol, Two Cheers for Capitalism, p. 57.

[112] Gerson, The Neoconservative Vision, p. 352.

[113] Irving Kristol, 'Congressional Right has it wrong', Wall Street Journal, 18 November 1985.

[114] Irving Kristol, 'From the land of the free to the big PX', New York Times Magazine, 20 December 1964.

[115] Kenneth Weinstein, 'Philosophic roots, the role of Leo Strauss, and the war in Iraq' in Irwin Stelzer (ed.), Neoconservatism (London: Atlantic Books, 2004), p. 208.

[116] Irving Kristol, Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea (Chicago: Elephant Paperbacks, 1999), p. 7.

[117] David Brooks, 'Lonely campus voices', New York Times, 27 September 2003.

[118] Max Boot, 'Myths about neoconservatism', Foreign Policy, January/February 2004, repr. Stelzer (ed.), Neoconservatism, p. 47.

[119] Stelzer, Neoconservatism, p. 4.

[120] Norman Podhoretz, 'Neoconservatism: a eulogy', Commentary, March 1996.

[121] Irving Kristol, 'The neoconservative persuasion', Weekly Standard, 25 August 2003, repr. Stelzer (ed.), Neoconservatism, p. 33.

[122] James Q. Wilson, 'Neoconservatism: pro and con', Partisan Review, Vol. 4, 1980, p. 509.

[123] Kristol, 'The neoconservative persuasion', p. 36.

[124] Daniel Moynihan and Nathan Glazer, Beyond the Melting Pot (Massachusetts: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1965), p. v.

[125] Mark Gerson, The Neoconservative Vision (Lanham, MD: Madison Books, 1997), pp. 98-101.

[126] March 1975.

[127] Daniel Moynihan, A Dangerous Place (Boston: Little, Brown, 1978), p. 158: on Waldheim, see Simon Wiesenthal, Justice not Vengeance (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1989), pp. 310-22.

[128] James Q. Wilson, 'Gentleman, politician, scholar', Public Interest, Summer 2003.

[129] For the complete text of Moynihan's speech, see Mark Gerson (ed.), The Essential Neoconservative Reader (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1996), pp. 93-9.

[130] James Q. Wilson, 'Gentleman, politician, scholar'.

[131] Theodor Herzl, The Jewish State (London: Henry Pordes, 1993), p. 26.

[132] Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke, America Alone: The Neoconservatives and the Global Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 46.

[133] Jeane Kirkpatrick, 'Dictatorships and double standards', Commentary, November 1979, repr. in Gerson (ed.), The Essential Neoconservative Reader, pp. 163-89, specifically p. 188.

[134] Ibid. p. 182.

[135] James Mann, Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet (New York: Viking 2004), p. 94.

[136] Ibid. p. 121.

[137] Jeane Kirkpatrick, 'Neconservatism as a response to the counterculture' in Stelzer (ed.), Neoconservatism, p. 239.

[138] Ibid. p. 236.

[139] Ibid. p. 236.

[140] Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), p. 326.

[141] Kirkpatrick, 'Neconservatism as a response to the counter-culture', p. 240.

[142] Quoted in Gerson, The Neoconservative Vision, p. 176.

[143] Norman Podhoretz, 'The future danger', Commentary, April 1981.

[144] David Frum, The Right Man (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2003), p. 243.

[145] Mann, Rise of the Vulcans, p. 145.

[146] Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind, pp. 141-2.

[147] Leo Strauss, On Tyranny (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), p. 23.

[148] Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (London: Penguin, 1992), p. 280.

[149] Quoted in Stelzer (ed.), Neoconservatism, p. 10.

[150] See Kirkpatrick contribution to 'How has the United States met its major challenges since 1945?' Commentary, November 1985.

[151] See Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, p. 281-2 and notes 4-6 of Chapter 26, 'Toward a Pacific union', p. 385.

[152] Irving Kristol, 'The emergence of two republican parties' in Neoconservatism, p. 357.

[153] Quoted in Gerson, The Neoconservative Vision, p. 166.

[154] Jacob Weisberg, 'The cult of Leo Strauss', Newsweek, 3 August 1987.

[155] Irving Kristol, 'A conservative welfare state', Wall Street Journal, 14 June 1993.

[156] Brigitte Berger and Peter Berger, 'Our conservatism and theirs', Commentary, October 1986.

[157] Francis Fukuyama, 'A reply to my critics', National Interest, Autumn 1989.

[158] Francis Wheen, How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World (London: Fourth Estate, 2004), p.76.

[159] See for instance Joel Achenbach, 'The clash', Washington Post, 16 December 2001.

[160] Fukuyama, The End of History, p. 303; see especially pp. 303-7.

[161] Fukuyama, 'A reply to my critics'.

[162] Francis Fukuyama, 'The End of History?', National Interest, Summer 1989.

[163] Fukuyama, The End of History, p. xii.

[164] 'Responses to Fukuyama', National Interest, Summer 1989.

[165] Ibid.

[166] Ibid.

[167] Fukuyama, The End of History, p. 70.

[168] Wheen, How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World, pp. 66-71.

[169] Philip Bobbitt, 'Bobbitt on Bobbitt', openDemocracy, 4 November 2002. For Fukuyama on the resurgence of nationalism see The End of History, pp. 266-75; on Islamic resurgence see pp. 235-6.

[170] Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (London: Free Press, 2002), p. 31.

[171] Ibid. p. 31.

[172] Allan Bloom, in 'Responses to Fukuyama, National Interest, Summer 1989.

[173] Fukuyama, The End of History, p. 16.

[174] Joshua Muravchik, 'Patrick J. Buchanan and the Jews', Commentary, January 1991; Gerson, The Neoconservative Vision, pp. 315-16.

[175] See Dennis Ross quoted in Mann, Rise of the Vulcans, p. 190. Also see interview with Paul Wolfowitz by Radek Sikorski, Prospect, 1 December 2004; also American Enterprise Institute, 16 November 2004.

[176] William Kristol and Robert Kagan, 'Introduction: National interest and global responsibility' in Kagan and Kristol (eds), Present Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in American Foreign and Defense Policy (San Francisco: Encounter, 2000), p. 19.

[177] Margaret Thatcher, 'New threats for old', from a lecture delivered in Fulton, Missouri, 9 March 1996, repr. in Stelzer (ed.), Neoconservatism, p. 94.

[178] Mann, Rise of the Vulcans, p. 81. The Pentagon Study was declassified in 2003.

[179] Paul Wolfowitz, 'Victory came too easily', National Interest, Spring 1994.

[180] Jay Winik, 'The neoconservative construction', Foreign Policy, Winter 1988/9.

[181] Kristol, Neoconservatism, p. 40.

[182] Ibid. p.xi.

[183] Norman Podhoretz, 'Neoconservatism: a eulogy'.

[184] AEI Bradley Lecture Series, published 15 January 1996.

[185] Ibid.

[186] Charles Krauthammer, 'Universal dominion: toward a unipolar world', National Interest, Winter 1989/90.

[187] Charles Krauthammer, 'The unipolar moment', Foreign Affairs, Winter 1990/1.

[188] Richard Perle, 2001 interview with Brendan Simms in Simms, Unfinest Hour: Britain and the Destruction of Bosnia (London: Allen Lane, 2001), p. 339.

[189] Joshua Muravchik, 'Conservatives for Clinton,’ New Republic, November 1992.

[190] Quoted in Fred Barnes, 'Neocons for Clinton: they're back!', New Republic, 7 March 1992.

[191] Joshua Muravchik in Stelzer (ed.), Neoconservatism, p. 254. Also 'Lament of a Clinton supporter', Commentary, August 1993.

[192] Quoted in Simms, Unfinest Hour, p. 54.

[193] 'What the West must do in Bosnia', Wall Street Journal, 2 September 1993.

[194] Halper and Clarke, America Alone, p. 90.

[195] Letter to the President on Milosevic, 20 September 1998, Project for the New American Century.

[196] Interview in Independent, 23 September 2004.

[197] Norman Podhoretz, 'Strange bedfellows: a guide to the new foreign policy debates', Commentary, December 1999.

[198] Robert Kagan, Paradise and Power (London, Atlantic Books, 2003), p. 42.

[199] Ibid. p. 25.

[200] Lawrence F. Kaplan and William Kristol, The War over Iraq: Saddam's Tyranny and America's Mission (San Francisco: Encounter, 2003), p. 120.

[201] Kagan, Paradise and Power, p. 46.

[202] See David Frum and Richard Perle on Major Pierre-Henri Bunel's leaking of target information in An End to Evil (New York: Random House, 2003), pp. 237-8 and note.

[203] Michael Ignatieff, Virtual War (New York: Picador, 2001 ), p. 164. See also Lawrence Freedman, 'The Revolution in Strategic Affairs', Adelphi Paper 31, International Institute for Strategic Studies, 1998

[204] Ignatieff, Virtual War, p. 151.

[205] Comments of Governor George W. Bush, Memorandum to Opinion Leaders from Gary Schmitt, Project for the New American Century, 7 May 1999.

[206] Tony Blair, 'Doctrine of the international community', speech delivered in Chicago, 24 April 1999, repr. Stelzer (ed.), Neoconservatism, p. 107.

[207] See Brendan Simms, 'Bush's ideas men' (review of Halper and Clarke's America Alone), Sunday Times, 11 July 2004.

[208] Kagan, Paradise and Power, p. 51.

[209] Statement of Principles, Project for the New American Century, 3 June 1997. Available through www.newamericancentury.org

[210] Kagan and Kristol, Present Dangers, p9.

[211] Ibid. p. 21.

[212] Ibid. p. 20.

[213] Ibid. p. 16.

[214] Ibid. p. 13.

[215] Ibid. p. 110.

[216] Project for the New American Century, Open Letter to President Clinton, 26 January 1998.

[217] Ibid. p. 316.

[218] Ibid. p. 310.

[219] Ibid. p. 314.

[220] Ibid. p. 318.

[221] Ibid. pp. 322-23.

[222] Ibid. pp. 333-34.

[223] Ibid. p. 320.

[224] Mann, Rise of the Vulcans, p. 316.

[225] Fukuyama, The End of History, pp. 4-5.

[226] Kagan and Kristol, Present Dangers, p. 8-9.

[227] Halper and Clarke, America Alone, p. 139.

[228] Mann, Rise of the Vulcans, pp. 313-14.

[229] Ibid. pp. 298-9.

[230] Kagan, Paradise and Power, p. 85.

[231] Norman Podhoretz, 'World War IV: how it started, what it means, and why we have to win', Commentary, September 2004.

[232] Rumsfeld comment of 8 October 2001. Quoted by Paul Wolfowitz in his Speech to the Committee on the Present Danger and the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, Mayflower Hotel, Washington, DC, Wednesday, 29 September 2004.

[233] Quoted in Byron York, 'Clinton has no clothes: what 9/11 revealed about the ex-president', National Review, 17 December 2001.

[234] Secretary Rumsfeld with US Troops at Bagram Airfield, Afghanistan, 16 December 2001. Transcript via Defense Department website.

[235] Bob Woodward, Plan of Attack (London: Simon & Schuster, 2004), p. 281.

[236] Kagan, Paradise and Power, p. 28.

[237] Norman Podhoretz, 'World War IV'.

[238] President Bush's Acceptance Speech to the Republican National Convention, 2 September 2004.

[239] Mark Steyn, 'The right side of history', Spectator, 5 March 2005.

[240] Cited in Jeffrey Gedmin, 'The prospect for neoconservatism in Germany' in Stelzer (ed.), Neoconservatism, p. 291.

[241] Robert Fisk, 'We are being set up for a war against Saddam', Independent, 4 December 2002.

[242] Michael Gove, 'The deadly Mail', Spectator, 17 April 2004.

[243] Halper and Clarke, America Alone, p. 181.

[244] Quoted in 'Bush nominates weapons expert as envoy to U.N.', New York Times, 8 March 2005.

[245] 'Conclave begins with day of ritual', Washington Post, 19 April 2005.

[246] Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (London: Penguin, 1992), p. 332.

[247] Leo Strauss, 'Relativism' in The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 17.

[248] See Allan Bloom, 'Reply to Fukuyama', National Interest, Summer 1989; and Fukuyama, The End of History, p. 278.

[249] Marianne Talbot in Sunday Times, 24 July 1994. Cited in Melanie Phillips, All Must Have Prizes (London: Little, Brown, 1996), p. 221.

[250] 'School told to drop its "offensive" saint's name', Daily Telegraph, 4 November 2004.

[251] 'Hospital removes Christian artefacts', Daily Telegraph, 3 March 2005.

[252] 'Theatres told: meet ethnic targets or lose your funding', Sunday Telegraph, 15 May 2005.

[253] 'Violent protests will benefit axed Sikh play, says minister', Daily Telegraph, 22 December 2004.

[254] 'Lottery denies Samaritans "for neglecting minorities'", The Times, 10 February 2005.

[255] 'Refuge for homeless may lose grant for saying mealtime grace', Daily Telegraph, 3 May 2005.

[256] Fukuyama, The End of History, p. 332.

[257] Leo Strauss, The City and Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), p. 1.

[258] Mark Steyn, 'The slyer virus: The West's anti-westernism', New Criterion, February 2002.

[259] See, for instance, Ali's account of one of his television performances in The Clash of Fundamentalisms (London: Verso, 2002), p. 293n.

[260] See Noam Chomsky, 'Reply to Hitchens', The Nation Online, 1 October 2001. Christopher Hitchens, 'A rejoinder to Noam Chomsky', The Nation Online, 15 October 2001, repr. Love, Poverty and War: Journeys and Essays (New York: Nation Books, 2004), pp. 421-7.

[261] Hitchens, 'A rejoinder to Noam Chomsky'.

[262] See transcript of speech at www.zmag.org/GlobalWatch/chomskymit.htm 19 David Horowitz and Ronald Radosh,

[263] 'Noam Chomsky's jihad against America', Frontpage Magazine, 19 December 2001.

[264] 'Noam Chomsky: you ask the questions', Independent, 4 December 2003.

[265] Mark Steyn, 'Democrats down a hole', National Review, 31 December 2003.

[266] Hitchens, 'A rejoinder to Noam Chomsky'.

[267] Arundhati Roy, The Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire (London: Flamingo, 2004), p. 47.

[268] Ibid. pp. 33-4.

[269] Arundhati Roy, 'Come September', Guardian, 26 September 2002, repr. The Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire, p. 33.

[270] Roy, The Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire, p. 76.

[271] Benjamin Netanyahu, Fighting Terrorism: How Democracies Can Defeat Domestic and International Terrorism (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1995), p. 82.

[272] Roy, The Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire, pp. 26-7.

[273] Netanyahu, Fighting Terrorism, p. 128.

[274] Julie Burchill, 'Don't take my name in vain', Guardian, 29 March 2003.

[275] Patrick West, Conspicuous Compassion (London: Civitas, 2004), p. 40.

[276] See Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) report, 'Opening "the Locked Gates of Jihad'", repr. Frontpage Magazine, 19 February 2004.

[277] Ibid.

[278] Douglas Murray, 'An unholy alliance', openDemocracy, 23 October 2002.

[279] Guardian Letters, 1 October 2002.

[280] Response to Anthony Browne's 11 August 2004 Times piece 'This sinister brotherhood'. Anonymous of MAB, 'MAB responds to vile attack', MAB online, 12 August 2004.

[281] Mary Wakefield, 'I don't lie. Whoops, there I go again', Daily Telegraph, 9 January 2004.

[282] 'Philosophers and Kings', Economist, 19 June 2003.

[283] Geoffrey Wheatcroft, 'Blair still took us to war on a lie', Guardian, 5 March 2005.

[284] Anthony Glees and Philip H. J. Davies, Spinning the Spies: Intelligence, Open Government and the Hutton Inquiry (London: Social Affairs Unit, 2004), p. 91.

[285] Joshua Muravchik, 'Conservatives for Clinton', New Republic, November 1992.

[286] Peter Stothard, 30 Days: A Month at the Heart of Blair's War (London: HarperCollins, 2003), p.42

[287] See Peter J. Boyer, 'The Believer', New Yorker, 1 November 2004.

[288] See William Shawcross, Allies: The United States, Britain, Europe and the War in Iraq (London: Atlantic Books, 2003), p. 29.

[289] Saddam Hussein in January 2000, celebrating the anniversary of the Iraqi armed forces. Quoted on title page of 'Regime Finance and Procurement', Vol. I of the Comprehensive Report of the Special Advisor to the DCI on Iraq's WMD, 30 September 2004.

[290] Rodger W. Claire, Raid on the Sun: Inside Israel's Secret Campaign that Denied Saddam the Bomb, (New York: Broadway Books, 2004), p. 40.

[291] Ibid. p. 240.

[292] Review of Intelligence into Weapons of Mass Destruction, Chaired by Lord Butler, 14 July 2004, paragraph 499, p. 123.

[293] Jeffrey Goldberg, 'The great terror', New Yorker, 25 March 2002.

[294] Shawcross, Allies, p. 103.

[295] See Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, 16 February 2003.

[296] 'Ministers play down threat of smallpox attack', Deutsche Welle, 19 February 2003.

[297] 'The Germans and smallpox', Andrew Sullivan blog, online, 18 February 2003.

[298] Lawrence F. Kaplan and William Kristol, The War Over Iraq: Saddam's Tyranny and America's Mission (San Francisco: Encounter, 2003), p. 92.

[299] John Pilger, 'Blair is a coward', Daily Mirror, 29 January 2003.

[300] Independent, 29 January 2004.

[301] See John Lloyd, What the Media Are Doing to Our Politics (London: Constable, 2004), pp. 8-9.

[302] Daily Mail, 4 February 2004.

[303] Toby Harnden, 'Hoping for the worst', Spectator, 15 May 2004.

[304] Ibid.

[305] Tariq Ali, 'Re-colonizing Iraq', New Left Review, May/June 2003.

[306] BBC Newsnight, interview with John Harris, 18 January 2005.

[307] Naomi Klein, 'Bring Najaf to New York', Nation, 13 September 2004.

[308] Donald Rumsfeld, 'The price of freedom in Iraq', New York Times, 19      March 2004.

[309] Robert Fisk, 'An illegal and immoral war, betrayed by images that reveal our racism', Independent, 7 May 2004.

[310] Tony Parsons, 'We were hoaxed...by Blair', Daily Mirror, 17 May 2004.

[311] Mary Ann Sieghart, 'The case for the war undermined', The Times, 13 May 2004.

[312] Mark Steyn, 'This is one armchair warmonger still fighting', Daily Telegraph, 30 May 2004.

[313] Speech by President George W. Bush at United States Army War College, Pennsylvania, 24 May 2004.

[314] President Bush, speech to the American Enterprise Institute, 26 February 2003.

[315] See Mahdi Obeidi and Kurt Pitzer, The Bomb in my Garden (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2004), passim.

[316] Mahdi Obeidi, 'Saddam, the bomb, and me', New York Times, 6 October 2004.

[317] CNN, 26 June 2003.

[318] See Comprehensive Report of the Special Advisor to the DCI on Iraq's WMD, 30 September 2004 (Duelfer Report), Vol. I, pp. 119-21, 274-6. Early findings, as with the interim testimony of David Kay, summarised in David E. Sanger and Thom Shanker, 'A region inflamed', New York Times, 1 December 2003.

[319] See, for instance, the belligerently ignorant work of Peter Brookes: e.g. his Times cartoon of 17 May 2005, portraying President Bush pointing at a headline reading 'Uzbekistan: President orders civilian massacre'. The 'joke' is that George Bush's speech bubble reads 'Whaddayamean, take him out? He's just my kinda guy!'

[320] See John Lloyd, What the Media Are Doing to Our Politics, p. 209.

[321] Oriana Fallaci, A Man (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1980), p. 256; The Rage and the Pride (New York: Rizzoli, 2002), p. 176.

[322] Roger Scruton on Tom Nairn in England: An Elegy (London: Chatto & Windus, 2000), p. 254.

[323] Terry Eagleton, 'A different way of death', Guardian, 26 January 2005.

[324] Richard Gott, 'The prime minister is a war criminal', Guardian, 26 April 2005.

[325] Roy, The Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire, p. 84.

[326] Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, Evening Standard, 29 June 2004.

[327] Pip Hinman interview with John Pilger, 'Truth and lies in the "war on terror'", Green Left Weekly, 28 January 2004.

[328] Amnesty International Report 2005, foreword by Irene Khan, Secretary General of Amnesty International.

[329] Tony Blair, 'Doctrine of the international community', from a speech delivered at the Economic Club of Chicago, 24 April 1999, repr. Irwin Stelzer (ed.), Neoconservatism (London: Atlantic Books, 2004), p. 113.

[330] Quoted in John Kampfner, Blair's Wars (London: Free Press, 2004), p. 3.

[331] See Matthew Elliott, 'Let them tell us the naked truth about tax', Sunday Times, 3 April 2005.

[332] Irwin Stelzer (ed.), Neoconservatism (London: Atlantic Books, 2004), p. 20.

[333] Harriet Sergeant, Managing Not to Manage: Management in the NHS (London: Centre for Policy Studies, 2003), p. 2.

[334] Private Eye, 11 May 2005.

[335] Robert Skidelsky, The World After Communism (London: Macmillan, 1995), p. xiii.

[336] Irving Kristol, 'A Tory revival starts with a 10% tax cut', Sunday Times, 29 May 2005.

[337] Irwin Stelzer, 'Why Brown is wrong for No. 10', The Times, 19 March 2005.

[338] See especially Owen Harries, 'The Australia Connection' in Christopher DeMuth and William Kristol (eds), The Neoconservative Imagination: Essays in Honor of Irving Kristol (Washington: The AEI Press, 1995), pp. 35ff, esp. p. 42.

[339] Francis Fukuyama, The End of History (London: Penguin, 1992), p. 307.

[340] Irving Kristol, 'Thoughts on reading about a summer-camp covered with garbage', New York Times Magazine, 17 November 1974.

[341] Richard John Neuhaus, 'Combat ready', National Review, 2 May 1994.

[342] T. S. Eliot, Choruses from 'The Rock', VI.

[343] For further discussion of this matter, the author recommends Caroline Cox and John Marks, The 'West', Islam and Islamism (London: Civitas, 2003) and Robert Spencer, Islam Unveiled (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2002).

[344] Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 5.

[345] Johann Hari, 'Smells like teen spirit?' Independent, 1 March 2003.

[346] See especially Melanie Phillips, All Must Have Prizes (London: Little Brown, 1996), pp. 333-4 and passim.

[347] Irving Kristol, 'Republican virtue v. servile institutions', The Alternative: An American Spectator, February 1975.

[348] Saul Bellow, Ravelstein (London: Viking, 2000), p. 19.

[349] Leo Strauss, Liberalism: Ancient and Modern (New York: Basic Books, 1968), p. 5.

[350] Robert H. Bork, 'Culture and Kristol' in DeMuth and Kristol (eds), The Neoconservative Imagination, p. 135.

[351] Adam Wolfson, 'Conservatives and neoconservatives' in Stelzer (ed.), Neoconservatism, p. 217.

[352] See discussion of this in Roger Scruton's Conservative Thinkers: Essays from 'The Salisbury Review' (London: Claridge Press, 1988), pp. 8-9.

[353] Irving Kristol, 'A conservative welfare state', Wall Street Journal, 14 June 1993, repr. Stelzer (ed.), Neoconservatism, p. 147.

[354] Gertrude Himmelfarb, Poverty and Compassion: The Moral Imagination of the Late Victorians (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), p. 6.

[355] Fukuyama, The End of History, p. 296.

[356] See also James Bartholomew, The Welfare State We're In (London: Politico's, 2004), passim.

[357] James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling, 'Broken windows' in Stelzer (ed.), Neoconservatism, pp. 154ff.

[358] See especially Norman Dennis, George Erdos and Ahmed Al-Shahi, Racist Murder and Pressure Group Politics: The Macpherson Report and the Police (London: Civitas, 2000), passim.

[359] Peter Brimelow, Alien Nation: Common Sense about America's Immigration Disaster (New York: Harper Perennial, 1996), p. 241.

[360] Andrew Roberts, 'Black immigration into post-war Britain: a strange case of accidental imperial implosion' in Leonie Kramer (ed,),The Multicultural Experiment (Sydney: Macleay Press, 2003), p. 151.

[361] Samuel P. Huntington, Who Are We? (London: Free Press, 2004), p. 171.

[362] Irving Kristol, 'The tragedy of multiculturalism' in Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea (Chicago: Elephant Paperbacks, 1999, p. 52.

[363] See especially Anthony Browne, Do We Need Mass Immigration? (London: Civitas, 2002), pp. 37-47.

[364] Andrew Neil, 'A dual sense of identity' in Alan Taylor (ed.),What A State! (London, HarperCollins, 2000), p. 187.

[365] See also Simon Heffer, Nor Shall My Sword: The Reinvention of England (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999), passim.

[366] See Tim Luckhurst, 'England is mollycoddling Scotland into sclerosis', Independent, 29 June 2005 and Tim Luckhurst, 'McLunacy', Daily Mail, 30 June 2005.

[367] 'Vote for EU constitution or risk new Holocaust, says Brussels', Daily Telegraph, 9 May 2005.

[368] See also George F. Will, 'The slow undoing: the assault on, and underestimation of, nationality' in Stelzer (ed.), Neoconservatism, pp. 129ff.

[369] Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), pp. 320-1.

[370] Roger Scruton, The Need for Nations (London: Civitas, 2004), p. 16.

[371] See 'German ambassador's VE Day message: the war ended 60 years ago - get over it', Sunday Telegraph, 8 May 2005.

[372] Matthias Matussek, 'My personal VE day', openDemocracy, 6 May 2005.

[373] Leo Strauss, Natural Right, p. 2.

[374] Will, 'The slow undoing', p. 133.

[375] Judgment - Strasbourg, 4 May 2001.

[376] See, for example, Sunday Times, News in Brief, 22 May 2005.

[377] David Frum and Richard Perle, An End to Evil (New York: Random House, 2003), p. 266.

[378] Reinhold Niebuhr was commenting on the League of Nations' failure to punish Japan for its invasion of Manchuria, Moral Man in Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics (New York: Scribner's, 1932), p. 110.

[379] Statement by the Action Council for Peace in the Balkans, quoted in Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke, America Alone: The Neoconservatives and the Global Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 93.

[380] Robert Cooper, The Breaking of Nations (London: Atlantic, 2003), p. 58.

[381] Mark Steyn, 'Let's quit the U.N.', Spectator, 8 February 2003.

[382] Scruton, The Need for Nations, p. 9.

[383] The disgusting piece was by one Rohan Hayasekera, who continued to defend his piece in spite (or perhaps because) of protest and notice not afforded to Index for many years.

[384] Joshua Muravchik quoted in interview, 1994, with Mark Gerson, in Gerson, The Neoconservative Vision (Lanham, MD: Madison Books, 1997), p. 106.

[385] See 'Beyond the barbarians at the gate'. Timothy Garton-Ash interviewed by Dominic Hilton, openDemocracy, 24 February 2005.

[386] Frum and Perle, An End to Evil, p. 250.

[387] Condoleezza Rice, 'The President's National Security Strategy', from a lecture in New York, 1 October 2002, repr. Stelzer (ed.), Neoconservatism, p. 83.

[388] Frum and Perle, An End to Evil, p. 252.

[389] Michael Gove, 'The very British roots of neoconservatism and its lessons for British conservatives' in Stelzer (ed.), Neoconservatism, p. 274 and passim.

[390] See Rafsanjani's Al-Quds Day sermon at Tehran University on 14 December 2001, MEMRI Special Dispatch Series No. 325, 3 January 2002.

[391] Transatlantic Trends 2003, www.transatlantictrends.org

[392] Alasdair Palmer, 'This is al-Qa'eda Rule 18: "You must claim you were tortured'", Daily Telegraph, 30 January 2005.

[393] Leading article, 'Terror endures', The Times, 5 August 2004.

[394] Bernard-Henri Levy, Who killed Daniel Pearl? (London: Duckworth, 2003), p. 243

[395] 'Al-Qa'eda terror trio linked to London School of "Extremists'", Daily Telegraph, 27 January 2002.

[396] See Sir John Stevens interviewed by John Kampfner, New Statesman, 2 August 2004.

[397] See Tariq Ali, 'The price of occupation', Guardian, 8 July 2005 and Dilpazier Aslam, 'We rock the boat', Guardian, 13 July 2005.

[398] Frum and Perle, An End to Evil, p. 35.

[399] Niall Ferguson, 'The 'E' word', Wall Street Journal, 6 June 2003.

[400] See Norman Podhoretz, 'World War IV: how it started, what it means, and why we have to win', Commentary, September 2004; and 'The war against World War IV', Commentary, February 2005.

[401] Halper and Clarke, America Alone, p. 313.

[402] Paul Wolfowitz, 'Support our troops', Wall Street Journal, 2 September 2003.

[403] David Ignatius, 'Beirut's Berlin Wall', Washington Post, 23 February 2005.

[404] Irving Kristol, 'On conservatism and capitalism' in Kristol, Neoconservatism, p. 233.

[405] See Douglas Murray, 'What al-Zarqawi knows', openDemocracy, 30 September 2004.

[406] Fukuyama, The End of History, p. 265.

[407] Fukuyama, The End of History, p. 330.

[408] See, for instance, Robert Kagan, Paradise and Power (London, Atlantic Books, 2003), p. 81.

[409] See also David Horowitz, Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left (Washington: Regnery, 2004), passim.

[410] President Bush's inaugural address, 20 January 2005. Full text on White House website.

[411] Tony Blair, 'Doctrine of the international community', speech given in Chicago, 24 April 1999, repr. Stelzer (ed.), Neoconservatism, pp. 112-13.

[412] Tony Blair, speech to the US Congress, 18 July 2003. Full text on Downing Street website.

[413] See, for instance, Halper and Clarke, America Alone, p. 338.

Table of Contents

- Copyright

- ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

- INTRODUCTION

- CHAPTER 1 NEOCONSERVATISM IN THEORY

- CHAPTER 2 US NEOCONSERVATISM IN PRACTICE

- CHAPTER 3 RELATIVISM AND THE IRAQ WAR

- CHAPTER 4 NEOCONSERVATISM FOR BRITAIN

- THE AUTHOR

- ABOUT THE SOCIAL AFFAIRS UNIT

- MORE FROM THE SOCIAL AFFAIRS UNIT

Table of Contents

Copyright

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1 NEOCONSERVATISM IN THEORY

CHAPTER 2 US NEOCONSERVATISM IN PRACTICE

CHAPTER 3 RELATIVISM AND THE IRAQ WAR

CHAPTER 4 NEOCONSERVATISM FOR BRITAIN

THE AUTHOR

ABOUT THE SOCIAL AFFAIRS UNIT

MORE FROM THE SOCIAL AFFAIRS UNIT