He looks at results, not opening declarations of high principle.In his 2011 appearance at Carnegie, he talked about the need to promote democracy, freedom of speech and openness in the Arab world even if the results might be messy and hard to predict, in ways that many neoconservatives (and Lexington, for what it is worth) would applaud.
"It's a stretch for the neoconservatives to recruit the pope as the leader of the war on terror, and it's also a stretch to associate him with the uncritical acceptance of capitalism," says Paul Baumann, editor of Commonweal, a (liberal) Catholic magazine.But American conservatives are insisting that the assault on Saddam Hussein, at least, is not going to come between them and their pontiff.
The goal for neoconservatives, said Mr Kagan, would be to "build a consensus" so that neither party could bail out of the war.
A group of around 100 people, mostly scholars but some journalists, were gathered for a conference on Afghanistan put on by the Foreign Policy Initiative, a new think tank launched by neoconservatives Bill Kristol, Fred Kagan and Dan Senor.All of the faces that terrified non-interventionist liberals and by the end of George Bush's presidency, conservatives were here.
They had to endure a lot of it when George Bush was president and America's neoconservatives blamed the rise of al-Qaeda on the lack of Arab democracy.
The idea that it is hard to rebuild state institutions and what is now obscurely known as civil society is both true and unhelpful: unless you conclude from it that America should avoid foreign entanglements altogether, as the neoconservatives emphatically do not, it is of little operational use.
He says Mr Gates may not prove to be the realist counterweight to the neoconservatives that many expect.
But it's entirely accurate to count neoconservative policy analyses as among the important causes of the war, to point out that the pro-Israeli sympathies of Jewish neoconservatives played a role in these analyses, and to note the support of the Israeli government and public for the invasion.
Had the neoconservatives not been pushing for war from 1998 onward, it would almost certainly not have happened.
Characterising an entire religion in this way is considered entirely beyond the pale in educated American society; while some small right-wing or evangelical Christian organisations demonise Islam as an enemy, mainstream conservatives, and for that matter neoconservatives, characterise only radical Islam as a threat.
This is not a place Mr Bush invaded for democracy's sake (though some American "neoconservatives" argued that this should have been a central aim).
