To: skinowski who wrote (118058 ) 11/2/2003 4:18:25 PM From: Win Smith Respond to Ok, with the help of today's paper I can give a relatively concise answer, though there are certainly many other thread participants much more closely attuned to this particular branch of theology. My favorite article on the neocons in general is from, of all people, Andrew Sullivan, before his hothead warblogger reincarnation, see andrewsullivan.com . But the foreign policy branch is a little more specialized. A brief summary, from nytimes.com : In the mid-90's, Chalabi attended conferences on a post-Hussein Iraq organized by Perle and sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute. There he met a group of neoconservative and conservative intellectuals who had served in the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, including Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, who later formed the core group that would persuade President George W. Bush to go to war with Iraq. As a number of Iraqi exiles have since related, Wolfowitz, then the dean of the Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, was particularly appalled and shamed by the first Bush administration's failure to help the Kurds and the southern Shiites in the aftermath of the first gulf war. Encouraged by President Bush to ''take matters into their own hands,'' these groups had risen against Saddam Hussein, only to be crushed by his forces while America did nothing. Wolfowitz and his colleagues believed that removing Saddam Hussein would have been the right way to end the first gulf war, and during their years out of power they lobbied the Clinton administration both publicly and privately to make the overthrow of Saddam Hussein a priority. newamericancentury.org and newamericancentury.org , the main players have been on the case for a while.
