Every Tuesday morning during the Iraq war Washington's opinion-makers and journalists knew there was only one place to be: at the "black-coffee briefings" held at the American Enterprise Institute, a fortress-like building on M and 17th streets, opposite the main offices of the National Geographic magazine.
Technically, AEI is a thinktank. More than that, though, it is the headquarters of the intellectual movement known as neoconservatism. Its staff includes famous names such as Richard Perle, Irving Kristol and Newt Gingrich. The magazine Weekly Standard, the neocon bible, is published at the same address.
Black coffee was not strictly compulsory at the briefings - adding milk was allowed - but it did seem a particularly apt metaphor. The neocons felt they were delivering stern, sobering truths, wake-up calls with all the kick of a strong espresso: that liberating Iraq and making an awesome show of American power was vital for the US and the world, that democracy would spread through the region as dictators fell like dominoes.
Resistance would be minimal: the war could be fought, most argued, with the lean hi-tech military championed by Donald Rumsfeld. But not with the UN and Europe, who did not have the stomach for the new era of muscular American power. But that was then; September in Washington finds the ultra-hawks in ferment. They confess to being taken aback by events in Iraq. Some are responding by arguing that the terrorist attacks on US troops there may actually be, counterintuitively, a good thing.
In interviews with the Guardian they expressed deep scepticism about President Bush's new overtures to the UN, accusing the White House of a lack of commitment - and, most surprising of all, rounding on their former hero Donald Rumsfeld. The distance between the president and the movement widely credited with persuading him to go to war in the first place has never seemed greater.
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A White House that appeared in tune with their thinking has proved to have other concerns: proving a point about military technology, in Mr Rumsfeld's case, and, in the president's, winning the next election. "There are peple around the president who can see that, politically, this is a mess," Mr Marshall said.
"But the neocons see it all in grand-historical terms - if it takes 100,000 soldiers, if it takes a draft, who cares? We gotta do it." more…
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1047850,00.html
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