neoconservadroid

....from Experts say Iraq war precludes similar future engagements in today's San Francisco Chronicle, by James Sterngold:

....the violent insurgency in Iraq, which has tied down 140,000 U.S. troops, has all but removed Americans' stomach for a similar pre-emptive engagement against an enemy who has not actually launched or prepared an imminent attack on the United States.

Iraq "will leave a long and damaging legacy," said Fred Ikle, a senior government arms control expert for decades who has argued that the United States must be more willing to use military might to achieve its goals. "It will inhibit us more than is good for our future. We fumbled."

Ikle was one of the founders of the Project for the New American Century, a neoconservative group that has long pressed for a more muscular American military posture, and includes Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz -- key architects of the Iraq war -- among its members.

Ikle's views are echoed by other prominent neoconservative thinkers.

"The appetite for this kind of action in the country is pretty low at the moment," said Max Boot, a senior fellow in national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Boot, an early supporter of the Iraq war, said that the United States is likely to launch small-scale pre-emptive strikes as needed in the future, much as Israel does against its enemies, but not the kind of large-scale attacks that were at the center of the Bush doctrine's aim of pressuring enemies to change or risk being destroyed.

"If, by some miracle, Iraq looks better in a few years, maybe there will be greater interest in the idea," said Boot.