Gerard Baker:
AMID the howls of horror around the world that greeted the nomination this week of Paul Wolfowitz to head the World Bank, one word was uttered with particular clarity and venom.
Mr Wolfowitz, the US Deputy Defence Secretary, is well known, according to his many critics, as a warmonger, a unilateralist, a scourge of the working classes, a bloodsoaked twister of the truth in avaricious pursuit of oil and American power.
But he is, of course, something else, something far, far worse than any other insult in the lexicon of modern political demonology.
As one World Bank employee, evidently in full suicidal mode, put it in a comment to a website (www.worldbankpresident.org ) on Friday: “The mood here in the bank in the last 2 days is one of shock and disgust. It feels like a funeral here. From a public relations point of view, this is a disaster. It took years for us to disassociate the bank from the bad old days of being on a leash for the US . . . now we are in a worst position ever (sic) by being the tool of not even the US as a whole, but neoconservatism.”
There it was, that heavily pregnant appellation, that ugly abstract noun, spat out like a perfect arc of phlegm from across the ether — Mr Wolfowitz is not just your common or garden evil genius. He is a neoconservative.
The puzzle for most Europeans and leftish Americans these past few years is how the neocons, a tightly knit group of highly motivated men, came to seize the reins of political power in the US and subvert American foreign policy to their ends.
But a much more germane question is: how did the neocons, a hitherto obscure group of intellectuals and policy specialists, whose principal ambition is the spread of democracy around the world, come to be so maligned and despised by almost everyone across the political spectrum?
The question is particularly apt in the light of developments in the Middle East in the past few weeks, where positive expressions of popular will in Iraq, Lebanon, Egypt and even Saudi Arabia have raised hopes of democratic change in the region.
Since this change, welcomed even by most Europeans and leftwingers, was always the principal aim of American neoconservatives, why have people like Mr Wolfowitz provoked such fear and loathing?
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Neocon-phobia is probably, therefore, just a more sophisticated way for President Bush’s critics to articulate their opposition. It’s a lot easier to say that you are against neoconservatism than to say that you are against democracy.
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