ABSTRACT
In the aftermath of 9/11, as neoconservatism became the “cause célèbre” of international politics, one popular caricature of the neocons in the blogosphere and occasionally in the mainstream media was the image of the “cabal.”1 The principal intellectual architects of the foreign policy of the George W. Bush Administration, in particular the Iraq War, were depicted as a secretive and tightly-knit group that had spent the Clinton years, while they were out of office, surreptitiously plotting and privately contriving the future of US foreign policy away from the prying eyes of the public, waiting for the day that they and their allies could return to government and unfold their master plan.2 The way in which the neocons were catapulted into the public eye after 9/11 made many suspicious of their apparently sudden influence and seemed to lend credence to the feeling that a small group had “hijacked” US foreign policy post-9/11.3 Of course this was not the case; the neocons and their allies had never hidden their activities in the 1990s. In fact they had taken out full page advertisements in The New York Times and set up web sites and magazines to publicize their views and build momentum for their cause but, unlike after 9/11, what they had to say did not particularly register with the general public, which, at the time, was largely uninterested in the travails of the neoconservatives, hence the suspicion that greeted the “sudden” emergence of the post-Cold War generation of neocons after 9/11. Post-Cold War neoconservatism was a public enterprise from the begin-
ning – but it was also a thoroughly elite one. The neoconservative-led network was comprised of members of what Bruce Kuklick calls “the decision-making class;”4 key figures in the Washington DC-based foreign policy establishment, many of whom had served in government before and were positioning themselves for a return, and others who resembled what Tony Smith calls “scholaractivists” – openly partisan campaigners based at think tanks and engaged in research on US foreign relations.5 What kind of a relationship could such a network have with ordinary Americans? On the one hand, there was an informal but very real exclusivity to the socially elite organizations; on the other, their output – in the form of magazines, advertisements and web sites – was available to all.
