We have been led astray by the term “neoconservative,” which the media generally defines as “democratic imperialists” (or perhaps “Jewish democratic imperialists”). In fact, the number of neoconservatives who were ever willing to risk anything in democracy’s name was minimal. A few influential “neoconservatives”—like Robert Kagan, William Kristol, and Paul Wolfowitz—did support the human rights interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo. But the bulk of 1990s conservative commentators and Republican politicians derided Bill Clinton’s humanitarian wars as a waste of blood and treasure, “foreign policy as social work.” After 9/11, the Bush administration used the Taliban’s human rights horrors to whip up support for war, but once the Taliban fell, it spurned the kind of nation building that would have been required to give Afghan democracy a chance. (To read Douglas Feith or Richard Haass’ memoirs is to grasp how dubious top Bush administration officials were about the prospects for Afghan democracy from the very beginning). And while George W. Bush himself seems genuinely to have believed that the Iraq War would strike a blow for liberty across the Islamic world, there is little evidence that that rationale influenced his own war planners, who expected to begin withdrawing U.S. troops within weeks of Saddam’s fall, even though only a lunatic could have believed that such a rapid drawdown was consistent with Iraqi democracy…

Now that George W. Bush is back in Texas, the long-term trajectory of conservative foreign policy is even clearer. With a few exceptions (like Ronald Reagan’s turn against Fidel Marcos in the Philippines), Cold War conservatives have proved highly pessimistic about Third World democracy. Far more than liberals, they backed colonial rule in the 1950s and 1960s on the grounds that independence would bring communists to power. And from Chile to South Africa to Zaire, they preached the same message in the 1970s and 1980s, supporting a gaggle of pro-American tyrants as preferable to the leftists who might replace them. Today, it is conservatives—far more than liberals—who back war with Iran, despite clear evidence that it would devastate the Iranian democracy movement. And it is conservatives—far more than liberals—who invoke the new bogeyman of Islamist rule to explain why we can’t support truly a free election in Egypt.