Bacevich on neoconservatism

The second excerpt on TomDispatch from Andrew J. Bacevich's new book is titled "The Neocon Revolution and American Militarism". In this extract, he traces the history of modern neoconservatism and highlights what he considers to be the essential features that make up its ideological position.

[T]he neoconservatives who gravitated to the Weekly Standard showed themselves to be the most perceptive of all of Woodrow Wilson's disciples. For the real Wilson (in contrast to either the idealized or the demonized Wilson) had also seen military power as an instrument for transforming the international system and cementing American primacy. Efforts to promote "a neo-Reaganite foreign policy of military supremacy and moral confidence" found expression in five convictions that together form the foundation of second-generation neoconservative thinking about American statecraft.

The following is a shortened version of what Bacevich sees as the important features of neoconservatism:

First was the certainty that American global dominion is, in fact, benign and that other nations necessarily see it as such....
Failure on the part of the United States to sustain its imperium would inevitably result in global disorder, bloody, bitter, and protracted: this emerged as the second conviction animating neoconservatives after the Cold War....
The third conviction animating second-generation neoconservatives related to military power and its uses. In a nutshell, they concluded that nothing works like force....
The fourth conviction animating second-generation neoconservatives was a commitment to sustaining and even enhancing American military supremacy....
The fifth and final conviction that imparted a distinctive twist to the views of second-generation neoconservatives was their hostility toward realism, whether manifesting itself as a deficit of ideals (as in the case of Henry Kissinger) or an excess of caution (as in the case of Colin Powell).

Again, Bacevich's ideas are fascinating, but I shall refrain from discussing them fully until I have read the whole book.