"Those same people"

Rumsfeld's gone. But it is becoming clear that his ouster had less to do with what has happened in Iraq than what has happened to the larger neoconservative dreams of which Iraq is a mere theater. Glenn Greenwald reminds us that the big dreamers are still very much in positions of power in the Bush administration.

Unlike the more political neoconservatives, who are very careful about what they say and go to great lengths to conceal their ultimate goals, Cohen has been an academic and thus more explicit about the theoretical underpinnings of his worldview. In a 1998 essay in (fittingly enough) The New Republic, Cohen called for the U.S. to build up and modernize its military capabilities faster and more aggressively, and to "justify" that plan, he laid out his neoconservative vision of the role of the United States in the world:

Another way to put it is that the United States needs an imperial strategy. Defense planners could never admit it openly, of course, and most would feel uncomfortable with the idea, but that is, in fact, what the United States at the end of the twentieth century is--a global empire.

Talk of "cooperative security" masks the reality that in any serious military confrontation, the central question is whom the United States asks to cooperate. . . . One cannot separate the so-called "soft power" of the United States--the global dominance of its culture, beginning with its language--from its military strength.

Rock fans around the world listen in English; so do fighter pilots. The same information technologies that make the Internet a decidedly American phenomenon provide the nervous systems of American military power. Free trade rests on common consent, to be sure, but would it exist absent America's military dominance?

Even Cohen recognized what a profound departure from America's founding principles it is to call for America to dominate the world as The Great Imperial Power:

The United States is today by far the most powerful state on the planet. If it chooses to remain so, citizen and soldier alike must brace themselves for the occasional imperial fiasco. More important, they will have to accept the uncomfortable notion that they are wielding military power in a way that is historically unusual for a country that has long viewed empires with proper republican suspicion. America's strategic vision will thus have to peer inward, as well as out, if we are to play our new role in the world successfully.

These are the radical principles laid out unabashedly by the Bush State Department's new Counselor, which are the same principles still driving the administration. We are in the middle of World War IV. We have numerous countries against whom we must wage war. The highest strategic priority is to change the government of Iran, with whom we can never negotiate. And the ultimate goal is to rule the world with our military force as the Supreme Imperial Power.

That is the neoconservative vision at its core. And the untold damage it has wreaked on our country has not diminished their influence in any way in this administration. They are still in control, particularly in the area they care about most -- the Middle East. And they have dealt with their greatest fear -- war-avoidance with Iran prior to regime change -- by installing one of their very own extremists to scrutinize and check the State Department.

This is really the debate America needs most, but is also the one we are furthest away from being able to conduct -- is the goal of the U.S. really to maintain and expand imperial world domination? The dangers to our country from that pursuit are grave and obvious. They are precisely the ones about which, among others, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Dwight Eisenhower most urgently warned, and Jefferson similarly emphasized continuously that the most important obligation a country has is to avoid war except when the nation's security is directly attacked.

But that, more than anything, accounts for the current predicament of America. We have ceased adhering in these matters to the principles of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Dwight Eisenhower, and have instead become a nation of Dick Cheneys, Victor Davis Hansons, Richard Perles, and Eliot Cohens.

On Friday, Eliot Cohen was named Counselor to the State Dept.