Attending the Foreign Policy Initiative’s inaugural conference on Afghanistan today at the Mayflower Hotel, I was struck by how very little that was said was controversial. And that’s really the point — in the wake of Iraq debacle, for which the neocons are widely and rightly held responsible, it simply won’t do to bang the drum for American military maximalism. One has to be a bit slicker than that. And these guys are nothing if not slick.

As their website makes clear, FPI intends to re-brand and mainstream-ize neoconservatism as a “reasonable” and “moderate” — and of course “serious” — alternative to the rising tide of isolationist sentiment in American politics (the fact that no such tide of isolationist sentiment is rising in American politics is entirely beside the point.) This strategy was evidenced in the morning’s first panel, as Robert Kagan praised President Obama’s “gutsy and correct decision” on Afghanistan, but warned that “the United States is at a tipping point between desire to maintain extensive engagement in the world, as it has done since World War II, and the temptation to pull back…[Obama] has decided to maintain the commitment.”

This is a pretty obvious strawman (one that Kagan built more fully in this article last spring, arguing that American foreign policy has essentially always been neoconservative.) There is no real substantive argument for America “disengaging” from the world. There is, on the other hand, a real debate over the nature of that engagement, a debate that the neoconservatives have largely lost. No longer do we insist “with us or with the terrorists.” We now understand that international partnerships and multilateral institutions are key elements of America’s national security architecture. No longer do we insist that we are in a “global war on terror.” We now accept that we face a number of challenges from discrete groups and organizations, some of which work together, some of which compete with each other. No longer do we insist that “we don’t negotiate with evil; we defeat it.” It is now broadly understood that we do negotiate with our enemies in order to gain strategic advantage over other enemies. Ten years ago, the sponsors of today’s event would have condemned all of this as “weakness.” Today it was simply accepted as wisdom.

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George Packer has a couple of posts on Kristol and Kagan’s neo-neocon Foreign Policy Initiative. Packer’s comments on the outsize role that the neoconservative Project for the New American Century played in getting up the Iraq war drew a protest from PNAC’s Gary Schmitt, who writes that “no one who ever worked for PNAC or was on its board worked in the Bush administration. Congress passed the Iraq Liberation Act, not PNAC.”

That is true. Similarly, George W. Bush invaded Iraq, not PNAC. But it’s pretty safe to say that neither the 1998 Iraq Liberation Act nor the 2003 Iraq invasion would have happened without PNAC’s activism. For a sense of how this worked in regard to the former, read former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter’s account of how PNAC board member Randy Scheunemann — who was then national security adviser to Trent Lott, and later John McCain’s foreign policy adviser, and then a lobbyist for Georgia, and then John McCain’s foreign policy adviser again — leaked a UN weapons report on Iraqi WMD (which turned out to be false) to con artist Ahmad Chalabi, who then provided it to the Washington Post.

The resulting story provided the major impetus for the passing of the 1998 Iraq Liberation Act, which made regime change in Iraq the policy of the United States. The piece is fascinating on a number of levels, notably for how pleased with themselves Chalabi’s little cabal of neocon supporters were with their plan to install him as the new post-invasion Iraqi leader, how up front they all were about their scheme to get America into a war, and how completely wrong they all turned out to be about what would happen afterward.

As for Gary Schmitt, he himself served with Scheunemann as an officer on the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, a front organization founded in 2002 in collaboration with members of the Bush administration to publicly lobby for the Iraq invasion. So while it may be true that “no one who ever worked for PNAC or was on its board worked in the Bush administration” (though both Schmitt and Scheunemann worked as Pentagon consultants) the clear fact is that PNAC and those closely associated with it played a key roles both in laying the early legislative groundwork for the Iraq war, and then later in developing and disseminating Bush administration propaganda leading to the invasion.