Before regime change in Iraq became a war, it was a policy project. And the staggering success in moving this quixotic project from the neocon margins all the way to the forefront of national policy will be written about for years to come. Realizing this, the anti-interventionists have now trained their guns on the "secretive" "neocon" "cabal" with its "grand designs" to "remake the world in our image." How many more "adventures" do they have in store for us, the isolationists now ask plaintively?

Reading Paul Kennedy's version of this tired, frustrated screed brought home for me just why the Iraq-isolationists got hosed so badly in this fight. And it's really quite simple: ultimately, you can't beat something with nothing. Nowhere — not once — in Kennedy's 2,029 word argument on "the perils of empire" does he suggest any alternative to the alleged neocon "grand design." As a case for self-abnegating humility, it's fine. As a blueprint for U.S. foreign policy, it's not.

I've said it once, and I'll say it again. So long as the Iraq-isolationists continue framing their message in negative, almost nihilistic, terms, they won't be able to shake the perception that their Middle East policy is nothing more than one of neglect. Benign neglect, perhaps, but still neglect. Given the Iraqi people's widely expressed desire for freedom from Saddam, the movement to do nothing and keep him there now looks very much like the front for inhumanity and neglect we always suspected it was.

Of course, it's not always the case in politics that the side clamoring for action gets its way. But 9/11 changed that. The dynamics of our foreign policy were transformed and the situation cried out for a decisive long-term solution encompassing the entire Middle East, and of which the Iraq war and the Arab-Israeli conflict are a part.

Most people instinctively understand this necessity, and I think the evidence lies in the fact that President Bush's approval ratings didn't rise to their post-9/11 levels. Americans weren't giving their assent to a new war but acknowledging 9/11 and the regime change in Iraq as events in the same war. Operation Iraqi Freedom was to the World Trade Center what D-Day was to Pearl Harbor.

Amazingly, the Iraq-isolationists now punching out keystrokes against the newly-"exposed" neocon plot still don't seem to get this. Kennedy blithely dismisses the necessity of responding decisively to 9/11 and urges us to write off this 3,000 casualty event as a dead loss: "The United States is unchallenged militarily and sees no rival Great Power in sight. Yet it has taken little comfort from this. Since 9/11, it feels less secure and is spending massive amounts on armaments." (Emphasis mine.) To Kennedy, all the post-9/11 security concerns seem somehow unwarranted, the event itself some sort of aberration. The Iraq-isolationists reach new heights in this self-delusion when they call homeland security measures "fictitious" in their Oscar acceptance speeches.

In the end, the isolationist, anti-war coterie got whipped because they were out of touch with this basic reality of the post-9/11 world. Instead of bothering to come up with a "grand design" of their own to compete with the neocons, they offered nothing, and thus couldn't be taken seriously. Even now, their idea is to just let the Middle East fester, and hope everything turns out for the best.

After 9/11, the dominant concern in Europe and elsewhere was that we'd lash out vapidly in blind rage, go home, and leave others to pick up the pieces. Now that we've made clear that we are in fact in this for the long haul, and that we ourselves will put the pieces back together, the criticism has shifted from thoughtful internationalism to a sort of obscurantist isolationism, skeptical of anything we could do to spread freedom.

Kennedy picks up on this thread by comparing us to the British, who also had hoped to remake the Mideast in their own image and failed. (They did a fairly decent job of it here and in India — it is too bad things didn't turn out better for them.) Historical warning served, I suppose — except for the one key difference Kennedy overlooks: the future we're offering differs dramatically from what the British were offering. The British hoped merely to swap out one colonial ruler for another. We're tapping into the genuine hatred of tyranny that runs wide and deep in Iraq (as we now know) and with those who chafe under the Mullahs' rule in Iran, and we offer freedom and self-government — the same freedom eagerly embraced by the Kurds in northern Iraq. It's not going to be easy, and yes, they still may not like us in the end. But what a basic understanding of freedom will impart is a distaste for resolving low-level political differences through violence. They'll dislike us the way Europeans do, not the way the hateful Mullahs do, and if we can pull it off, that in itself will be a thousand-fold improvement.

The major current running through Kennedy's piece is the need to avoid empire, opposition to which is considered a good unto itself. (Here I hesitate to pile on since I realize Kennedy's just issuing a pro-forma defense of that book he wrote fifteen years ago, down to the ominous references of economic challenges from the Far East and Europe.) But he doesn't convince us that empire is what we're actually avoiding. Defense spending stands at 3.5% of GDP, and about 4% with the war, down from 6% throughout the Cold War and a far cry from the 11% of GDP it took to fight in Vietnam. This time, we won with half the manpower and in half the time, and should we have to do something like this again in a dozen years, the results will be even more impressive. Moreover, proponents of the war were called "chickenhawks" because so many hadn't served in uniform. That's what happens when you have a relatively small and agile military and it's probably one of the surest signs we're not an empire. Empires tend to enforce forced conscription of all adult males, making the "chickenhawk" argument irrelevant; we don't. Paradoxically, technology has enabled us to escape empire, in the sense that resources have to be massively diverted from productive use into successive military campaigns, leading to long-term civilizational decline, yadda yadda yadda. That isn't happening.