Jack Hunter offers correctly points out that there was nothing conservative about GW Bush and his neoconservatives cohorts, whose only defining characteristic was their aggressive foreign policy and focus on nation building. The usual conservative skepticism of government attempts to engage in social and economic engineering was most notably absent in those who believed that the United States could transform Iraq & Afghanistan into stable, peaceful, market-oriented democracies. The most dangerous and fiscally irresponsible example of "big government" is reckless warfare and nation building. In the last few years of his life, conservative commentator Robert Novak took a great deal of heat for his public opposition to the invasion of Iraq. And recently the much respected conservative writer George Will called on the American Government to withdraw from Afghanistan and abstain from participating in the Libyan Civil War. If republicans ever hope to gain the support of more thoughtful Americans, they must distance themselves from neoconservative nation-building and affirm the traditional conservative principles of non-intervention.
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