Beating up on neocons used to be a specialize sport without wide appeal. With all due false modesty I offer myself as an early practitioner. Back in the mid-to-late-1970s, when I had a weekly column in the Village Voice, I used to have rich sport with that apex neocon, Norman Podhoretz, editor of Commentary. I nicknamed him Norman the Frother and freighted him with so many gibes that he made the mistake of publicly denouncing me in his magazine, exclaiming that "Cockburn's weekly pieces have set a new standard of gutter journalism in this country," a testimonial I still proudly feature on the back of my books.

The neocons' political hero in those days was Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson, much venerated in Israel and the corporate offices of Boeing for his ardor and constancy in sluicing US taxpayers' money into their treasuries. But instead they got Jimmy Carter, who, on a couple of occasions, was downright rude to Menachem Begin. So the neocons abandoned the Democrats and threw in their lot with Ronald Reagan.

Now here we are on the downslope of 2003 and George Bush is learning, way too late for his own good, that the neocons have been matchlessly wrong about everything. The neocons told Bush that eviction of Saddam would rearrange the chairs in the Middle East, to America's advantage. Wrong. They (I'm talking about Wolfowitz's team of mad Straussians at DoD) told him that there was irrefutable proof of the existence of weapons of mass destruction inside Iraq. Wrong. They told him it would unlock the door to a peaceful settlement in Israel. Wrong. They told him that Ahmed Chalabi had street cred in Iraq. Wrong. They told him it would be easy to install a US regime in Baghdad and make the place hum quietly along, like Lebanon in the 1950s. Wrong.

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