It's a matter of public record that this war with Iraq is largely the brainchild of a group of neoconservative intellectuals, who view it as a pilot project.

"Among the neoconservative intellectuals, Fukuyama has surely been the most imaginative, the most playful in his thinking and the most ambitious," Paul Berman wrote here.

As of 1998 the organization's membership contained many leading Congressional figures in the Republican Party, though none of the party's neoconservative intellectuals.

To answer questions like these, neoconservative intellectuals required a "sociology of virtue."

BACK in New York, a vast gulf now separated me from my old friends, most of whom were neoconservative intellectuals.

If there is a paradox here, it lies in the distance between this fare and the sober elitism advocated by neoconservative intellectuals.

It is a new incarnation for Mr. Wolfowitz, a neoconservative intellectual who was a primary architect of the Iraq war during four years as deputy secretary of defense.

The think tanks were places where neoconservative intellectuals could think the unthinkable and say the unsayable.

The New Republic carried a piece last month about how neoconservative intellectuals have also started to condemn the Christian-conservative rhetoric.

So if you don't want that job done, you place it in the hands of prominent neoconservative intellectuals, with no real-world experience.