Pat Buchanan: A real conservative vs. the neocons

And while we're on the subject of the nutty "neo" conservatives Buchanan has spent the past couple decades battling, check this excellent piece in the National Interest debunking the nutty neocon notion that Ronald Reagan would have gotten us bogged down in the Mideast:

More recently, these efforts to wrap Bush’s aggressive foreign policy in a Reagan blanket have been duplicated in the rhetoric of the now-dwindling field of candidates for this year’s GOP presidential nomination. Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich all identified Reagan as a model for the foreign-policy bellicosity they espoused with such zeal during the campaign.

This is all specious. The West’s Cold War victory was a triumph of foreign-policy realism, not neocon pugnacity. It came about through measured, deliberate decision making over decades. If the victory teaches us anything about American foreign policy in our time, it is that the country should not have abandoned its successful Cold War steadiness for the provocative sledgehammer approach adopted after 9/11.