Is Carnegie Endowment Still Wedded to Neoconservative Pre-Emptive War?

Recently the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace held a conference on nuclear nonproliferation, which I thought at least started a useful discussion. Bush has called for major reforms to the nonproliferation treaty regime, and IAEA chief ElBaradei has echoed Bush.

However, in an article in the Washington Post on the failure of Bush's pre-emptive foreign policy, Robin Wright quotes Robert Kagan of the Carnegie Endowment as an unrepentant Neoconservative. So, that makes me worry that the Carnegie nonproliferation initiative is pre-emption under a different name. After all the first justification for our pre-emptive attack on Iraq was Saddam's possession of weapons of mass destruction. Proliferation is an important issue, but maybe we shouldn't yet throw out the baby with the bath water by rejecting the existing nonproliferation regime.

Diplomats vs. Bush

While I have not seen the text of the letter signed by a number of senior American diplomats, I support what I have heard about it. I never understood why the US thought it had to go it alone in Iraq. If we had gotten some international organization on board -- the UN, NATO, or some regional organization (unlikely, but conceivable) -- to support our intervention, we would now be in a much better position to defend what we did, Abu Ghraib and all. If we had had some partners, the Red Cross might have used them to get our attention to stop Abu Ghraib before it got out of hand, as it did. Now we are really hanging out there all alone. We need someone besides Bush, someone nicer, someone more devoted to the US constitution, and someone with higher class advisers, particularly as Secretary of Defense and Attorney General.