Pity the poor Project for the New American Century. The whole Iraq debacle may have ruined its agenda, like, forever, argues BBC world affairs correspondent Paul Reynolds.
"The Project for the New American Century" has been reduced to a voice-mail box and a ghostly website. A single employee has been left to wrap things up.
The idea of the "Project" was to project American power and influence around the world.
The 1997 statement (written during the administration of President Bill Clinton) said:
"We seem to have forgotten the essential elements of the Reagan Administration's success: a military that is strong and ready to meet both present and future challenges; a foreign policy that boldly and purposefully promotes American principles abroad; and national leadership that accepts the United States' global responsibilities."
Neo-conservatism has gone for a generation, if in fact it ever returns
David Rothkopf
Carnegie EndowmentAmong the signatories were many of the senior officials who would later determine policy under President George W Bush - Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Elliot Abrams and Lewis Libby - as well as thinkers including Francis Fukuyama, Norman Podheretz and Frank Gaffney.
The neo-conservatives were called that because they sought to re-establish what they felt were true conservative values in the Republican Party and the United States.
They wanted to stop what they felt were the isolationist tendencies that had developed under President Clinton, and even under the pragmatic President George Bush senior.
They saw the war in Iraq as their big chance of showing how the "New American Century" might work.
They predicted the development of democratic values in a region lacking in them and, in that way, the removal of any threat to the United States just as the democratisation of Germany and Japan after World War II had transformed Europe and the Pacific.
Then Iraq went horribly off the rails. Former neo-cons Richard Perle and Kenneth Edelman have argued in Vanity Fair that had they known how things would turn out, they would have never got on board the Let's-Forcibly-Bring-Democracy-To-Iraq bandwagon.
Gary Schmitt, formerly of the project and now with the American Enterprise Institute, defended the neo-con record:
"Our view has been adopted. Even during the Clinton administration we had an effect, with Madeleine Albright [then secretary of state] saying that the United States was 'the indispensable nation'.
"But our ideas have not necessarily dominated. We did not have anyone sitting on Bush's shoulder. So the work now is to see how they are implemented. Obviously it makes life difficult with the specific failure in Iraq, but I do not agree with Richard Perle that we should never have gone in.
"I do argue that the execution should have been better. In fact, I argued in late 2003 that we needed more troops and a proper counter-insurgency policy."