Decades after 9/11, what became of the US’s neoconservatives?

Few willingly describe themselves as ‘neoconservative’ as the label has fallen away from popular use.

In the weeks before former President Bill Clinton delivered his State of the Union address to Congress in 1998, a group of intellectuals, writers and policymakers penned an open letter to the president that made an impassioned case for “removing Saddam Hussein and his regime” from power in Iraq. “We urge you to act decisively,” the letter, published through an organisation called the Project For The New American Century, read. “If we accept a course of weakness and drift, we put our interests and our future at risk.” The letter stood as a statement of policy in concert with a school of thought commonly called neoconservatism. Although Clinton ignored their advice, the signers included names of men who would later hold sway as part of George W Bush’s presidential administration: Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, to name a few.