Suddenly an obscure ideological label, the stuff of doctoral dissertations, appears daily in newspapers around the globe. "Neoconservatives" are supposedly responsible for the war in Iraq, the "axis of evil" rhetoric, and America's militant "war against terrorism" that has much of the world on edge.

They have, it is said, "hijacked" President George W. Bush's foreign policy, which differs radically from that of his father and from his own campaign pronouncements. When things seemed to be going badly in Iraq, several of the elder Bush's advisers warned that the current president was receiving "bum advice." They left no doubt whence they thought it was coming: the "neocons." Who or what are neoconservatives? And what is their relation to Bush's policies?

The term first appeared in the 1970s as an anathema applied by one group of liberals to another. The ones who applied it were those who had absorbed some of the sensibilities of the 1960s Left. This included a profound opposition to the war in Vietnam, a harsh critique of the broader realities of American life and a hopeful embrace of new constituencies such as students, minorities, liberated women and gays.

The ones on whom the label was pinned were liberals of a more traditional stripe, in the ideological footsteps of Harry Truman. Cold warriors, they were less opposed to the Vietnam War, more positive in their assessments of America and more comfortable with the attitudes of "Joe Sixpack" than of activists. They were, in short, rebels against the rebellion of the 1960s, and at first they resisted being called "neoconservatives," an epithet that read them out of the liberal camp.

One by one, however, they acquiesced, and in the 1980s, in response to President Ronald Reagan's embrace, most shifted to the Republican Party. Until then, neocons had been Democrats, admiring Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson and the labor chieftain George Meany, champions of the welfare state and unflinching anti-Communism. (The Republicans, in contrast, had supported detente.) Some said that Rea-gan, once a left-leaning labor leader who became a Republican only in his fifties, was the original neocon.

Neocons helped forge the hard-edged anti-communism of Reagan's administration. This embodied not only a steep military build-up but also a sharper rhetorical thrust, branding the Soviet Union an "evil empire."

Thus, a distinctive political visage was etched. Traditional conservatives favored military strength and a narrow, concrete conception of national interests, while liberals were dovish and more inclined toward abstract ideals. Neoconservatives were some of each: military hawks but also advocates of human rights and broad principles of world order. This was less a matter of altruism than of enlightened self-interest, a conviction that America would be safer in a world that was more free and democratic and where aggression was punished. Perhaps because many of them came from the left, neocons also displayed a trademark gusto for polemic.

The end of the Cold War was a triumph for neocon policies but it also seemed to render them moot. Then the war in Bosnia brought neoconservatism back with a rush. While traditional conservatives thought Bosnia beyond the scope of U.S. interests and liberals bemoaned Serbian atrocities yet balked at the use of force, neocons fought for military intervention.

Then came Sept. 11. The subsequent war against terrorism has borne the tint of neoconservatism in combining robust military action with a high ideological content. In his insistence that the terrorists hate American freedom, that states supporting terrorism are "evil," that "either you are with us or you are with the terrorists," Bush expresses the kind of zealotry that neocons brought to the Cold War. Above all, his goal of draining the political swamps that breed terrorism by spreading democracy to the Middle East, a goal outlandish to traditional conservatives, bears a neocon stamp.

Has Bush borrowed this approach from the neocons among his advisers? Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, are certainly not neocons, at least not in their histories. Who knows how Bush decides? All that can be said is that his policies resemble things advocated by neocons, a loose group with a distinct history and well-publicized ideas, not at all a shadowy cabal. 

Joshua Muravchik, a neoconservative, is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and author of Heaven on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism.