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In all the public reconsideration of the Iraq war, neocons have barely wrestled with the implications of the invasion's failure for their worldview, content to blame the mess on errors of execution. The Iran debate, however, exposes as much as their writings on Iraq omit. For decades, a near-limitless belief in U.S. power has bridged neocon foreign policy thinking. That's why it is stunning to hear so many neocons ultimately express pessimism about the Bush administration's prospects for preventing the Iranian bomb. "The horse is ninety percent out of the barn," says Donnelly. "They're going to get the bomb unless we invade. That's not an option. So, I'd say, the time to stop this from happening has pretty much passed. Now, the question is, what are you going to do about it?" 

And there's no surer sign that neoconservatism has been chastened than the manner in which neocons describe themselves when discussing Iran. Where many of them once unabashedly self-identified as members of an intellectual movement, they now deny that such a movement ever existed. They refer to neoconservatism in quotation marks, as if the term were merely a concoction of overactive left-wing imaginations. David Frum, a former Bush speechwriter, told me, "This really is an example of what academics call essentialism. Hostile critics invent this thing called neoconservatism that unfailingly favors unilateral military force. But, when the so-called 'neoconservatives' examine Iran and don't advocate the use of unilateral military force, the critics feel like a dirty trick has been played upon them." Denial may be the first step on the path to recovery.