The war in Iraq is the culmination of a neoconservative takeover of America, if much of the European and some of the American media are to be believed. Thanks to a small cabal of intellectuals, America has abandoned its traditional foreign policy and become a unilateralist, imperialist hegemon, or hyperpower, given to pre-emptive strikes against any nation that it decides threatens its security. After years of plotting, this band of neoconservatives, or neocons, led by their most important practitioners, George W Bush and Dick Cheney, now have control of American foreign and security policy, not to mention domestic policy.

It is the goal of the collection of essays I have edited into a new book, Neoconservatism, to replace heat with light and to separate the truths underlying some of the fears of neoconservatism and neocons from the fantasies. The first truth is that there is no such thing as a neoconservative “movement”, in the dictionary sense of “a body of persons with a common object”. The intellectuals known as “neocons”, loosely defined, prize their individualism; not for them, grouping with others into an ideological monolith.

Furthermore, a close reading of what prominent neocons have said leads to the conclusion that the foreign policy they advocate, some of which was adopted by the Bush administration in response to the attack on America on September 11, 2001 is less radical, and certainly less novel, than is widely thought. Although neocons are proud to have broken in many ways with the post-cold war consensus, they can reasonably claim that their ideas have deep roots in early American and British history.

So, too, with domestic policy. The programmes advocated by neoconservatives in the fields of crime, welfare reform and what has been called “the culture war” did not spring fully formed from the minds of those who helped George W Bush to fashion “compassionate conservatism”. Instead, these ideas originated with Victorian reformers, and were then buried under the mass of legislation that constituted the New Deal of Franklin D Roosevelt, and by Lyndon Johnson ’s Great Society, before re-emerging with the neocons.

All of this suggests that criticism of neoconservatism as a “cabal” is not well founded. Popular in Europe and in the liberal media in America, the idea goes like this: a small group of intellectuals, including many future members of the Bush administration, plotted for years to replace America’s long-standing multinational foreign policy, with its heavy reliance on the United Nations, with a more unilateralist, expansive and muscular approach to world affairs.

The centre of this cabal is said to be the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), an organisation founded by William (Bill) Kristol in 1997 in order “to promote American global leadership”. Its other founders include Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Elliott Abrams, all of whom were destined for key positions in the Bush administration. Kristol uses his editorship of The Weekly Standard, an influential Washington-based magazine that at times supports and at times criticises the Bush administration, to provide a platform for many working neocons.

No one can doubt that PNAC was an important contributor to Bush’s foreign policy. To suggest, however, that it is a part of some secret effort to overthrow traditional American foreign policy is simply not true. In a democracy, ideas matter in the crafting of foreign policy, and some of the neocons (but not all) who contributed to the work of PNAC thought hard, quarrelled among themselves, wrote with style and wit, spoke at gatherings of opinion-makers and circulated memoranda urging America to adopt an approach to the world that is responsive to the post-cold war threats to its security.

The myth of a secret cabal is not the only one constructed by the neocons’ critics. Another, put simply, is that neoconservative foreign policy is the invention of Jewish intellectuals whose primary interest is the survival and expansion of Israel rather than the security of the United States. “Con is short for ‘conservative’ and neo is short for ‘Jewish’,” jokes David Brooks, a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.

The durability of this myth is puzzling, since neither Colin Powell nor Condoleezza Rice, the president’s principal foreign-policy advisers, is Jewish; nor are Cheney, Rumsfeld or George Tenet (until recently director of the CIA). And Bill Kristol and Richard Perle, both Jewish neocons, were in the forefront of those urging the Clinton administration to intervene in Kosovo to stop the slaughter of tens of thousands of Muslims.

What is more remarkable still about the myth that Jewish neocons dominate administration policy is the close involvement of the Christian right with the Bush government. With the religious right the core of Bush’s political support, and Jewish voters second only to blacks in their loyalty to his political opponents, the argument that it is Jews who run the government’s foreign policy becomes difficult to maintain.

Another hotly contested question hinges on the foreign-policy goals of the neocons and their ability to persuade the Bush administration to adopt them. The doctrine of pre-emption, the perceived need to deal with “rogue states”, and some of the other ingredients of neoconservatism actually have deep roots in American history, and were espoused by British leaders, including Canning, Palmerston, Churchill and Thatcher, long before they were adopted by Bush (who barely discussed foreign policy during his election campaign).

Consider Tony Blair — a non-neocon raised by neocons to the exalted status that until now was accorded only to Churchill and Thatcher. He was ahead of Bush in accepting that intervention by western democracies in what once were seen as solely the affairs of sovereign states is sometimes necessary to cope with rogue regimes and terrorists.

Early in the 20th century Theodore Roosevelt articulated a policy that “chronic wrongdoing, or an impotence which results in a general loosening of the ties of civilised society, may . . . ultimately require intervention by some civilised nation, and . . . may force the United States, however reluctantly . . . to the exercise of an international police power”.