The War Party: Support for Bush's foreign policy now defines the GOP by W. James Antle III, The American Conservative

Litmus tests must go. That is the rallying cry of those who believe Republicans should drop their insistence that the party’s 2008 presidential candidate toe the line on taxes, abortion, guns, or immigration. Wartime, the argument goes, is no time for conservatives to demand ideological purity. Or, as Noemie Emery put it in an emblematic essay for The Weekly Standard, “in a time of national peril, the test is a luxury [conservatives] cannot afford.”

Judging from presidential preference polls, many Republicans appear to be listening. The current 2008 frontrunner, former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, is pro-choice and supports civil unions for gays, gun control, and a fairly permissive immigration policy. Until recently, he favored taxpayer funding of abortion and opposed the partial-birth abortion ban. In second place is Sen. John McCain, who voted against the Bush tax cuts, sponsored amnesty for illegal immigrants, championed a campaign-finance law that put restrictions on conservative groups ranging from the National Rifle Association to the National Right to Life Committee, and believes the federal government should referee professional boxing.

Together, they receive majority support among those who plan to vote in a Republican primary next year. Between the two of them, they make virtually the entire conservative domestic agenda—lower taxes, limited government, gun rights, the pro-life cause, and the defense of traditional marriage—negotiable. Yet on one issue, Giuliani and McCain are both unflinchingly orthodox: the war in Iraq.

In fact, it would be difficult to find a Republican who hews closer to the party line on Iraq than the two frontrunners. McCain is adamant that if U.S. forces were to withdraw, “the consequences would be chaos, genocide, and, sooner or later, we go back.” Or we end up with terrorism on our own soil: “If we come home, bin Laden and [deceased al-Qaeda leader] Zarqawi, they are going to follow us.”

Giuliani agrees. “When you listen to these debates in Congress, and you listen to the politicians debating, you sort of get the impression that they think we’re in control of whether we’re at war or not,” America’s Mayor explained to pundit Sean Hannity. “It doesn’t matter what we think. They’re at war with us. They want to come here and kill us.”

McCain and Giuliani are both convinced that the Iraq War is central to the war on terrorism; that fighting in Baghdad directly prevents more carnage in New York; and that at least some form of democracy promotion in the Middle East is in our national interest. In many respects, they are more fervent believers in the Bush Doctrine than the current president. McCain was clamoring to send additional troops to Iraq back when the White House preferred light footprints to surges.

All of these views fit comfortably within the conservative foreign-policy mainstream.