Gene Callahan applies Eric Voegelin's criticisms of Gnosticism to neoconservatives:
One of the chief vices Voegelin ascribes to Gnosticism is the will to live in a dream world and the reluctance to allow reality to intrude upon the dream. During the many years of chaotic violence following America’s "victory" in Iraq, the difficulty of continuously evading the facts on the ground compelled some who supported the war to admit that things did not proceed as envisioned in their prewar fantasy. Even so, few of these reluctant realists are moved to concede that launching the war was a mistake. A popular dodge they engage in is to ask critics, "So, you’d prefer it if Hussein was still in power and still oppressing the Iraqi people?" That riposte assumes that, if a goal is laudable when evaluated in a vacuum from which contraindications have been eliminated, then pursuing it is fully justified. …
The Western moral tradition developed primarily by the Greek philosophers and Christian theologians denied that a claim of good intentions was a sufficient defense of the morality of an action.
The Dish 