Still Blaming Neocons For Iraq? Get Real

Whilst reading the provocative and convention challenging Advice to War Presidents: A Remedial Course in Statecraft by Angelo Codevilla, I came across this passage (which is the book's first endnote from the preface) which definitely goes against the grain of standard thinking:

There is no truth to the commonly held opinion that Neoconservatisim and Neoconservatives were primarily or even substantially responsible for the G.W. Bush Administration's foreign policy, especially its venture in Iraq. The occupation of Iraq was urged by Secretary of State Colin Powell using arguments both Realist (the Saudis demand it) and Liberal Internationalist (since we've broke it we've got to fix it). The occupation's political policy was set by Robert Blackwill, a Realist from the Council on Foreign Relations, and military policy by Walter Slocombe, a Liberal Internationalist from the Carter and Clinton Administrations. The intellectual architect of the Administration's 2007-2008 political military strategy was Stephen Biddle, another Realist from the Council. National Security Advisor and (later) Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice--the person closest to the President--either enabled whatever tendency in the Administration was strongest at any given time or just amalgamated the factions' contrasting recipes into "bridging documents." Yet she herself had risen through the Realist ranks under the patronage of former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft. As we will see, Iraq was no different from other twentieth-century U.S. foreign policy ventures in that it was a vessel in which the several tendencies of contemporary American statecraft mixed like oil and water.