Republicans’ verbal gyrations over the Iraq War should not be dismissed as the usual rhetorical jabberwocky of an election season. Their stumblings and justifications provide an important window into a larger, crucial story. They reveal that Movement Conservatives remain rooted in a worldview that has been outdated for so long it is now delusional.

The tempest began in a teapot when Fox News’s Megyn Kelly asked Jeb Bush whether he would have gone into Iraq knowing what we know now. Bush said yes, defending the 2003 invasion that more than 70% of Americans now think was a mistake. This answer prompted astonished observers to wonder how he could have fumbled so badly. Within days, Bush stammered first to the suggestion that he had misheard the question, and then concluded that he would, in fact, have opposed the operation altogether.

But Bush’s first answer was not an error. It revealed his continuing loyalty to a series of principles to which he actually put his name in 1997. With those principles, a group of elite white men set out to revive the Cold War world that had given men like them control of the rest of humanity. Those principles dictated the Iraq War, and — although they are completely obsolete — they still animate Movement Conservatives.

The road to Iraq began in 1989, with the fall of the Berlin Wall. That event marked the end of the Cold War, which had shaped an American generation. Until World War II, America had been just one of many nations jockeying for advantage in a multilateral world. Alliances had been made and broken, wars had been won and lost, and American leaders had shifted the nation’s weight to reflect current conditions around the world. World War II changed all that. America and the USSR emerged from that cataclysm as the world’s superpowers, locked into a Manichean battle for supremacy. For the next 44 years, fervent anti-communist warriors refused to recognize nuance or compromise in foreign affairs. They divided the world into white and black, good and bad, us and them.

When the USSR began to spin apart in 1989, the unraveling of the Cold War left these Movement Conservatives adrift. While many of them found their purpose by turning their attention to wiping the “communism” of social welfare legislation out of domestic life as it had been wiped out of the world community, others looked at the splintering of foreign affairs and despaired. No longer was America a superpower; it was again just one nation among many, unable to dictate the behavior of weaker nations.

The return to a multilateral world entailed a return to an awareness of complexity, in contrast to the simplistic divisions of the Cold War. President George H. W. Bush responded to this complexity by refusing to gloat as smaller nations left the USSR, then ended the Gulf War as soon as Iraqi forces had withdrawn from Kuwait, rather than pushing forward and taking control of Iraq itself. If President Bush’s prudence worried Movement Conservatives, they were horrified by what seemed to them the weakness and confusion of the Clinton years. America seemed impotent as Somalia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, and Haiti shattered.

Movement Conservatives refused to recognize that what they saw as weakness and incoherence was an international adjustment to the realities of the same sort of multilateral world that had existed before the peculiar moment of the Cold War had divided the world between two superpowers and the third-world nations trying to carve out their own destinies within that division. This was not the world Movement Conservatives knew. They wanted back the world they had controlled. In a declaration of principles, they explained that they wanted an end to “incoherent policies” and called for a government that would “shape circumstances before crises emerge.” They demanded a “Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity.”

In 1997, a group of Movement Conservatives set out to resurrect the Cold War moment that had made America supreme. In that year, political commentators William Kristol and Robert Kagan launched the Project for the New American Century. Its statement of principles called for dramatically increased defense spending to implement a strategic vision that would “shape a new century favorable to American principles and interests.” America must “challenge regimes hostile to our interests and values,” and “promote the cause of political and economic freedom abroad.” America had a responsibility, the signatories to the statement said. The nation must “accept responsibility for America’s unique role in preserving and extending an international order friendly to our security, our prosperity, and our principles.” Dick Cheney, Francis Fukuyama, Norman Podhoretz, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz were among the original signers of the document. So was Jeb Bush.

The next year, members of PNAC urged President Clinton to launch a “determined program to change the regime in Baghdad.” Saddam Hussein had developed biological and chemical weapons, they said, with which he could destabilize the entire Middle East. He could threaten American troops, Israel, moderate Arab states, and “a significant portion of the world’s supply of oil.” Iraq, they said, was “ripe for a broad-based insurrection.” When Clinton bombed Iraq in late 1998 rather than launching an invasion, PNAC and its supporters, like Senate Majority leader Trent Lott and Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, insisted he was weak.