An article in Opinion Journal applies Thomas Sowell's Vision of the Annointed thesis to the Iraq war.   I put up a review of Vision of the Annointed in my Book Reviews a while back and was somewhat lukewarm towards the book.    It was interesting construct that explains a lot but I thought Sowell could have put more punch into his descriptions.   

Here, Robert Bartley wonders aloud why critics of capitalism, nuclear power, eating meat, wearing fur, the death penalty, and starbucks are so united against American success in the war against Iraq:

It's no accident that Mr. Cheney's critics on the environment are also his critics on the war. Thomas Sowell has written two books pondering why the same people end up on the same side of issues that have no intrinsic connection. In "A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles," he writes that this is because they operate from two different "visions" of how the world works, indeed of human nature. In "The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy," he argues that the prevailing vision in the press, academy and politics has become so dogmatic that it has lost touch with reality.

...Students and journalists who have never heard of Derrida reflect his influence in preoccupation with issues of gender, class and race. As Mr. Sowell writes, the "vision of the anointed" has become impervious to evidence. Rather, it's "a badge of honor and a proclamation of identity: To affirm it is to be one of us and to oppose it is to be one of them."

It isn't the outcome they care about, it's that utopian idealism was tainted by the need to make something happen in the real, physical world.