There is a strange1 little book review by Gideon Rose in which he refers to the author as a "hawkish liberal." I couldn't determine with any certainty Rose's reasons for calling George Packer a liberal. Maybe it's just me, but "hawkish liberal" has the oxymoronic ring of "military intelligence" and "benevolent despot."

Rose writes,

The United States would not have gone to war just to spread democracy in the Middle East (as even the war's intellectual architect, former deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz, acknowledged), but the case for democratization played an important role in buttressing the other two arguments and was the most exciting aspect of the endeavor for neoconservatives and liberals alike.

And Rose, who says he supported the war, concludes,

It is not too soon, however, to return a judgment on those at the helm who took a difficult job and made it infinitely more so, dramatically undermining America's regional and global position in the process. They were "careless people," as Fitzgerald said of Tom and Daisy Buchanan, who "smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made." That, if nothing else, can stand as a lesson for future tender souls contemplating the possible benefits of liberal imperialism and mulling attempts to do the right thing with the wrong partners. ·

These quotes suggest that Rose defines a hawkish liberal to be someone who supports imperialist adventures for the purposes of spreading democracy. I would say of any such true believers that—far from being characterized as "hawkish liberals" they should better be known as "those who have drunk the Kool-Aid."

Or perhaps "liberal" in this context implies a conservative who feels that genocide should only be committed abroad.