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Fukuyama: After Neoconservatism |
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The Fukuyama Defection
Francis Fukuyama signed the founding statement of PNAC, the key neocon group (Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Libby, Feith, etc.) that lobbied for the Iraq war starting with a letter to Clinton in 1998. Fukuyama also signed the 9/20/01 letter to Bush demanding the Iraq war. In 1992 he famously proclaimed The End of History, expecting a smoother path to liberal democracy world wide. He declares below that the unrealistic neocon views are "something I cannot support," and identifies many of the specific neocon blunders leading to Iraq becoming an "operational base for jihadist terrorists." He should know, he was privy to five years of neocon planning to take Baghdad with no planning beyond that.
Bush is beginning to understand the neocon folly. Wolfowitz, Feith and Libby (indicted) are gone and Condi Rice (not a neocon) is backpedaling. But the bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samarra underscores Fukuyama's analysis. Samarra was meant to be a classic example of the latest neocon strategy called "clear, hold, build." At the end of 2004, 5,000 U.S. and Iraqi troops were sent to Samarra. An 18 mile earth wall was bulldozed around the city, with only three entry/exit points. US troops were housed in public buildings surrounded by free-fire "killing" zones. The attacks by insurgents dipped, then recovered. The city's population fell from 200,000 to under 100,000. Step 1 for Bush: Remove the remaining neocons, ask Cheney to resign and keep him out of foreign policy.
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After Neoconservatism
By Francis Fukuyama, Feb. 19, 2006, The New York Times full PDF
As we approach the third anniversary of the onset of the Iraq war, it seems very unlikely that history will judge either the intervention itself or the ideas animating it kindly. By invading Iraq, the Bush administration created a self-fulfilling prophecy: Iraq has now replaced Afghanistan as a magnet, a training ground and an operational base for jihadist terrorists, with plenty of American targets to shoot at. The United States still has a chance of creating a Shiite-dominated democratic Iraq ... There are clear benefits to the Iraqi people from the removal of Saddam Hussein's dictatorship... But it is very hard to see how these developments in themselves justify the blood and treasure that the United States has spent on the project to this point.
The so-called Bush Doctrine that set the framework for the administration's first term is now in shambles. The doctrine argued that, in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, America would have to launch periodic preventive wars to defend itself against rogue states and terrorists with weapons of mass destruction; that it would do this alone, if necessary. ... It is not surprising that in its second term, the administration has been distancing itself from these policies. ...
The ... soaring rhetoric of Bush's second Inaugural Address, have borne very problematic fruits. The Islamist Muslim Brotherhood made a strong showing in Egypt's parliamentary elections in November and December. While ... the vote [in Iraq] led to the ascendance of a Shiite bloc with close ties to Iran. But the clincher was the decisive Hamas victory in the Palestinian election last month, which brought to power a movement overtly dedicated to the destruction of Israel. ....
The problem with neoconservatism's agenda lies not in its ends, which are as American as apple pie, but rather in the overmilitarized means by which it has sought to accomplish them. What American foreign policy needs is not a return to a narrow and cynical realism, but rather the formulation of a "realistic Wilsonianism" that better matches means to ends.
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The Neoconservative Legacy
The way the cold war ended shaped the thinking ... younger neoconservatives like William Kristol and Robert Kagan, in two ways. First, it seems to have created an expectation that all totalitarian regimes were hollow at the core ... once the wicked witch was dead, the munchkins would rise up and start singing joyously about their liberation. As Kristol and Kagan put it ... "the idea of America using its power to promote changes of regime in nations ruled by dictators rings of utopianism. But in fact, it is eminently realistic."
This overoptimism about postwar transitions to democracy helps explain the Bush administration's incomprehensible failure to plan adequately for the insurgency that subsequently emerged in Iraq. ... While they now assert that they knew all along that the democratic transformation of Iraq would be long and hard, they were clearly taken by surprise. According to George Packer's recent book on Iraq, "The Assassins' Gate," the Pentagon planned a drawdown of American forces to some 25,000 troops by the end of the summer following the invasion. ...
The neoconservative position articulated by people like Kristol and Kagan was, by contrast, Leninist; they believed that history can be pushed along with the right application of power and will. Leninism was a tragedy in its Bolshevik version, and it has returned as farce when practiced by the United States. Neoconservatism, as both a political symbol and a body of thought, has evolved into something I can no longer support.
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The Failure of Benevolent Hegemony
The Bush administration and its neoconservative supporters did not simply underestimate the difficulty of bringing about congenial political outcomes in places like Iraq; they also misunderstood the way the world would react to the use of American power. ... Kristol and Kagan considered whether this posture would provoke resistance from the rest of the world, and concluded, "It is precisely because American foreign policy is infused with an unusually high degree of morality that other nations find they have less to fear from its otherwise daunting power."
It is hard to read these lines without irony in the wake of the global reaction to the Iraq war, which succeeded in uniting much of the world in a frenzy of anti-Americanism....
Finally, benevolent hegemony presumed that the hegemon was ... competent. Much of the criticism of the Iraq intervention from Europeans was ... that it ... didn't know what it was doing in trying to democratize Iraq. In this, the critics were unfortunately quite prescient. ... But the intelligence community never took nearly as alarmist a view of the terrorist/W.M.D. threat as the war's supporters did.
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What to Do
Now that the neoconservative moment appears to have passed, ... we need to demilitarize what we have been calling the global war on terrorism, ... Meeting the jihadist challenge is more of a "long, twilight struggle" whose core is not a military campaign but a political contest for the hearts and minds of ordinary Muslims around the world. ...
The worst legacy that could come from the Iraq war would be ... a sharp turn toward isolation with a cynical realist policy aligning the United States with friendly authoritarians. Good governance, ... is critical to a host of outcomes we desire, from alleviating poverty to dealing with pandemics to controlling violent conflicts. A Wilsonian policy ... needs to be informed by a certain realism that was missing from the thinking of the Bush administration in its first term and of its neoconservative allies. ...
We have to shift our focus to the reform, reorganization and proper financing of those institutions of the United States government that actually promote democracy. ... The Bush administration has been walking — indeed, sprinting — away from the legacy of its first term, ... but the legacy and its neoconservative supporters has been so polarizing that it is going to be hard to have a reasoned debate.
What is needed now are new ideas, neither neoconservative nor realist, ideas that retain the belief in the universality of human rights, but without its illusions about the efficacy of American power and hegemony to bring these ends about.
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http://zfacts.com/p/236.html | 01/18/12 07:17 GMT
Modified: Tue, 10 Oct 2006 17:05:41 GMT
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Who is Fukuyama?
He is one of the top 25 neocons who founded PNAC
"I have numerous affiliations with the different strands of the neoconservative movement. ... Strauss's protégé Allan Bloom,... Wohlstetter, and worked also on two occasions for Wolfowitz."
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Amazon
America Alone:
By mainstream Republicans with long experience in government. Fair-minded and fascinating. The book is a damning indictment of neocons and the Iraq War -- because it is incredibly well researched and cautious. Read the authors' key points in their own words.
more books
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