Nice essay on Fykuyama that tries to outline the reasons for his intellectual turn. It more or less comes down to the difference between Alexander Kojeve and Leo Strauss---a separation that follows different threads on the right. While I sort of follow its rational, it strikes me as extremely odd that Fukyama's support for the quintessentially American hubris of the Bush administration needs an explanation from the European history of ideas.
There is something seriously absurd about that. I would call it an intellectual obfuscation of the blatantly criminal and stupid regime in Washington, elected and re-elected by a voting public in the throws of a pathological denial. And maybe more interesting (at least to me) is a foreign policy intellectual community that seems just as pathological, just as criminally negliant, and just as clue less.
What were these people thinking?
C --------------
Inside Man, Perry Anderson
Three years into the war in Iraq, with no end in sight, soul-searching has broken out in the foreign policy establishment. Second thoughts about the invasion are now a library. Among these, few have received wider coverage than Francis Fukuyama's. The fame of the author of The End of History and the Last Man is, of course, one reason. The frisson of an illustrious defection from the ranks of neoconservatism is another, no doubt more immediate one. But to take America at the Crossroads simply as a political straw in the wind--although, of course, it is also that--is to diminish its intellectual interest. This lies essentially in its relation to the work that made Fukuyama's name.
The argument of America at the Crossroads falls into three parts. In the first, Fukuyama retraces the origins of contemporary neoconservatism. His story begins with a cohort of New York intellectuals, mostly Jewish, who were socialists in their youth but rallied to the flag during the cold war and then stood firm against the New Left when the United States was fighting Communism in Vietnam. In due course, out of their milieu came a social agenda too: the critique of welfare liberalism developed in The Public Interest, edited by Irving Kristol and Daniel Bell. Meanwhile, moral reaction against the laxity of the 1960s was being lent philosophical depth by Leo Strauss in Chicago and cultural zip by his pupil Allan Bloom. Military understanding and technical expertise were provided by nuclear strategist Albert Wohlstetter, theorist of counterforce missile capacity and prophet of electronic warfare. Fukuyama explains that in one way or another he was personally involved in all of these enterprises. But his account of them is calm and balanced, and if anything understates the potency of the political cocktail they represented. His emphasis falls rather on their ultimate confluence with broader and more popular currents of conservatism--belief in small government, religious piety, nationalism--in the base of the Republican Party. Together, this was the political torrent that powered the rise of the Reagan presidency.
But the greatest triumph of the conservative ascendancy--victory in the cold war--contained, he suggests, the seeds of what would become the undoing of neoconservatism. For the fall of the Soviet Union bred overconfidence in the ability of America to reshape the world at large. Exaggerating the role of US economic and military pressure in the sudden collapse of the USSR, which in reality was decaying within, a younger levy of thinkers--William Kristol and Robert Kagan are singled out--came to believe that tyranny could be felled and liberty planted with comparable speed elsewhere. It was this illusion, according to Fukuyama, that led to the attack on Iraq. Ignoring not only the quite different political landscape of the Middle East but also the warnings of the original neoconservatives against overly voluntarist schemes of social engineering, the projectors of the invasion have saddled the United States with a disaster from which it will take years to recover. Needless resort to a unilateral force has isolated America from world opinion, above all its European allies, weakening rather than strengthening the US position in the world.
Fukuyama devotes the rest of his book to the outline of an alternative foreign policy that would restore America to its rightful place in the world. A "realistic Wilsonianism," tempering the best of neoconservative convictions with a more informed sense of the intractability of other cultures and the limits of American power, would retain the need for pre-emptive war as a last resort and the promotion of democracy across the globe as a permanent goal. But it would confer with allies, rely more often on soft than hard power, undertake state-building in the light of social science and encourage the spread of new, overlapping forms of multilateralism, bypassing the deadlocks of the United Nations. "The most important way that American power can be exercised," Fukuyama concludes, "is not through the exercise of military power but through the ability of the United States to shape international institutions." For what they can do is "reduce the transaction costs of achieving consent" to US actions.
In the tripartite structure of America at the Crossroads--capsule history of neoconservatism; critique of the way it went awry in Iraq; proposals for a rectified version--the crux of the argument lies in the middle section. Fukuyama's account of the milieu to which he belonged, and its role in the run-up to the war, is level-headed and informative. But it is a view from within that contains a revealing optical illusion. Everything happens as if neoconservatives were the basic driving force behind the march to Baghdad, and it is their ideas that must be cured if America is to get back on track.
In reality, the front of opinion that pressed for an assault on Iraq was far broader than a particular Republican faction. It included many a liberal and Democrat. Not merely was the most detailed case for attacking Saddam Hussein made by Kenneth Pollack, a functionary of the Clinton Administration. What remains by a long way the most sweeping theorization of a program for American military intervention to destroy rogue regimes and uphold human rights round the world is the work of Philip Bobbitt, nephew of Lyndon Johnson and another and more senior ornament of the national security apparatus under Clinton. Beside the 900 pages of his magnum opus, The Shield of Achilles, a work of vast historical ambition that ends with a series of dramatic scenarios of the coming wars for which America must prepare, the writers of The Weekly Standard are thin fare. No neoconservative has produced anything remotely comparable. Nor was there any shortage of lesser trumpeters on the liberal end of the spectrum--the Ignatieffs and Bermans--for an expedition to the Middle East. There was no illogic in that. The Democrats' war in the Balkans, dismissing national sovereignty as an anachronism, was the immediate condition and proving ground of the Republicans' war in Mesopotamia--genocide in Kosovo only a little less overstated than weapons of mass of destruction in Iraq. The operations of what Fukuyama at one point allows himself, in a rare lapsus, to call the "American overseas empire" have historically been bipartisan, and continue to be so.
In the Republican camp, moreover, neoconservative intellectuals were only one, and not the most significant, element in the constellation that propelled the Bush Administration into Iraq. Of the six "Vulcans" in James Mann's authoritative study on who paved the road to war, Paul Wolfowitz alone--originally a Democrat--belongs to Fukuyama's retrospect. None of the three leading figures in the design and justification of the attack, Rumsfeld, Cheney and Rice, had any particular neoconservative attachments. Fukuyama is aware of this, but he offers no explanation, merely remarking that "we do not at this point know the origins of their views." What, then, of his own location within the galaxy he describes? Here--it must be said that this is uncharacteristic--he smooths out the record. With a misleadingly casual air, he says that while he started out "fairly hawkish on Iraq" at a time when no invasion was envisaged, when one was later launched he was against it.
In this his memory has failed him. In June 1997 Fukuyama was a founder, alongside Rumsfeld, Cheney, Dan Quayle, Wolfowitz, Scooter Libby, Zalmay Khalilzad, Norman Podhoretz, Elliott Abrams and Jeb Bush, of the Project for the New American Century, whose statement of principles called for "a Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity" to "promote the cause of political and economic freedom abroad." In January 1998 he was one of the eighteen signatories of an open letter from the project to Clinton insisting on the need for "willingness to undertake military action" to secure "the removal of Saddam Hussein's regime from power," and declaring that "the US has the authority under existing UN resolutions to take the necessary steps" to do so. Four months later, he was among those denouncing the lack of such action as a "capitulation to Saddam" and an "incalculable blow to American leadership and credibility" and spelling out just what measures against the Baath regime were required: "We should help establish and support (with economic, political, and military means) a provisional, representative and free government" in "liberated areas in northern and southern Iraq" under the protection of "US and allied military power." In other words: an invasion to set up a Chalabi regime in Basra or Najaf, and to topple Saddam from this base.
Under Bush, the project--its ranks now swollen by such stalwarts as Democratic veteran Stephen Solarz and Marshall Wittmann, now of the Democratic Leadership Council--returned to the attack, and Fukuyama was again to the fore in pressing for an onslaught on Iraq. On September 20, 2001, little more than a week after 9/11, he appended his signature to a blunt demand for war that waved aside any relevance of links to Al Qaeda and did not even bother to raise the specter of WMD:
It may be that the Iraqi government provided assistance in some form
to the recent attack on the United States. But even if evidence does
not link Iraq directly to the attack, any strategy aiming at the
eradication of terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined
effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq. Failure to
undertake such an effort will constitute an early and perhaps
decisive surrender in the war on international terrorism. The United
States must therefore provide full military and financial support to
the Iraqi opposition. American military force should be used to
provide a "safe zone" in Iraq from which the opposition can
operate. And American forces must be prepared to back up our
commitment to the Iraqi opposition by all necessary means.
For good measure, the signatories added that "any war against terrorism must target Hezbollah" and prepare for "appropriate measures of retaliation" against Syria and Iran as its sponsors.
To recall this campaign for blood and steel in the Middle East is not to single Fukuyama out for special incrimination. Congress, after all, would give the green light for war on Iraq with virtually complete bipartisan unanimity. But Fukuyama's deeper implication in the drive to Baghdad than he would now have us believe raises an important question: Why, if he was originally so committed to the adventure in Iraq, did he later break so sharply over it with his erstwhile intellectual allies? The disasters of the occupation are, of course, the most obvious reason--all kinds of creatures, large and small, jumping off the ship as it tilts lower in the waters. But this cannot be the principal explanation of Fukuyama's change of mind. He says he had lost belief in an invasion before the war started, and there is no reason to doubt him. Moreover, disillusion with the lack of practical success in an enterprise regarded as commendable in principle has been common enough among conservatives, without leading to the kind of historical critique and dissociation Fukuyama has embarked upon. It would have been quite possible to say Operation Iraqi Freedom has gone wrong, even that in retrospect it was a mistake from the beginning, without writing an obituary of neoconservatism. What suddenly put such distance between Fukuyama and his fellow spirits? . . remainder of article here:
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060424/anderson