Joanna
Chuck Grimes wrote:
>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
>___________________________________
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>
>
>