[lbo-talk] Buckley throws in the towel on Iraq

Michael Pollak mpollak at panix.com
Sun Feb 26 16:22:39 PST 2006



> I thought Buckley never saw himself as a neocon

Here, on the other hand, is a neocon -- and he's even harder on them than Buckley. [Via Jonathan Schwartz's Tiny Revolution comments page]

http://news.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=266122006

Neocon architect says: 'Pull it down'

NEOCONSERVATISM has failed the United States and needs to be replaced

by a more realistic foreign policy agenda, according to one of its

prime architects.

Francis Fukuyama, who wrote the best-selling book The End of History

and was a member of the neoconservative project, now says that, both

as a political symbol and a body of thought, it has "evolved into

something I can no longer support". He says it should be discarded on

to history's pile of discredited ideologies.

In an extract from his forthcoming book, America at the Crossroads, Mr

Fukuyama declares that the doctrine "is now in shambles" and that its

failure has demonstrated "the danger of good intentions carried to

extremes".

(. . .)

Mr Fukuyama once supported regime change in Iraq and was a signatory

to a 1998 letter sent by the Project for a New American Century to the

then president, Bill Clinton, urging the US to step up its efforts to

remove Saddam Hussein from power. It was also signed by

neoconservative intellectuals, such as Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan,

and political figures Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and the current

defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld.

However, Mr Fukuyama now thinks the war in Iraq is the wrong sort of

war, in the wrong place, at the wrong time.

"The most basic misjudgment was an overestimation of the threat facing

the United States from radical Islamism," he argues.

(. . .)

Mr Fukuyama, one of the US's most influential public intellectuals,

concludes that "it seems very unlikely that history will judge either

the intervention [in Iraq] itself or the ideas animating it kindly".

Going further, he says the movements' advocates are Leninists who

"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 practised by the United States".



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