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http://www.macleans.ca/topstories/world/article.jsp?content=20060327_123776_123776Q&A with author and former neo-con Francis Fukuyama 'America, in its domestic institutions, feels that concentrated power is a danger. Yet when we go into international politics we say, trust us.' TONY KELLER A lot of our readers will be familiar with what I'll call the George Clooney/Syriana thesis: the war in Iraq is wrong because its alleged goals -- oil, money, power, empire -- are evil. Your argument against the war is very different. Right. I and a lot of other serious people had a very difficult time coming to a judgment about the war, because there are competing goods on both sides. The George Clooney types completely disregarded the idealistic dimension of the war, but I think that was actually quite important. There was a belief that if you did not stand up to certain forms of tyranny, then you couldn't create a just world order. That was really one of the important motives, especially for someone like Paul Wolfowitz. I think probably less for his boss, Don Rumsfeld. Although people would presumably prefer to work things out peacefully, there come times when military power needs to be used for moral ends. A lot of people thought this was one of them.
And yet you nevertheless say that the war was a mistake. What was the error?
The most obvious one was just the miscalculation -- the complete miscalculation -- of how much the war would cost and how difficult it would be to move to anything that looks like a stable democracy in post-Saddam Iraq. And in a way this is the most unaccountable error, because many of the neo-conservatives who had supported the war had also, in earlier years and decades, been very, very cautious in their attitude toward ambitious social engineering. There'd been a lot of argument, in the context of domestic American social policy, about how it was extremely hard to achieve good social results in education, affirmative action, busing, welfare, these issues that bedevilled the United States. And then they all of a sudden turned around and argued that the root cause of terrorism is the lack of democracy in the Middle East and the United States is somehow going to midwife the emergence of Middle East democracy.
Were there other mistakes?
Another one was just about how the world would regard this exercise of American power. People like William Kristol and Bob Kagan , writing before the war, had made this general case for what they called "benevolent hegemony." The United States was King Kong on the world stage, we spend as much as the rest of the world combined on our military, and we would use that margin of power to fix problems, to provide global public goods, get rid of dictators, weapons of mass destruction, terrorism and human rights violations. I think the basic mistake they made was the belief that the rest of the world would approve this. There's actually a phrase that I quote in my book, where they ask themselves rhetorically, would people resist this exercise of power, and they say, "Well, no, because American foreign policy is unusually suffused with morality." That belief in American exceptionalism, and the idea that the world would legitimate the exercise of American power, was the other really big, fundamental mistake.
But neo-cons criticized Bill Clinton and the Democrats for pursuing an activist foreign policy, for nation-building -- and then within a few years they're actually engaging in something far more ambitious. How did this happen?
The one you have to explain is George W. Bush. As a candidate in 2000, Bush argued very explicitly against nation-building and he said we needed a more humble foreign policy. And Condi Rice gave this famous interview where she said American troops can't be escorting children to school in the Balkans and places like that. And then they have this second inaugural address with all this soaring rhetoric about how American foreign policy is going to be based purely on values and the spread of freedom to every last corner of the world. I think there's just a really simple explanation for how they got there, which is that they actually did not go to war to spread democracy, they went to war for security reasons related to WMDs, terrorism, and I think they had a strategic view of the importance of access to oil that was also in the background. And then those reasons, one by one, they blew up. All they were left with was the idealistic justification, and that's why they have put that front and centre.
But you agree with those ideals?
Oh, absolutely.
So is the debate between you and the neo-conservatives over means rather than ends?
In a sense, I do share the same ends as the neo-cons. But we've just dramatically over-militarized the means. I also disagree with other parts of the neo-con agenda, for example, the attitude toward international organizations. I continue to be skeptical that the UN is going to be the one global institution that can solve all of these complex nation-building, security, weak-state issues, but I do think that forms of international co-operation other than "coalitions of the willing" are necessary to legitimate and make effective the use of American power around the world.
I was trying to think of a simple slogan that sums up your position. How's this: "The Neo-cons in Iraq: Not Evil, Just Stupid."
No, I don't think they were evil. I mean, when people say that they were evil it attributes to them all of these hidden agendas. One category of accusation is that they were really working on behalf of Israel, another one is that it's just about oil and the Bush family and a lot of short-term economic payoffs, another is that it's just somehow throwing American weight around for the sake of throwing our weight around. And all of those are, you know, they're just wrong. Those were not the motives that drove them.
So what should have been done on Iraq?
The United States was essentially following a containment strategy -- as we are doing in North Korea and Iran right now. We could have revitalized the sanctions regime. We did get the inspectors back into Iraq, and those inspectors actually did a much better job than anyone realized, keeping track of Saddam's WMD programs. And we could have lived with that situation for quite a while.
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