The Wall Street Journal
March 11, 2006
BOOKS
Fukuyama's Pivot
He urged military intervention in Iraq and hailed the country's liberation, but now this leading public intellectual has second thoughts -- and a new plan
By BRET STEPHENS
March 11, 2006; Page P10
America at the Crossroads
By Francis Fukuyama
Yale, 226 pages, $25
In January 1998, a group called the Project for the New American Century issued a public letter to President Clinton on the subject of Iraq. The threat posed by Saddam Hussein, it said, was "more serious than any we have known since the end of the Cold War." Efforts to contain the dictator were "steadily eroding." If Saddam acquired weapons of mass destruction, "as he is almost certain to do if we continue along the present course," the whole Middle East would be put at risk.
(snip)
Among the letter's 18 signatories were Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Zalmay Khalilzad, John Bolton and the neoconservative political theorist Francis Fukuyama, best known for his 1992 book, "The End of History and the Last Man." And yet, as the invasion of Iraq loomed in 2002, Mr. Fukuyama tells us in "America at the Crossroads," he came to the conclusion that "the war didn't make sense." The book attempts to explain why and to sketch out a new set of principles for a prudent foreign policy. On April 14, 2003 -- five days after the fall of Baghdad to U.S. troops -- Mr. Fukuyama published an article in this newspaper in which he noted that Americans have "justly celebrated the downfall of Saddam Hussein's dictatorship" (my emphasis). There is not a word in the article to suggest the misgivings Mr. Fukuyama claims to have been harboring for a year.
The chronology here has no bearing on the validity of Mr. Fukuyama's views. Nor does it count against him that he changed his mind. Credibility is another matter. Mr. Fukuyama is a public intellectual of the first rank, with influence and connections at the highest reaches of the Bush administration. Several thousand U.S. troops have now been killed or injured in a war he gave every appearance of supporting well after the Rubicon was crossed. If Mr. Fukuyama now judges the effort a terrible folly, the least he can do is offer an honest account of the part he played cheering it on.
(snip)
Mr. Fukuyama's more relevant objections are as follows. First, he says, the administration failed to anticipate the extent to which the war would aggravate anti-Americanism and reshape global politics accordingly. Second, it mischaracterized and exaggerated the threat posed by radical Islamism: Jihadism, he writes, is "a byproduct of modernization and globalization, not traditionalism," which is better dealt with by integrating Muslims already living in the West than by "'fixing' the Middle East." Third, the administration neglected the insight of the founding neoconservatives -- intellectuals like Irving Kristol and Daniel Patrick Moynihan who, beginning in the 1960s, wrote critiques of large-scale government programs -- that ambitious attempts at social engineering tend to backfire.
(snip)
Mr. Stephens is a member of the Journal's editorial board.
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