Fukuyama's Fantasy

The Washington Post


Fukuyama's Fantasy

By Charles Krauthammer
Tuesday, March 28, 2006; Page A23

It was, as the hero tells it, his Road to Damascus moment. There he
is, in a hall of 1,500 people he has long considered to be his
allies, hearing the speaker treat the Iraq war, nearing the end of
its first year, as "a virtually unqualified success." He gasps as the
audience enthusiastically applauds. Aghast to discover himself in a
sea of comrades so deluded by ideology as to have lost touch with
reality, he decides he can no longer be one of them.

And thus did Francis Fukuyama become the world's most celebrated ex-
neoconservative, a well-timed metamorphosis that has brought him a
piece of the fame that he once enjoyed 15 years ago as the man who
declared, a mite prematurely, that history had ended.

A very nice story. It appears in the preface to Fukuyama's post-
neocon coming out, "America at the Crossroads." On Sunday it was
repeated on the front page of the New York Times Book Review in Paul
Berman's review.

I happen to know something about this story, as I was the speaker
whose 2004 Irving Kristol lecture to the American Enterprise
Institute Fukuyama has now brought to prominence. I can therefore
testify that Fukuyama's claim that I attributed "virtually
unqualified success" to the war is a fabrication.

A convenient fabrication -- it gives him a foil and the story drama
-- but a foolish one because it can be checked. The speech was given
at the Washington Hilton before a full house, carried live on C-SPAN
and then published by the American Enterprise Institute under its
title "Democratic Realism: An American Foreign Policy for a Unipolar
World." (It can be read at http://www.aei.org/publications/pubID.
19912,filter.all/pub_detail.asp .) As indicated by the title, the
speech was not about Iraq. It was a fairly theoretical critique of
the four schools of American foreign policy: isolationism, liberal
internationalism, realism and neoconservatism. The only successes I
attributed to the Iraq war were two, and both self-evident: (1) that
it had deposed Saddam Hussein and (2) that this had made other
dictators think twice about the price of acquiring nuclear weapons,
as evidenced by the fact that Moammar Gaddafi had turned over his
secret nuclear program for dismantling just months after Hussein's
fall (in fact, on the very week of Hussein's capture).

In that entire 6,000-word lecture, I said not a single word about the
course or conduct of the Iraq war. My only reference to the outcome
of the war came toward the end of the lecture. Far from calling it an
unqualified success, virtual or otherwise, I said quite bluntly that
"it may be a bridge too far. Realists have been warning against the
hubris of thinking we can transform an alien culture because of some
postulated natural and universal human will to freedom. And they may
yet be right."

History will judge whether we can succeed in "establishing civilized,
decent, nonbelligerent, pro-Western polities in Afghanistan and
Iraq." My point then, as now, has never been that success was either
inevitable or at hand, only that success was critically important to
"change the strategic balance in the fight against Arab-Islamic
radicalism."

I made the point of repeating the problematic nature of the
enterprise: "The undertaking is enormous, ambitious and arrogant. It
may yet fail."

For Fukuyama to assert that I characterized it as "a virtually
unqualified success" is simply breathtaking. My argument then, as
now, was the necessity of this undertaking, never its ensured
success. And it was necessary because, as I said, there is not a
single, remotely plausible, alternative strategy for attacking the
root causes of Sept. 11: "The cauldron of political oppression,
religious intolerance, and social ruin in the Arab-Islamic world --
oppression transmuted and deflected by regimes with no legitimacy
into virulent, murderous anti-Americanism."

Fukuyama's book is proof of this proposition about the lack of the
plausible alternative. The alternative he proposes for the challenges
of Sept. 11 -- new international institutions, new forms of foreign
aid and sundry other forms of "soft power" -- is a mush of
bureaucratic make-work in the face of a raging fire. Even Berman, his
sympathetic reviewer, concludes that "neither his old arguments nor
his new ones offer much insight into this, the most important problem
of all -- the problem of murderous ideologies and how to combat them."

Fukuyama now says that he had secretly opposed the Iraq war before it
was launched. An unusual and convenient reticence, notes Irwin
Stelzer, editor of "The Neocon Reader," for such an inveterate
pamphleteer, letter writer and essayist. After public opinion had
turned against the war, Fukuyama then courageously came out against
it. He has every right to change his mind at his convenience. He has
no right to change what I said.

letters@charleskrauthammer.com