[ppi] [ppiindia] Fukuyama's Fantasy

** Mailing List|Milis Nasional Indonesia PPI-India **
** Situs resmi: http://www.ppi-india.org **
** Situs milis: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ppiindia **
** Informasi Beasiswa Scholarship: http://informasi-beasiswa.blogspot.com **
<br><br><a href="http://informasi-beasiswa.blogspot.com";><img 
src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/Info_Beasiswa.gif"; height="67" width="200" 
style="border:0" alt="Info Beasiswa Scholarship "/></a><br><br>
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/27/AR2006032701298.html?sub=AR

 
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@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx



[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]



***************************************************************************
Berdikusi dg Santun & Elegan, dg Semangat Persahabatan. Menuju Indonesia yg 
Lebih Baik, in Commonality & Shared Destiny. 
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ppiindia
***************************************************************************
__________________________________________________________________________
Mohon Perhatian:

1. Harap tdk. memposting/reply yg menyinggung SARA (kecuali sbg otokritik)
2. Pesan yg akan direply harap dihapus, kecuali yg akan dikomentari.
3. Reading only, http://dear.to/ppi 
4. Satu email perhari: ppiindia-digest@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
5. No-email/web only: ppiindia-nomail@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
6. kembali menerima email: ppiindia-normal@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
 
Yahoo! Groups Links

<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
    http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ppiindia/

<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
    ppiindia-unsubscribe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
    http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
 


--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Situs resmi: http://www.ppi-india.org ; 
Situs milis: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ppiindia ; 
Informasi Beasiswa Scholarship: http://informasi-beasiswa.blogspot.com
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
<br>
<a href="http://informasi-beasiswa.blogspot.com";><img 
src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/Info_Beasiswa.gif"; height="67" width="200" 
style="border:0" alt="Info Beasiswa Scholarship "/></a><br>

Other related posts: