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Neocon architect says: 'Pull it down'
By Alex Massie
02/21/06 "The
Scotsman" -- -- 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".
In its narrowest form, neoconservatism advocates the use of
military force, unilaterally if necessary, to replace autocratic
regimes with democratic ones.
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.
"Although the new and ominous possibility of undeterrable
terrorists armed with weapons of mass destruction did indeed
present itself, advocates of the war wrongly conflated this with
the threat presented by Iraq and with the rogue
state/proliferation problem more generally."
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".
Although Mr Fukuyama still supports the idea of democratic
reform - complete with establishing the institutions of liberal
modernity - in the Middle East, he warns that this process alone
will not immediately reduce the threats and dangers the US
faces. "Radical Islamism is a by-product of modernisation
itself, arising from the loss of identity that accompanies the
transition to a modern, pluralist society. More democracy will
mean more alienation, radicalisation and - yes, unfortunately -
terrorism," he says.
"By definition, outsiders can't 'impose' democracy on a country
that doesn't want it; demand for democracy and reform must be
domestic. Democracy promotion is therefore a long-term and
opportunistic process that has to await the gradual ripening of
political and economic conditions to be effective."
©2006 Scotsman.com
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