We are doomed
Posted on 03/01/2006 5:00:58 PM PST by churchillbuff
Francis Fukuyama's America at the Crossroads argues that the United States made the mistake of going into Iraq without preparing for a hostile occupation because of the flawed foreign-policy thinking of a small group of people called neoconservatives. ...
[snip]
While he remains sympathetic to the democracy-spreading mission, Fukuyama castigates the unilateral and militaristic turns that gave us such concepts as "preventive war," "benevolent hegemony," and "regime change." Neoconservatives, he contends, have abandoned their fundamental political insight, namely that ambitious schemes to remake societies are doomed to disappointment, failure, and unintended consequences. "Opposition to utopian social engineering," Fukuyama writes "… is the most enduring thread running through the movement." Yet neoconservatives today are bogged down in an attempt to remake a poorly understood, catastrophically damaged, and deeply alien semi-country in the Middle East. How did these smart people stray—and lead the country—so far off course?
(Excerpt) Read more at slate.com ...
SAVAGE mentioned this last week on his RadioRant...
They were wrong about everything in Iraq and now they want us to deja vu all over again in Iran. No thanks.
"Neoconservatives, he contends, have abandoned their fundamental political insight, namely that ambitious schemes to remake societies are doomed to disappointment, failure, and unintended consequences."
Gosh, I thought that's what "Paleos" accused "neos" of.
Did Fukuyama ever describe himself as a neocon? Does he know what it means? the Larouchian background? "Regime change" is a "neocon" creation? Fukuyama drank the "spot the neocon" Kool-Aid.
Only a guy who thinks like Fukuyama could write a book titled "The End of History". He still lives in a pre-9/11 world.
We should have stayed out of Japan as well
Well, life is hard sometimes. Still, we cowboy up and do what we have to do.
Despite what Fukuyama says, we didn't go into Iraq to remake the society. We went in there to hang Saddam. The rest is just housekeeping and the cost of doing business.
We'll get through it, and when we do, we will deal with the next crisis that comes along.
"Francis Fukuyama's America at the Crossroads argues that the United States made the mistake of going into Iraq without preparing for a hostile occupation because of the flawed foreign-policy thinking of a small group of people called neoconservatives. ..."
Nobody can predict the future ... not even Francis Fukuyama.
George
He's funny. He calls Reagan a "neo-con". The least he could have done is stuck with his "Wilsonian" insight and stuck with it, call the interventionist strain "Wilsonian" and drop the neo-con canard. "Wilsonians" have been in all parties, just as have "isolationalists."
We are doomed
Nobody seems to know why we went in. We've heard 20 reasons since the beginning. It's a shifting rationale; every time a reason is exposed as mistaken or not worth the price, we're given a new reason why it "had to be done."
There weren't WMDs, and Iraq didn't do 9-11; that's the bottom line - the invasion was an unnecessary expenditure of American lives and of $200 billion (and counting) in American tax money.
This is the kind of thing that, when government does it on the domestic front, we call it a "government boondoggle" - p-ssing away taxpayers' money for no good reason.
Well, most other people say it was Bush's failure to guard Iraqi borders for Rumsfeld to prove his "light" army schemes, and whatever the Breme interregnum meant to accomplish. But if Fukuyama says its the "neocons"...
One day it will be a Liberal; the next day it will be a paleo Conservative. The red/brown alliance against the war on terror is alive and well -- and spells enormous harm for our country.
Ah, but a LOT of people predicted a major insurgency if we invaded Iraq - and they predicted that a huge force of US troops would be needed to prevent that insurgency. Some generals made that prediction - and Rumsfeld gave them the boot. That was back when the neocons LOVED Rumsfeld. Now they're making him the scapegoat for policy choices that they endorsed and praised him for.
"Ah, but a LOT of people predicted a major insurgency if we invaded Iraq - and they predicted that a huge force of US troops would be needed to prevent that insurgency."
True to a big degree.
"Some generals made that prediction - and Rumsfeld gave them the boot. That was back when the neocons LOVED Rumsfeld."
Blame the "neocons" for enabling Rumsfeld's ideas? I think he stood on other grounds, independently, his idea to "transform" forces to reduce them and direct more money into MIC toys, esp. dumping a lot of money into Star Wars Part Deux, for which he lobbied privately for before 2000.
In Act Two, which takes place in the late 1970s, a slightly different cast of neoconservative characters applies the same insight to the American foreign policy of the detente era. There are scenes here of their hostility to the United Nations; of their battles with Kissinger's realism, which they see as too accommodating of communism; and of their push to challenge the Soviet Union more aggressively, both morally and militarily. Once again, they look prescient in retrospect, though in his sympathy for the golden era, Fukuyama doesn't consider the ways in which the neocons were also massively wrong about communism. For example, a central tenet of neoconservative thinking in the 1980s, derived from Jeanne Kirkpatrick's famous article "Dictatorships & Double Standards," was that communist societies could not change from within.
It is not until the Third Act that neoconservatism goes catastrophically wrong. Imbued by the revolutions of 1989 with a sense of their own rightness and of America's unchallenged dominance, the neocons imagine that even backward, non-Western societies with no liberal traditions can follow a Polish post-totalitarian path to modern democracy. Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and William Kristol fantasize that a dubious Garibaldi figure, Ahmad Chalabi, can overthrow the world's most vicious dictator with a small band of followers. After this hope proves futile, they somehow persuade the vice president and secretary of defense—and in the climactic scene, the president himself—that once the American military finishes the job his father started, Iraqis will embrace their occupiers.
Weisberg is too snide about Kirkpatrick and the Reagan era and too snide about the Bush administration as well, but it sounds like Fukuyama gets things about right.
It's an ironic turn of events, but a lot of the "irony" has to do with the difficulty of defining a word like "neo-conservatism." It turns out to be a large tent or umbrella that accomodates independent intellectuals and policy mavericks in the 1970s and establishment bureaucrats today.
You could interpret the story differently, finding more a continuity or commonality between political leaders of different outlooks that has less to do with the ideas of intellectuals or propagandists and more to do with the way our country and its bureaucracy tends to act in foreign affairs.
Of course, not all politicians or diplomats face the same troubles. There are realists and opportunists and isolationists and idealistic quasi-pacifists who will fail in other ways, but a marriage of crusading idealism to power can produce similar results, whatever the official rationale for intervention.
Sorry Francis, but the Bible always gets it right.
Matthew 24
3 And as he sat upon the mount of Olives, the disciples came unto him privately, saying, Tell us, when shall these things be? and what shall be the sign of thy coming, and of the end of the world?
4 And Jesus answered and said unto them, Take heed that no man deceive you.
5 For many shall come in my name, saying, I am Christ; and shall deceive many.
6 And ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars: see that ye be not troubled: for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet.
7 For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in divers places.
8 All these are the beginning of sorrows.
You do if you've been paying attention. Bush came into office dropping hints that he intended to deal definitively with Saddam; certainly I interpreted some of Bush's remarks that way. I wrote almost immediately after 911 that if we didn't finish Saddam as a part of our "war on terror" we were making a grave error. So I haven't been listening to the political rhetoric as much as I have been watching what they've been doing.
I believed from the beginning that any war that left Saddam in place was doomed to failure. If you believe that, which you probably do not, but I do, then all that follows, the insurgency, the rebuilding, facing down Iran behind the scenes, all of it is part of the cost of doing what has to be done.
Articles that claim that no one expected the insurgency are just fluff. I certainly expected an insurgency. What is the right sized army to deal with it? I don't know. But I wasn't surprised, except that with Iran next door meddling, I've been surprised that it wasn't worse.
Will we achieve a lasting democracy in Iraq? Maybe, maybe not. We'll give it a shot. We'll give the Iraqis the best chance they are ever going to have.
But we will hang Saddam.
NeoCons, code for Jews.
We went through this in the 30s & 40s. Give it all a rest already.
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