Francis Fukuyama gives an excellent overview – at least for me – of the history of the neoconservative movement, its various strains, in his article in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, After Neoconservatism. The larger intent of the essay, however, is not professorial, but to announce the political economist’s withdrawal from the N-crowd. Those dreaded neos are, after all, responsible for the war in Iraq and that war, we all know, is a disaster. Well, maybe. Fukuyama not much more than a decade ago announced “the end of history.” In this article he says he was misread on that score and he really meant liberal democracy would lead to the end of history. Again: Well, maybe. Fukuyama seems to be a man in a hurry. The Iraq War here he declares to be a failure after only three years. Nostradamus? [Don't say "Well, maybe" again-ed. Okay, I won't.] In my own way, I sympathize with Fukuyama. The opinion game is ruthless. You have no time to wait for history and must make pronouncements based on thin and fleeting evidence. Still, it seems very early to close the book on Iraq. I suspect there are many twists and turns yet to come. Even Germany and Japan took a while to settle down after WWII – and that wasn’t the Middle East. Sometimes I think people like Fukuyama (I’m being mean here) write these things to get their New York Times cards back, to be welcomed home into the fold and not to have to spend the rest of their lives writing for the Weekly Standard. Or worse yet, blogging.
Personally, I think the real issue is that if a pundit doesn’t make a new and controversial statement every few months — and get in the press with it — they have to go back to work, like a job.
In any case, the “end of history” thing was silly and short-sighted, and this is also silly and short-sighted.
Roger:
Think Lincoln vs. McClelland, Republicans vs. Copperheads. And the Copperheads had a massive bodycount to lean their lack of spine on.
History, like many other things, ain’t over till it’s over. To paraphrase Chou En-Lai, we’ll need at least 200 years to evaluate the Iraq thing.
Moreover, the Wilson vs. Lodge, Roosevelt vs. Lindbergh, Nixon v. McGovern, recurs in U.S. history with rhythmic regularity. High-minded interventionism, cautious realpolitik, and the resistance to foreign entanglements are all old ideas whose time has come and gone and come and gone . . .
Fukuyama’s had his 15 minutes with “The End of History.” Now that he’s got his Dead Tree Media Card back from the Gray Lady. I hope they paid him enough so he can say he was published in the Times, and also get a ride on the subway (a Metrocard to go with his DTM Card).
I would say claiming he wants to get back in good with the NY Times is harsh. It’s the equivalent of saying he wants to catch a ride on the Titanic after it already hit the iceberg.
I can’t say that I have paid any attention to Fukuyama over the years, besides noting any book titled The End of History had to be some sort of joke or else a work of profound silliness. Shrug, history goes on, historians are spectators, and have a poor record in predicting the future. I suspect Fukuyama is not particularly well informed, but picks up his “facts” from the people he associates with. He is an academic, after all. These days that is not much a recommendation, it is perhaps even an outright handicap.
As to current history, it is picking up pace rapidly, with new developments in Europe and the Islamic world with the mo’toon wars and the Iranian bomb. Bush gave history a kick start and no one really knows where it is going to end up. But I must say that Fukuyama’s article already feels dated.
I also find it interesting that Fukuyama mentions 9/11 just three times and that in passing. The central part of his argument seems to be more theoretical and based on a discussion of the historical genesis of the neo-conservatives and their revolutionary roots. It strikes me that this approach treats the real events that drive history as some sort of sideshow, like the shadows cast by some higher Platonic reality. Ugh.
Fukuyama’s last reference to 9/11 is interesting:
It is no accident that so many recent terrorists, from Sept. 11′s Mohamed Atta to the murderer of the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh to the London subway bombers, were radicalized in democratic Europe and intimately familiar with all of democracy’s blessings. More democracy will mean more alienation, radicalization and ó yes, unfortunately ó terrorism.
Got that? Democracy is the problem and gives rise to Arab terrorism. I think the problem with Europe is not Democracy, the problem is socialized economies, socialist grievance theories, socialist welfare states, lack of free speech, and plain old European insularity. I welcome the coming conflicts in Europe because I think that is where they belong and because I think Europe richly deserves whatever it gets for incubating this cancer. If nothing else, Iraq has helped that to a head.
I must be a childlike Panglossian optimist. Defeatist rhetoric seems utterly senseless to me. As far as Iím concerned—the war in Iraq has already been won. We are only dealing with the cleanup work. Victory in war is normally defined as the defeat of the enemy. The so-called insurgents are only able to pull off occasional terrorist attacks. They have no realistic chance of capturing power. Moreover, the number of murders has dropped off dramatically. Iím not even sure if the terrorists are killing one hundred fifty people per week. Iraqís total population is comprised of some twenty-six million people. One merely needs to employ their fourth grade math skills. We are not losing in Iraq!
perhaps Fukayama is
just an incredibly bad writer,
afflicted with the modern
journalistic desire for a *hook*
to title his work with.
Roger’s short comments above suggest
Fukayama is protesting he’s
“been misunderstood”,
through no fault of his own,of course…
“In this article he says he was misread on that score
and he really meant liberal democracy
would lead to the end of history.”
his intent was to postulate
not that “History would END”,
but the “Democratic societies are the *End*
(ie Goal,Fruit,etc.) of human/historical/societal development”.
like i said,
perhaps Fukayama is
just an incredibly bad writer,
afflicted with the modern
journalistic desire for a *hook*
to title his work with.
Sorry Roger, I couldn’t read past this statement. I can’t learn anything new from someone who thinks they have real elections in Iran who then mischaracterizes Ahmadinejad as a conservative. Francis Fukuyama is too “reality based” for me. A U.S. Senate filibuster is more like an election than what they have in Iran. Senator Ted Kennedy is more like a conservative than Ahmadinejad. No wonder Fukuyama gets “misread”.
This statement also shows why you won’t be able to recapture use of the word liberal. Fukuyama and his ilk will never use these terms correctly again.
Ah yes, those democratic elections in Iran. I heard Daniel Schorr on NPR this weekend talking about how the administration ignores the will of the people in the Middle East, first in Iraq and now in Iran. He called Ahmadinejad democratically elected and therefore the peoples’ choice, ignoring the fact that 1) only 5% or so of the population showed up to vote and 2) the election was for a figurehead (which was the main reason why only 5% or so showed up to vote). But Schorr has a deep bass voice and his age is somewhere around 137, so he must know what he’s talking about.
While Francis is clearly wrong (again) and there is absolutely nothing remarkable about an academic, especially a historian, being wrong in his predictions, there is a troubling element to this. And that is the growing failure of will amongst the American “elite” to defend American principles, American values, American culture, American interests, and American security. It is useful to look at this episode of quitting through the lens of the MSM’s Danish cartoon preemptive appeasement drill – they are of a piece in which American “elites” find greater value in appeasing our enemies, or withdrawing from confrontation, than in defending our values from our enemies. At the risk of making my own prediction, it seems it is becoming increasingly clear that the demos, or democracy, is going to be the only thing that will save our nation. We will jettison “elites” who will not defend us and elect those that will. Much of this is already playing out in our elections, but I suspect the contrasts will grow starker over the next few elections, and the denizens of the faculty lounges, editorial boards, newsrooms, the labor unions, the DNC and Daily Kos will grow increasing frantic and enraged by their growing irrelevancy. To quote our good American Patriot George S. Patton, “America doesn’t like a loser.”
Hi
The Iranian election results are easy to get…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_presidential_election,_2005
Yes, the gateway to being able to get on the ballot is not something that we have in the US, but then again if you are not a part a republican/democrate party getting on the ballot for a local election is not easy, in fact it is almost impossible in some area’s. The choice we are allowed is deeply restricted by this… (and of course we have the why vote for someone who cann’t win problem too, I vote libertarian where I can because they represent in my political views, even if they never will win.)
These people have the goverment that the majority of them want, it just happens to be a goverment that we don’t like. This has also happened with Hamas, and in Egypt with the Muslim brotherhood.
Democracy does not seem to produce the results we want in the middle east.
From the wikipedia.org article.
The Iranian presidential election of 2005, the ninth presidential election in Iranian history, took place in two rounds, first on June 17, 2005, and then as a run-off on June 24. It led to the victory of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the hardline mayor of Tehran, with 19.48% of the votes in the first round and 61.69% in the second. Ahmadinezhad is believed to have won the second round because of his populist views, especially those regarding the poor people and their economic status. The election saw a turnout of almost 60% of eligible voters, seen as a strike back by Iran at the United States’ initial allegations that many in Iran would be restricted from voting.
If only the progressives can see for themselves how bigoted and condescending they sound.
They are saying to the world, Germans (and to a lesser extend, rest of old Europe) and Japanese were two much more worthwhile projects and therefore, more deserving peoples for our reconstruction projects. They are saying ME too screwed up, there is no hope at all worth any of our effort. We should just accept the current status quo as the reality on the ground.
One does get a sense of self-interest at work in reading Fukuyama’s analysis.
However, the War in Iraq has been a huge failure at least in terms of how it was sold to the American people.
#1 No WMD’s, and certainly no hint of _imminent_ WMD’s.
#2 No immediate drawdown and certainly no simple pacification, which is what was promised through “Shock and Awe”
#3 In no sense did this war “pay for itself” either in terms of blood or treasure, which again is how it was advertised
Of course one can put off fixing blame when we have problems to fix. The fact remains however that no one lost their job for their (at minimum) poor planning, poor intelligence, and poor presentation to the American people. That’s not right.
Moreover the above equation with Germany and Japan is just plain wrong. The Japanese never lost their head of state (The Emperor) and were remarkably quiescent. The Germans were mostly very quiet, even as they were inundated with millions of German refugees from the East and while continuing to hold millions of DP’s. Furthermore, the Japanese had a democratic tradition going back to the Meiji restoration, while the German pedigree in democracy, at least in terms of municipal law, goes back many hundreds of years.
The fact of the matter is that by invading Iraq we destabilized a multi-ethnic state, have created a situation where Shi’ite Muslims are bound to dominate, and are further bound to be infiltrated and controlled by Iran, which is a Shi’ite state. We can’t leave, because since breaking Saddam’s power, we are the only thing holding it together. And, so long as we are there, our kids are sitting ducks for IED’s, and will continue to be, until we leave. But at the same time, we cannot leave, because we cannot afford to have this center of oil production — important for the world economy if not precisely our own — being suspended while various groups fight over it, or while terrorists interdict it. Spare us any more such “successes.”
Febday,
You characterized Saddam’s Iraq as a stable multi-ethnic state, and one that we destabilized.
I suppose that one might characterize a terrorist police state as stable, and it was and is certainly multi-ethnic.
And destabilization was precisely the point. Our policy from the 1990s on was regime change. That’s by definition destabilizing.
Certainly you recogmize that the Middle East has been “stable” because we have allowed fascist and sometimes theocratic thugs to rule, all for the sake of a relatively “stable” supply of oil. That’s the real politik, and well and good except for the advent of global terrorism.
Our strategy was obvious. Regime change across the region. First Afghanistan, then Iraq, then…? Syria and Iran are logical choices, and by force if necessary.
The WMD debacle is a red herring advanced by the left. Their existence or not in Iraq is a secondary issue. The primary issue, and one that is indisputable, is that Iraq at one point had them, used them, and was friendly with known terrorist entities. Saddam had to go, as do the Ba’athist thugs in Syria, and the lunatics in Iran. It’s no accident that both these countries share a border with Iraq.
There are good arguments that we have made tactical mistakes. Regardless, we have implemented our policy and now have three armored divisions in the belly of the beast.
Let the destabilization continue.
#1 No WMD’s, and certainly no hint of _imminent_ WMD’s.
#2 No immediate drawdown and certainly no simple pacification, which is what was promised through “Shock and Awe”
#3 In no sense did this war “pay for itself” either in terms of blood or treasure, which again is how it was advertised
I supported the war, and none of those points played a role in my position. That is to say, you have set up a strawman. No doubt it makes you feel good to do so, but as an argument it has no impact and gets no traction in my reality. So comfort yourself with the pleasant fantasy that it does so but don’t expect that you are convincing anyone who doesn’t already share your views.
Okay, I’ll play. You supported the war whether or not there were WMD’s, regardless of how many wounded or killed Iraqis or Americans there might be, for however many years, and regardless of the cost.
Then why exactly did you support the war? And exactly what justification would you offer for invading other countries and overthrowing their governments? Because without the threat of imminent WMD use, there is no plausible justification for the invasion.
danredys, That Wikipedia info on the Iran elections comes from the authoritarian rulers of Iran. The 60% plus turnout is a press release that is nothing but fiction, which Wikipedia treats as fact, and it still doesn’t address the issue of the president elected to a figurehead role. Do you actually believe that the majority of Iranians have the government they want? I can’t fathom how one could come to this conclusion.
WMDs? Wait for them; they’re in the Bekka Valley, as we will see before too long. But moreover, Who cares? Looking at them as anything but as Chapstick for Tony Blair’s kiester misses the point.
Once you invade, it doesn’t matter if you went in because the clouds in your coffee looked like Saddam Hussein’s mustache, you’re there and that’s that. Motives are irrelevant; what matters is outcomes.
I should think the hundreds of thousands of corpses dug out of mass graves so far would give one pause before proclaiming Iraq’s stability to be such a grand thing. After all, East Germany was stable, the Soviet Union was stable, China is stable, North Korea is stable, Saudi Arabia, Cuba, Egypt, on and on. Every dictatorship and authoritarian regime run worth a damn is stable.
Stability, let’s not forget, is what brought us September 11.
================
Anyway, I put Fukuyama in the camp with George Will and Bill Kristol. These are people who should know better, but still read the Washington Post and the New York Slimes every day. Chrenkoff? Never heard of him. What newspaper does he write for?
You can’t predict the outcome of the game with just four innnings played. But neither can you predict the outcome by reading Pravda‘s game updates.
As an American, I’m an optimist. Would that Fukuyama would learn to be one, too.
Fedbay–
You plainly know nothing about international law, such as it is. A state of war existed between the United States and Iraq that dates to 1991. Saddam violated the ceasefire agreement on a daily basis. We needed NOTHING else to attack him. All the rest is window dressing for the kleptocrats at the U.N. And if you think 30 years of Saddam was just nifty, you would loved Uday and Qusay: The Sadistic Sequel.
Honestly, I do not understand why leftists think leaving cruel dictators in place to sow their discord is okay. Maybe it’s just their latent sympathies for Joe Stalin?
What is always of greatest amusement is watching folks like Fukuyama wakeup one day and find the world is completely different.
The reasons they come up with to explain the changes are always a real woot. Of the sort that had scientist putting the wrong head on a dinosaur because the head found with the skeleton didn’t match their misconceptions.
Okay, I’ll play. You supported the war whether or not there were WMD’s, regardless of how many wounded or killed Iraqis or Americans there might be, for however many years, and regardless of the cost.
Another strawman, no?
Then why exactly did you support the war?
Ah, at last an actual question, although I see that you have already answered it…
Because without the threat of imminent WMD use, there is no plausible justification for the invasion.
I suppose God has endorsed this view so it must be true. May I see the signature?
My support was based on several things:
1) The whole region was a cesspit stuck in stasis, and for the most part still is. It needed a kick in the butt to get moving. I wouldn’t have considered that sufficient in itself, but the 9/11 attack made it acceptable to me.
2) The sanctions were deeply immoral and corrupting. I am not a big fan of sanctions as they punish the ordinary people, destroy the economy, and empower the criminal element. That same scenario played out in Serbia. In any case the sanctions were going to fail soon enough, France and Russia would have seen to that.
3) Removing Saddam was a favor to most everyone in Iraq and polls there support that view. I find it fascinating to watch the tentative revival of Arab culture that is taking place and find it rewarding to watch the baleful Nazi influence begin to fade. What will take its place no one knows for sure, but at least there is possibility and some hope.
4) The Kurds are free and the Baathist ethnic cleansing and murder has stopped. Kurdistan offers something better for the rest of Iraq to emulate.
5) And so far the fighting has been moved to the Middle East, where it belongs. If it now moves into Europe, that is also where it belongs. To supinely await attack when war has been declared and acts of war committed is to invite it home.
6) Saddam did in fact support terrorism. I actually noted this well before 9/11 when I read interesting coverage by a reporter who attended a terror bazaar that took place in Baghdad, the second or third yearly event of that sort, IIRC.
7) Saddam wanted more weapons of mass destruction, in particular the bomb. This was not to attack the US, but rather to balance Iran. But even so, the flow of money into the international arms black market could not but help increase the dangers of proliferation.
And apropos the proceeding point, the exposure of the Khan network and the dismantling of the Libyan bomb program have, in my view, completely justified the expenditure of blood and money. YMMV.
The article is thoughtful and interesting and should not be lightly dismissed.
The whole “End of History” thing has been misunderstood. He wasn’t saying, “It’s over folks. Nothing to see here. Move along…”
He was saying that the the question of whether or not liberal (not necessarily, “leftist”) democracy was the best form of government had been answered in the affirmatie, not that there would never again be a significant human event or large-scale conflict.
Whether or not he was being impatient is debatable. In fact, he seemed to be saying, “Slower, Please, and lose the naive belief that attempting to bring democracy to a place that managed to resist its temptations for so long is going to be anything other than ugly, painful and expensive.”
He also seemed to be saying that economic development and liberalization should take precedence over political freedom, which can (as we’ve seen) usher in very bad groups that enjoy the popularity of politically immature electorates.
The Neocons MAY be making the same mistake the liberals made in the 60′s – that of assuming that widescale pathology can be quickly cured by the American government.
The central difference between Francis Fukuyama and myself is that Iím convinced we had to liberate Iraq. There was never a realistic option to do otherwise. Saddam Hussein was going to continue funding terrorist operations and destabilizing the region. We also had to bring the Muslim world into the 21st Century. Their sense of victimhood and entitlement must cease. Iraq is the second domino to fall. Afghanistan was the first. The rest have to eventually fall if we are to ever again feel safe.
Snippet:
The problem with your theory is that economic liberalization and development is extremely difficult to achieve in a police state. And we tried that after the first Gulf War. We chased Saddam out of Kuwait, We didn’t destroy his military capacity to continue his crushing treatment of his own people, we encouraged the people to rise up and then watched them get crushed in the most grotesque fashion, And we did that because not getting rid of Saddam was part of the bargain we made with the rest of the world to form the grand coalition. And, for the sake of honesty, I agreed with this entire tactic at the time because that was the sophisticated nuanced approach. Is the current tactic perfect? No way. Have their been incredibly stupid mistakes made along the way? Yes. But the notion that trade and negotiation alone was going to get rid of the cancerous regimes like Saddam’s Iraq, or that their was one iota of change happening in the Mideast before we went in is laughable. The empty rhetorical call for democracy,yes even a Muslim form of it, that wasn’t followed by any real action had produced nothing following the first Gulf War. The polite interaction with the regimes in the area was only solidifying the various dictatorships.
I detest Pat Buchannon’s isolationist foreign policy idea’s but at least he is honest. He says there will never be change in the area so we will deal with these thugs for our own benifit and we won’t pretend that we care about the downtrodden of that area because there is nothing we can do about it that won’t just make it worse. President Bush was going to follow the sixty year,Democratic and Republican, tradition of oil for “stability.” After 9-11 he saw what a failure this policy was. I have no idea where you come from so I won’t tar you with the following accusation. But for so many years a large part of the left and the Democratic party crowed about Human rights and dignity and the need for democracy in the region, but as far as any concrete change there had been almost none in the region. And I have not seen any raesonable non violent plan that was going to get rid of the Saddam or Taliban regimes. Our policy was “talk about regime change but do nothing” The sanctions kept Saddam from using his still intact conventional forces against anyone in the region but did nothing to keep him from brutalizing his own people and from using petrodollars to finance asymetrical warfare against the west. Hoping he wouldn’t do it isn’t a reasonable plan. As ugly as it has been there has been more movement for change in the region in the last 6 years then in the previous 4 decades. After 9-11 waiting 50 to 60 years hoping that these regimes would change out of the goodness of their hearts was not an option. Is every single life that has been lost a tradegy. Yes. Over time would preserving the staus qou produced more pain and misery. IMHO,yes. We lectured the dictaorships about their Human Rights violations but we did nothing and as long as they could put up with our public scoldings now and then these regimes knew they could operate their police states for multiple decades.
Neo-Conservatism seems to have lost its meaning and has become a flexible term for people to attack their political opponents. Real Neo-Conservatism began in the 1960′s in the pages of Commentary Magazine by the like of Norman Podhoretz, Irving Kristol, Pat Moynihan and Bill Bennett. Neo-Conservatives were liberals “who had been mugged by reality.” As such, they New Deal liberals who had become disenchanted with failed domestic paternalism and the swing by the Democratic Party toward appeasement and support for Communist governments. The Neo-Conservative movement really died with Reagan revolution and the end of the Cold War particularly when Frances Fukuyama declared the end of history in 1991.
Today, the likes of Pat Buchanan use Neo-Conservative as a veiled anti-Semitic remark despite the fact that the neo-Con movement was as Catholic as it was Jewish. He applied it to people like Doug Feith who was never a liberal and never a Democrat. When not used as a code-word for Jew it has become a term used by Socialist internationalists to define those of us who believe in an aggressive prosecution of the GWOT and an assertive US foreign policy.
In the end I think Fukuyama is on to something. It is time declare the end the of the Neo-Conservative movement. It actually died a decade ago. It is also time to redefine the political spectrum in different terms then the Stalinist Left-Right dichotomy that has ruled political discourse since the 1930s. The real political world is divided into three governing philosophies:
Statism: Which is a collection of Socialists, Fascists, Greens and Islamzoids
Republicanism: Constitutional governance with a separation of powers
Free governance: Libertarianism.
This is not a continuum. It is a set of discreet governing philosophies.
The Neo-Conservative movement has been instrumental in transforming our perception of the political world
I am not surprised that Fukuyama has turned on his former party. His End of History thesis was so off the mark that he must be questioning his old beliefs. However, the end of history theory was always bunk. He was wrong then and he wrong now. Samuel Huntington had it right from the beginning.
So Fukuyama opts out. Who cares? 90% of the population probably has no idea who he is anyway.
Has George Bush ever referred to himself as a neocon? Perhaps he has but I don’t remember it.
I think the most ridiculous aspect of this is that the war in Iraq is already considered a failure when the truth is we won the damn war. Unless these people thought Baghdad was going to look like Paris in two years I really do not know how they can consider it a failure.
My God it will take years just to provide electricity and clean water to a majority of the population. The idea that things are deemed a failure because certain people are bored is something only an academic could come up with. Maybe the people of Iraq have other ideas.
And I am tired of the nonstop fighting about the war. If Bush had come on TV after 9/11 and said that Clinton was lying about Saddam having weapons and having ties to terrorism people would have been outraged.
If he had followed that by saying the Iraqi Liberation Act was null and void and that if Saddam wanted to stiff arm the UN, circumvent the inspectors, terrorize his own people, break the cease fire on a daily basis, destroy the Marsh Arabs and the Kurds and in general treat the UN and the US with complete disrepect that was just ok fine…well the outrage would have been loud and clear.
The only real problem most of the antiwar movement had with this war was the R behind Bush’s name. It was not the right people in charge.
So Fukawhat’s his name thinks that democracy is the problem because after all Europe is democratic and they are radicalized? That is stupid. Look at Saudi Arabia and Egypt and Indonesia. There is nothing European about them. It seems that the only hope for modernizing the middle east is open government and education. Unless of course people want to look the other way while some “stable” dictator runs a tight ship.
yep, that has a history of success.
KP,
The problem with your theory is that economic liberalization and development is extremely difficult to achieve in a police state.
Thanks. Liberalization and developement are a result of reasonably decent government. Economic wellbeing does not precede good government.
The welfarists always make this mistake. They believe you can pour enough welfare into an area to civilize it. All that is really happening is pouring money into the corruption. Establish the closest thing to decent government that can be established and THEN crank up the economic assistance. This is the thinking that led to the French push to create Eurabia. They think they can civilize thugs with bribes. The thugs just take the money and invest it in extortion operations.
The best thing that could possibly happen in Palestine, IMO, is Hamas being elected and western support being cut off. They’ll flail around, scream bloody murder, imaple themselves trying to strike out, but eventually the people will start to toss the bums running the show out on their ears. The stupidest thing that can be done is to feed money to yet another gang of thugs.
Dear PeterG.
As you should know the Shah of Iran was deposed by the Iranian people in 1979, they then chose to put this form of govement in place. Since they managed to overthow a previous goverment ~25 years ago they should be able to do the same now if they felt it needed to be done. Since there seems to be little or no protest against the current goverment… this would seem to lead that they find it an acceptable from of goverment no matter what you may think.
Of course, the previous elections in 2000 had the world hoping that the power of hardline(conservative) clerics would be reduced –>
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_depth/middle_east/2000/iran_elections/iran_election_news/627344.stm
Which starts out with –>The landslide win by Iran’s reformists in the country’s general election was an unmistakable demonstration of people power and a heavy blow to hardline clerics:
Of course over the next four years the moderates ruled poorly and managed to get nothing done. They got replaced by someone else, and now it is their turn to make Iran a better place to live. This is what happens in countries with elected leaders.
The current goverment they have now is a more free system then what they had under the Shah.
Which is an improvement to them even if (since we put the Shah in power) not a improvement for the US.
Life is tough, and in a democracy I beleive a people should be allowed to elect their own leaders good or bad.
In Egypt in the last series of elections the goverment intervened (closing polling places, violence against voters) because the Muslim brotherhood was winning too much. Of course the US forced those free elections in the first place and if the Eqyptian goverment didn’t interven we would of liked the results even less… but maybe just maybe the elections results shouldn’t of been changed. The Muslim Brotherhood may of ran egypt better then the current rulers.
Right now the Iranian democracy is still in its infancy… I think we should wait for at least another 25 years to see where it goes, because most likely it will see the reduction of some of the power of the religous elite and a more moderate goverment overall. Since right wing extreamism doesn’t put chicken on the dinner table.
Dan
I love it when the YARGBians appear over the hill…
I am always impressed how many people acknowledge their own rose-colored view of the world, even when they seem to know it to be false. Some examples from this thread, klrfz says, “Francis Fukuyama is too “reality based” for me.” Mr Thomson, “I must be a childlike Panglossian optimist.” FreshAir, “As an American, I’m an optimist.”
Optimism makes a very good campiagn theme because people like feeling good. Most “reality-based” people I know find themselves optimisitic about some things and pessimistic about others. People who walk around optimistic all the time with no regard for the realities of the situation probably ought to be committed, as they are a danger to themselves and others.
Jerry says, in an effort to create some historical context, “Neo-Conservatives were liberals ‘who had been mugged by reality.’”
Modern neocons, however, seem to be better defined as conervatives who have been mugged by a fantasy in a Mohammed Atta mask. This is not to say that 9.11 did not illustrate a new threat to our country, it simply means that it has been used to justify some strange foreign policy conclusions. Perhaps a word for what our foriegn policy has become is Phantasiepolitik, long on optimism, short on planning.
Roger, at least, says we ought to wait for the judgment of history, convenient because it precludes an near-term reckoning for those who got us involved in this debacle, though true in a sense. We don’t know what the body count will be when the dust settles on this one. Perhaps historians will be able to argue that it was all somehow worth it. Certain folks in Roger’s comment section, however, who cling to these strange notions involving the Bekka valley and the insurgence being less deadly now than in the past, are the true believers. They’ll stay on the Phantasiepolitik train long after the intellectuals who helped found it, such as Fukuyama, have long since gotten off.
chuck — “…don’t expect that you are convincing anyone who doesn’t already share your views.”
Yes, but this goes for your comments as well. In fact, I doubt there is a single person reading this that can convince another reader to change his or her viewpoint.
Such it is when we are dealing in the realm of facts, not opinion! Talking with a __________ (liberal, conservative) about the war on terror is like being a doctor and trying to have an intelligent discussion about cancer with a faith healer!
Febday at February 20, 2006 08:47 AM: “Because without the threat of imminent WMD use,
there is no plausible justification for the invasion.”
This is bullbleep, Febday. Ever hear of umpteen UN resolutions and Cease-fire agreements
violated; of (since disclosed) Oil For Food abuses; of our “friends and
allies”, many of whom were on Saddam’s payroll, pressuring for an end to sanctions that were
killing babies while Saddam was building 20-some gazillion dollar each palaces; of Saddam’s
intention to renew WMD production after sanctions were lifted? I could go on, but it’s obvious
we did the right thing. As others have already said, the CONTINUATION of GWI is just based on Cease-fire violations alone. Now that we are there nearly three years, the LLL (Losing Loony Left.
I refuse to call them liberal because they aren’t and I resent their appropriation of a really
good word.) blathers, bleats and bloviates about why we shouldn’t be. If you have no ideas about
what to do NOW, just hush please. The grownups are struggling with real problems.
There seems to be dissonance between Fukayama’s claims that liberal democracy will be the ultimate in history and that liberal democracy is causing historic Muslim Jihad. Have I missed something?
“reality based” is now used only as an insult, like “progressive”
Gotch, Surrender John!
“He also seemed to be saying that economic development and liberalization should take precedence over political freedom”
We did that in Iraq, which most people seem to forget. We regularized the banking system, strengthened an independent judiciary, helped electoral politics get started at a municipal level . . . a lot of the desired infrastructure for democratization.
In fact, Baghdad has had a real estate boom in spite of the terrorism, and there is much new entrepreneurship there.
We should have delayed elections another year to give moderate groups more lead time to organize, but Sistani and others were agitating for elections and we would have looked more like occupiers if we denied them.
Kevin Peters,
I was only attempting to clarify a small number of the points Fukuyama made in an article that, I suspect, most posters here have not read, or attempted to seriously understand.
I agree with you “morally” i.e., that the Middle East – particularly Hussein’s part of it is uniquely bad in the Human Rights department, and that there was no real propects for that improving any time soon.
I also believe that our support for dictators is a HUGE contributor to the problems there, or at least to the pervasive perception that we (rather than the people who live there) are the primary reason for Middle Eastern pathology.
Be that as it may, agreeing that it is screwed up, and that liberals who care oh so much, but didn’t actually promote any serious plans for dealing with the problems have not provided any alternatives (breathe in…), does not mean that the current course of action is helping.
I don’t think there are any good alternatives. The one big alternative (if it can be called that) in place was comprised of supporting dictators who promised to “control” their extremists. It had, to say the least, a few problems of its own. It is, as you mentioned, precisely the policy that got us here.
I think Fukuyama is just saying that we should slow down, take a deep breath, and be more methodical in working towards the (inevitable??) development of democracy “over there,” which has huge hurdles, and may take a LOOOOONG time.
What I like about Fukuyama’s article is that he addresses seriously the fact that Bush is trying to bring democracy to the Middle East, and criticizis that policy. It’s way, way, WAY better than the nonsense that we are trying to steal oil that we could have purchased much more cheaply than the cost of Invading and democratizing Iraq.
Fukuyama’s argument is serious and has generated serious discussion. Good for him.
klrfz, “‘reality based’ is now used only as an insult, like ‘progressive’”
You must be joking. “Reality based” is an insult? Is that something like grade school dunces making “smart kids” an insult? By proclaiming “reality based” an insult, you illustrate my point about the self-delusional nature of you, the true believers of Phantasiepolitik, perfectly.
What everyone seems to be ignoring where Saddam is concerned is that he was supposed to comply.
That way we would not wondering what happened to the WMD because they would have been disposed of in a way that could be documented. We do not know if Saddam sold them, buried them, or destroyed them..That right there puts him in violation of numerous UN mandatory force resolutions. He could done the same thing Kaddafi did but he refused.
As for reality, Saddam’s regime skinned people alive. I can not believe there are people sitting around wondering whether or not Iraqis would be better off if the Butcher of Baghdad was still putting people in wood chippers and starving children.
Democracy is not just an election, it is the rule of law and minority rights. When the mullahs of Iran hand pick who gets to run while they are still hanging homosexuals in public…that is not a democracy.
Iraqis have more faith in the future than we do. That tells you something about the socalled reality based community here.
By the way, I hear no solutions from the critics. Just criticism. Just after the fact… hind sight… arm chair… bitching that pretty much boils down to selling out to the dictators in the name of keeping the rif raf in its place.
At least SJ agrees with me that “progressive” is an insult. Are you gonna take that, Markus?
OMG! I just realized. Now I can use “Smart” John instead of Surrender John or Shari’a John.
Seriously John, all those people who said you were smart, they were being ironic. Sorry you have to hear it here.
“grade school dunces” – another score! You are an old guy! No one has talked like that for 100 years.
Also I have to note for the crowd, SJ clearly has not read Fukuyama’s article either. GOAL!!! It’s a hat trick!!!!!
Premature retrospectives regarding the “mistake” snippets:
A few years ago I said (and, alas, wrote) that neoconservatism had had its own distinctive qualities in its early years, but by now had been absorbed into the mainstream of American conservatism. I was wrong, and the reason I was wrong is that, ever since its origin among disillusioned liberal intellectuals in the 1970s, what we call neoconservatism has been one of those intellectual undercurrents that surface only intermittently. It is not a “movement,” as the conspiratorial critics would have it. Neoconservatism is what the late historian of Jacksonian America, Marvin Meyers, called a “persuasion,” one that manifests itself over time, but erratically, and one whose meaning we clearly glimpse only in retrospect.
…
(The favorite neoconservative text on foreign affairs, thanks to professors Leo Strauss of Chicago and Donald Kagan of Yale, is Thucydides on the Peloponnesian War.)
from The Neoconservative Persuasion by Irving Kristol, The Weekly Standard, 8/25/03, Volume 008, Issue 47
To many, Athenian intervention also brought democracy, but that was not its aim. Pericles and the Athenians, when they could, left the existing regime in place, even when it was oligarchic or tyrannical. Only when rebellions forced them to intervene did they impose democracies, and even then not always. Pericles’ imperial policy was prudent and pragmatic, not ideological. Nevertheless, over the years, the Athenians instituted and supported many democracies against oligarchic or tyrannical opponents throughout the empire. From a twentieth-century perspective, this might seem like an unalloyed benefit of the empire, but it was not so viewed by everyone in the time of Pericles. Aristocrats and members of the upper classes in general regarded democracy as a novel, unnatural, unjust, incompetent, and vulgar form of government, and they were not alone in resenting the Athenian role in support of it. In many cities, probably in most, even members of the lower classes regarded Athenian intervention in their political and constitutional affairs as a curtailment of their freedom and autonomy, and would have preferred a nondemocratic constitution without Athenian interference to a democratic government with it.
Modern scholars have tried to argue that this Athenian support for democracy made the empire popular with the masses in the allied cities, and that the hostility with which they reportedly came to view it was the result of distortions caused by the aristocratic bias of the ancient writers. The consensus, however, has rightly continued to emphasize the empire’s fundamental unpopularity with all classes except the small groups of democratic politicians who benefited directly from Athenian support.
from Pericles of Athens and the Birth of Democracy by Donald Kagan
It will be a very long time, if ever, before history vindicates Paul Wolfowitz. That being said, I’m hoping for the best. So long as we stay to ensure the territorial integrity of the nation-state and, in addition, the political rights of minority populations (something I support and expect will be necessary for many years) the vindication question will be an open one. If, a few years after occupation ends, Iraq more resembles Japan than it resembles Cuba, all the blood and money will have been worth it.
May it please [insert the name of a "higher" power].
from 03/01/2004: They Say You Want A Constitution… (UPDATED) at rogerlsmon.com by Rebel
…and so it goes.
I loved the way he kept hedging his bets by referring to our “perceived failure” in Iraq. If you’re going to opine, at least take a stand.
Our guys are laying it on the line over there literally and this guy can’t even do that figuratively.
Snippet:
Thank you for your reasonable response. ” I beleive that our support for dictators is a huge contribution to the problems there” and the qoute about the alternative being supporting didctators who control their radicals is making my point. Both choices have huge possibilities for terrible results. But we tried the “stability for oil” plan. And, because of the massive petrowealth of the region it spawned the terror network that we are facing today.
Bush took a gamble. But it was a gamble that has the possibility of transforming the region. The old tactic was a recipe for disaster. It is easy to smack the administration around for it’s errors, and like most wars, there have been an ample number of bonehead moves. I have no problem with critiques of the war strategy as long as someone is trying to win the war or if they propose a better strategy for victory or if they can argue that going back to the status qou is better.
If we are to blame for the dictators are we not responsible for cleaning up the mess. And I don’t think pulling out of the region and leaving it up to the peole of the middle east is viable either. That is what Reagan did in Afghanisstan. And we got the Taliban. And they allowed Al Queda to use their country as a home base to attack us.
I guess we could pull out and tell the middle east that if any WMD attack happens in the United States we will blow up any capital or religous Holy site in the region one at a time. We could hold the whole region responsible to controll their own nutbags and promise them utter, total destruction if they don’t But that is not a viable option either. And the chance of a devasting 1930′s style depression is too great if the fanatics control the area, and thats not taking into consideration that we would be leaving Israel to the tender mercies of Al Queda,(translation genocide).
Thats the problem. There is no pretty option. And we can’t leave. So, with all his errors, Bush at least is trying to implement a solution that has the potential to change things. I don’t see a solution that would have allowed us to avoid the death of our citizens. And I expect many more, I have been shocked that there has been so few so far. It is a miracle that a second 9-11 has not happened so far. I know the Islamo fascists have not abandoned their goals. I find it hard to beleive that the fact the field of war has shifted to their home turf isn’t one of the reasons 9-11 has notcome to us yet. It is coming, but we have at least made them spend some of their resources in their fight against a democratic Middle East in their backyard.
danredys,
Does the fact that North Koreans don’t overthrow their Dear Leader mean that North Koreans are on the whole satisfied with their leadership? Could it not be that they lack the means, that even if 90% want to change their regime, the other 10% may have all the guns, all the money, all the methods by which to subjugate that 90%? When the Shah of Iran was deposed in 1979 I doubt there was a majority that supported replacing him, but there wasn’t enough support for the Shah in contrast to the fanatical support for the Ayatollah. But I’ll grant that even if the majority didn’t support this change there was no stopping it, and it had to play itself out for the disaster it would inevitably turn out to be.
There is no lack of a desire to protest against the current Iranian leadership. What happens is the protestors are rounded up, killed and jailed, and other potential protestors are intimidated into submission. This lack of protest should not be seen as the will of the people. I don’t believe that anyone has been elected in Iran to lead the country. I don’t believe that the mullahs who run the place have anything to do with democracy in even an infant state. The elections have been farces. And unfortunately the more brutal the regime, the less chance of changing it from within without some sort of outside support.
KP,
The conceit of the academics shows with the likes of Fukuyama. Slow down, speed up, do it better! What has the guy ever managed that is more complex than a classroom? He’s a “thought leader” not a select an imperfect attempt at an imperfect solution with limited resources and unlimited demands upon those resources. He’s part of the “all we need is better ideas crowd”. That doesn’t make him a bad person and he’s worth paying some attention to but nobody is paying him to actually make the hard decisions. He gets paid to think, write, and speak.
One of the side channels of this discussion I find fascinating is this: for a long long time, conservatives where characterized by their particular understanding of human nature that (my words) denied its malleability; liberals, on the other hand suggested that human nature could in fact be changed.
What the Administration has done most significantly, has announced as policy it will no longer support despotic regimes in the name of realpolitick–that is a remarkable change in a the history of diplomatic relations that has always evaluated thugs as “our thugs or their thugs.” Now, has the process moved as rapidly as some might like? it is that nasty realpolitick that still rears its ugly head–but at least we have an unequivocal statement that we are on the side of democracy.
That statement is profound; and its also Wilsonian–and yes, it does mean we have to accept regimes, such as Hamas, that we may not like. Much hard work has to be done to put this policy into place and make it successful–but consider: this is the first time in 60 years we have gone on record in the international arena, as supporting democracy.
And that support suggests that conservatives really do believe democracy is what people want, and we really can change their aspirations–almost a liberal formulation had not liberalism become so corrupted along the way.
SJ:
Thanks for the quote but you didn’t really understand the point of the post. This is not to say you are right or wrong in your opinions but only that you seem wedded to this notion of a Neo-conservative movement. The Neo-Conservative movement is something that existed at a particular time for a particular reason, i.e., a combination of the breakdown in the faith engendered New Deal/New Frontier/Great Society liberalism and the rehabilitation of Communism in the Post-McCarthy period and its takeover of the intellectual base of the Democratic Party. After the Reagan Revolution and the fall of Soviet Communism the Neo-Conservative movement was over. People use the term Neo-Conservative as a pejorative term to describe non-socialist Jews and supporters of a Wilsonian foreign Policy. There is no such thing as a modern neo-Conservative movement. For example, William Kristol, Irving’s son is not a neo-Conservative. He is just a normal Conservative. Doug Feith has always been part of the conservative movement without the neo label. Buchanan and his Paleos don’t want to call them dirty Jews so they call them Neo-Cons. Socialists call them Neo-Cons for their Wilsonian internationalism … and because they don’t want to call them dirty Jews. The Conservative movement is not a monolith. Perhaps we should rename Conservatives as Madisonians or Hamiltonians. The reason that many liberals feel a need to fragment the Conservative movement is that they really canít relate to a political movement that allows diversity of thought and lively argumentation. Liberalism as we know it today is merely another form of Statist totalitarianism.
As far as Iraq goes, I don’t about WMD in the Bekka but I can tell you that the insurgency is in the process of winding down since the election. This judgment is based on both public facts and classified information. My guess is that AQI is winding down their operations in Iraq and setting up in the Palestinian territories. The Sunni insurgents are just going through motions right now. I think they have figured out if they keep fighting, they will all end up dead.
Fukuyama has proven to be an intellectual disappointment. He is mostly a spotty thinker and would never have made any splash except for the “end of history” phrase. Such a debut makes one the fair-haired boy for a while, but fame is fleeting. History will never end so long as man exists.
I hope he is wrong about Iraq being a failure. It was a hopeful plan which involved killing muslims at a retail level in the hopes of reforming a brutal system. If it does fail, the alternative may become killing them wholesale (e.g., in hundred million increments from SSNs parked at a comfortable distance away). In such a case there will be no relief efforts that will stream in to help and the living will envy the dead.
Someone should remind the muslims that each of the 16 ICBMs on a Boomer can carry up to 20 Hiroshima-size warheads. Simple math says that a full output from one sub in 30 minutes is potentially 320 population centers of a million or more of Allah’s faithful each reduced to a gigantic Dresden or Hiroshima or Nagasaki. They should think very hard about that; it can be replicated form another Boomer an hour later if needed; then another…then how many more. Kill ‘em all…Allah will know his own.
Despite the shocked wails of apologists and cowards, western civilization must be the world’s legacy if there is to be any human life worth living left. I hope the sub commanders know that. I am ready for the “wholesale” scenario as a response to the next WMD incident in the West. Kill ‘em all…Allah will know his own.
“And that support suggests that conservatives really do believe democracy is what people want, and we really can change their aspirations–almost a liberal formulation had not liberalism become so corrupted along the way.”
We can’t change human nature. But we can give the good parts of human nature a push now and then.
Most American conservatives have always wanted to conserve the classical liberalism of the American founders–albeit a liberalism with an American twist. What has changed is the cost/benefit analysis. Pre 9-11, it wasn’t seen as worth the American blood (and treasure to a lesser extent) to reform Iraq–unless the Iraqis first showed strong inclinations to do most of the heavy listing themselves. The Iraqis were edging that direction (especially the Kurds), when 9-11 suddenly changed the analysis.
All that, and the events in eastern Europe and western former Soviet Union since 1989 make some things possible that were not before.
I enjoyed reading Fukuyama’s book “The End of History and the Last Man.”
But I supported the Iraq war and still do.
As for Fukuyama’s thesis in his book “The End of History and the Last Man,” I think Fukuyama was partially correct. Democracy is on the march across the globe (just compare the number of democracies in the world in 1900 and how many existed in 2000).
Where Fukuyama’s thesis might have been incorrect is when he underestimated the threat of Radical Islam, believing it to be less of a problem than Marxism because it would only appeal to Muslims while Marxism could appeal to people of all ethnic groups.
But people can convert to Islam either voluntarily or by force.
So, while I would recommend that people interested in foreign policy read Fukuyama’s famous 1992 book, I would not recommend that we adopt Fukuyama’s conclusions reached in his latest column.
Steven Mitchell,
it wasn’t seen as worth the American blood (and treasure to a lesser extent) to reform Iraq–unless the Iraqis first showed strong inclinations to do most of the heavy [lifting] themselves.
Among the failures of the international MSM is their failure to make it known how much of the “heavy lifting” the Iraqis are doing for themselves.
Every US casualty makes headline news. The level at which the Iraqis are dying is treated with silence. The “Iraqification” of the conflict must be dressed up as failure. It cannot be described for what it is – a tough, hard, slog that will take time and have some setbacks. It must be presented, always, as a failure.
To the MSM success is not an option. Like David Irving they cannot accept that they were wrong, and work to get it right, they must work to ignore contrary evidence and if any manages to get through their filters, they must present it as a case where they were “wronged” rather than where they were wrong.
BTW, at least a part of this is because they cannot allow an investigation into where and how they went wrong. There was too much “access” being paid for. The public has a low enough opinion of them but that is about as low as it can get – nearly bottomed out. If the full scope of how the MSM all were doing the Eason Jordan in Iraq and elsewhere ever becomes public knowledge they are hosed – they’ll be no more bottom to the public’s opinion of them.
Well, I don’t think its worth arguing who supported the war for what reasons… I seem to recall a few years back that WMD’s were in lots of posts… I’m almost positive that I head both Mr. Bush and Mr. Powell say WMD a lot. Indeed, I don’t remember anything about some of these other issues which are now being stated, but perhpas I simply don’t recall them.
However, I would like to address what I consider a more key issue, that of the neo-con movement. Eight years ago, the neo-con movement appeared fresh and GWB’s election and subsequent choices of cabinent members seem to have given the neo-con’s a huge boost. The invasion of Iraq seems to sit well with neo-con political views (be it from WMD’s or regieme change or whatever). This war, it could be argued was based on Neo-Con theories (nothing wrong with that)
However, (and I think this may be more key than many people want to realize) the war was sold as an easy, short and cheap venture. We were told months, few lives lost, shock and awe/hearts and minds and democracy. So far, the facts on the ground seem to indicate that the presumed outcome and the real outcome were substantially different. This, to many people may translate as failed neo-con theory. If polls are to be believed, support for the Preisdent is not good and support for the republican party overall seem faltering. Yet, for the most part, the Republican party seems to be holding a neo-con heading (with an occasional diversion into christian fundamentalism). Failure of the Repubican party at the polls this fall, could indicate a failure of the Neo-Con agenda to maintain its support amongst the general public. If the republican party loses in ’06 and in ’08 due (at least in appearance) to Neo-Con theories, how likely will the party be to support another Neo-Con agenda? If the Republicans decide not to support neo-con ideas in their party and democrats surely won’t in theirs, where does that leave the neo-con movement?
No one may get the axe for the errors and failures during the war, but I think its a possibility that the neo-con movment (for better or worse), may risk getting beheaded.
ddydew:
You have obviously missed my posts. The neo-Con movement ended when the Wall came down. Neo-Cons are product of the rejection of liberalism by ex-new dealers in 1960′s. Why do you think they were called neo-Cons. By 1990 there was no neo in conservatism. Please stop using the term.
Jerry,
If that’s the case, are you saying that this administration is simply Conservative?
This administration has grown the Federal goverment by a number of Departments, has stood against States Rights on numerous occasions, has passed legislation that compromises privacy and personal freedom and can’t balance the budget. What interpertation of Conservative are you using?
I’m not even going to argue if the administrations choices are wise or unwise, only that they do not hold with traditional conservativism. Do you have some different term you would apply?
“The problem with your theory is that economic liberalization and development is extremely difficult to achieve in a police state.”
Um. Did you forget China? South Korea? Taiwan? The latter two are now democracies, but they weren’t until the past 15 years. If East Asia can do it, why not the Middle East?
“Allah will know his own”: that phrase is making the rounds – most recently in a column by Bernard Lewis. It is more directly attributable to Arnaud-Armaury, the Abbot of Citeaux, “spiritual advisor” to the Albigensian Crusade (1209).
When Arnaud-Amaury was asked whom to kill he replied “Kill them all. God will know his own.”
(Google for “albigensian crusade’)
Which does not change Lewis’ point – it’s just that we might as well give credit to old quotes where they are due.