Posted on Friday, June 9, 2006 - 11:05 am:

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NEOCONSERVATISM, AT least as a powerful movement bearing that name, now looks moribund. The mortal blow may well be seen in the future to have been delivered by the defection of neoconservatism's last truly distinguished intellectual, Francis Fukuyama, and the shattering critique of neoconservatism delivered in his new book, America at the Crossroads. Fukuyama declares:

"Whatever its complex roots, neoconservatism has now become inevitably linked to concepts like preemption, regime change, unilateralism, and benevolent hegemony as put into practice by the Bush administration. Rather than attempting the feckless task of reclaiming the meaning of the term, it seems to me better to abandon the label and articulate an altogether distinct foreign policy position."

Until 2002, Fukuyama was closely identified with the neoconservative movement and in particular the related Project for a New American Century (PNAC). He was a signatory to several PNAC public statements, including one from 1998 accusing President Clinton of having "capitulated" to Saddam Hussein and calling on the United States to do everything necessary to remove him from power in Iraq. In America at the Crossroads, Fukuyama suggests regret for that signature but says that "an American invasion of Iraq was not then in the cards, however, and would not be until the events of September 11, 2001."

Nonetheless, on September 20, 2001, Fukuyama signed another public PNAC letter declaring, "even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the attack, any strategy aiming at the eradication of terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq." This statement also called for the War on Terror to target Hizballah, and for U.S. "retaliation" against Iran and Syria if they failed to break off support for that organization. In other words, this document was an early introduction to all the key strategic errors later committed by the Bush Administration in the War on Terror.

In the course of 2002, however, Fukuyama took part in a study on long-term U.S. strategy in the War on Terror: "It was at this point that I finally decided the war [with Iraq] didn't make any sense", he writes in America at the Crossroads. He also began to think through his wider differences with the neoconservative movement. As a result of this analysis, Fukuyama takes issue in his new book with the now-widespread excuse of neoconservatives and liberal hawks that the disasters in Iraq have been the result of unpredictably incompetent execution by the Bush Administration, rather than of the ideas that led to war:

"[These] abstract ideas were interpreted in certain characteristic ways that might better be described as mindsets or worldviews rather than principled positions. The prudential choices that flowed from these mindsets were biased in certain consistent directions that made them, when they proved to be wrong, something more than individual errors of judgment."

In the book he also accurately identifies three main areas of biased judgment with regard to Iraq on the part of the administration and its supporters: exaggerated threat assessment; indifference to international public opinion, leading to underestimation of the damage that the global backlash against the war would do to American interests; and "wild over-optimism" concerning America's ability to pacify, reconstruct and reshape Iraq after the initial conquest. It was above all these errors of judgment, Fukuyama says, that led to his break with the neoconservatives.

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