Why Fukuyama starts with F. U.

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... 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."

No shit, Francis. And Radical American Christian Fundamentalism has a few problems with modernity too. You gonna write a book for them as well? Maybe an epitaph for science while you're at it?

Once, I was a stupid college sophomore and a crazy hungarian waved Fukuyama's and Strauss'. theories under my nose. The mad Magyar really wanted me and others to share his passion for the revealwd truth. But I just couldn't. He claimed he'd left his Marxist roots behind. He thought Reagan and North and Casey and McFarland had the answer in Nicaraugua and El Salvador, in Afghanistan and Africa. We were the "good" hegemons, with only the purest of interests, thought he.

I wondered then who was supposed to be the grown-up and who was the prisoner of hormones and sophomoric kum-ba-ya-ism. I believed then as I do now, thanks to the wisdom of my sublimely practical yet insightful late mother, that spadework and fundamental principles of humanity are far more real and powerful levers than ideological pyrotechnics. Speed kills, arrogance suffocates, patience builds, and insight comes. From the old man: Curiosity, observation and humility are force multipliers, but bring your boxing gloves.

In the following years, armed with this wisdom, me and my uncredentialed naievete wandered the halls of commerce pitching its products and gee-ing up those charged with delivering them. All along the way, I met cousins of the mad Magyar. These were the people who claimed to be "practical"; doers not theoreticians. John Wayne's in egyptian cotton and cufflinks; people with "no time for bullshit." Each knew best. Many were in postitions to force what they "knew" into process, policy or product. And each was now looking across their desk at me and my colleagues because they'd run out of excuses: What they "knew" was wrong. And customers, employees and shareholders were abandoning them because of it. They were getting fragged by their own "troops" because of it. What they didn't know, but now realized, was that "What's in it for me?" is a fine survival mechanism for the shark in the ocean or the tiger on the savannah, but not very handy on human scale. Eating one's young or menacing the pride into submission works fine in a unitary executive and on top of a heirarchy frozen in amber--one with no complaint department and with no access to political and actual munitions.

But that's not the way the world works. Sometimes, my ideas suck. Sometimes, I need to listen. Sometimes, I can be the danger that needs to be protected from.

Sometimes, most of the time really, a little humility and self-doubt goes a long long way.