Well, well, well, Francis Fukuyama is sorry. Professor Fukuyama had thrown his lot in the neo-cons in the lead up to the Iraq War. Now 3 years later, he is admitting that he, and they, were wrong. “By invading Iraq, the Bush administration created a self-fulfilling prophecy: Iraq has now replaced Afghanistan as a magnet, a training ground and an operational base for jihadist terrorists, with plenty of American targets to shoot at,” Fukuyama now admits.

Unlike Ken (“It’ll be a cakewalk”) Adelman or Richard (“They’ll greet us with flowers”) Perle, Francis Fukuyama has finally given up the neo-con dream of world domination. No longer is Fukuyama comfortable with the hegemonic muscle-flexing of the Bush administration. Not that he doesn’t still hope for a happy ending but he says, “[I]t is very hard to see how these developments in themselves justify the blood and treasure that the United States has spent on the project to this point.” Yet, he refuses to acknowledge that the politicization of intelligence is what got us there in the first place.

Fukuyama’s ‘mea culpa’ essay, in the New York Times magazine on 19 February 2006, presents a strange cross between humility and belligerence. He traces the roots of the neo-conservative movement back to a group of bright young men at CCNY during the Great Depression (One wonders why he felt it necessary to identify them as Jews; especially when, in the next breath, he adds Daniel Patrick Moynihan to the mix. Perhaps my antennae are quivering unnecessarily).

He does sum up the basic tenets of neo-conservatism succinctly: “Four common principles or threads ran through much of this thought up through the end of the cold war: a concern with democracy, human rights and, more generally, the internal politics of states; a belief that American power can be used for moral purposes; a scepticism about the ability of international law and institutions to solve serious security problems; and finally, a view that ambitious social engineering often leads to unexpected consequences and thereby undermines its own ends.”

He presents these presumptions as truth for all to know as if they had been handed down on stone tablets from Sinai (hey, he’s the one who started with the Judaic inferences). He has previously asserted that “there is a universal hunger for liberty in all people that will inevitably lead them to liberal democracy, and that we are living in the midst of an accelerating, transnational movement in favor of that liberal democracy” (Though, in this piece he denies it). As far as the argument that capitalism begets democracy goes, I have one word: Singapore (Fukuyama is still trying to claim that his is actually a Marxist argument. That’s a discussion for another time).

Fukuyama goes on to tackle the bugbear of relativism. He writes about Strauss, “[who] was concerned with the ‘crisis of modernity’ brought on by the relativism of Nietzsche and Heidegger, as well as the fact that neither the claims of religion nor deeply-held opinions about the nature of the good life could be banished from politics, as the thinkers of the European Enlightenment had hoped.”

Shall we talk about relativism? What greater proponent of relativism is there than the Bush administration? When they didn’t find WMD, the mission morphed into ‘bringing democracy to the middle east.’ This is the existentialist administration: they are constantly creating their own reality. Kierkegaard is rolling over in his grave.

Fukuyama does almost understand an essential concept: “The idea that the United States is a hegemon [that is] more benevolent than most is not an absurd one, but there were warning signs that things had changed in America’s relationship to the world long before the start of the Iraq war. . . There were other reasons as well why the world did not accept American benevolent hegemony. In the first place, it was premised on American exceptionalism, the idea that America could use its power in instances where others could not because it was more virtuous than other countries.” No, the U.S. doesn’t always wear the white hats. As a matter of fact, from the latter half of the 20th century onward, American 10-gallons have ombréd to a far darker shade.

Also, while he seems to understand the limitations of the concept that what we are involved in is a “war on terror,” he goes on to refuse to acknowledge that any good that can come from the action or intervention of the United Nations. This plays right into the neo-con dyspeptic perspective of the world.

Finally, he now disassociates himself with his old friends and becomes that which he truly dislikes: a relativist. I’m glad I never called him, “friend.”

Please give what you can to Médecins sans Frontières (Doctors without Borders).

And, of course

(hewa ni hataraki: work for peace)