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@@ At last, the warmongers are prepared to face the facts and admit they were wrong @@

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Arash

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Mar 11, 2006, 5:26:46 AM3/11/06

Independent UK
March 9, 2006

At last, the warmongers are prepared to face the facts and admit they were wrong

By Rupert Cornwell

It has taken more than three years, tens of thousands of Iraqi and American lives,
and $200 billion (£115bn) of treasure - all to achieve a chaos verging on open civil
war. But, finally, the neo-conservatives [1] who sold the United States on this
disastrous war are starting to utter three small words. We were wrong.

The second thoughts have spread across the conservative spectrum, from William
Buckley [2], venerable editor of The National Review to Andrew Sullivan [3], once
editor of the New Republic, now an influential commentator and blogmeister.

The patrician conservative columnist George Will [4] was gently skeptical from the
outset. He now glumly concludes that all three members of the original "axis of
evil" - not only Iran and North Korea but also Iraq - "are more dangerous than when
that term was coined in 2002". [5]

Neither William Buckley nor Andrew Sullivan concedes that the decision to topple
Saddam was intrinsically wrong. But "the challenge required more than Bush's
deployable resources", the former sadly recognizes. "The American objective in Iraq
has failed".

For Andrew Sullivan, today's mess is above all a testament to American overconfidence
and false assumptions, born of arrogance and naïveté. But he too asserts, in a column
in Time magazine this week, that all may not be lost. [6]

Of all the critiques however, the most profound is that of Francis Fukuyama [7], in
his forthcoming book, America at the Crossroads. Its subtitle is "Democracy, Power
and the Neo-Conservative Legacy" - and that legacy, Fukuyama argues, is fatally
poisoned.

This is no ordinary thesis, but apostasy on a grand scale. Fukuyama, after all, was
the most prominent intellectual who signed the 1997 "Project for the New American
Century" [8], the founding manifesto of neo-conservatism drawn up by William Kristol
[9], editor of the Weekly Standard, the house journal of the neo-conservative
movement.

The Project for the New American Century (PNAC) aimed to cement for all time
America's triumph in the Cold War, by increasing defence spending, challenging
regimes that were hostile to U.S. interests, and promoting freedom and democracy
around the world. Its goal was "an international order friendly to our security,
prosperity and values".

The war on Iraq, spuriously justified by the supposed threat posed by Saddam's WMD,
was the test run of this theory. It was touted as a panacea for every ill of the
Middle East. The road to Jerusalem, the neo-cons argued, led through Baghdad. And
after Iraq, why not Syria, Iran and anyone else that stood in Washington's way? All
that, Francis Fukuyama now acknowledges, has been a tragic conceit.

Like the Leninists of old, he writes, the neo-conservatives reckoned they could drive
history forward with the right mixture of power and will. However, "Leninism was a
tragedy in its Bolshevik version, and it has returned as farce when practiced by the
United States". [10]

But was it not Francis Fukuyama who claimed in his most celebrated work, "The End of
History and the Last Man" [11], that the whole world was locked on a glide-path to
liberal, free-market democracy? Yes indeed. But that book, he points out, argued that
the process was gradual, and must unfold at its own pace.

But not only were the neo-cons too impatient. A second error was to believe that an
all-powerful America would be trusted to exercise a "benevolent hegemony". A third
was the gross overstatement of the post 9/11 threat posed by radical Islam, in order
to justify the dubious doctrine of preventive war.

Finally, there was the blatant contradiction between the neo-cons' aversion to
government meddling at home and their childlike faith in their ability to impose
massive social engineering in foreign and utterly unfamiliar countries like Iraq.
Thence sprang the mistakes of the occupation period.

Some, however, are resolutely unswayed. In the latest Weekly Standard, William
Kristol accuses Francis Fukuyama of losing his nerve - of wanting to "retrench,
hunker down and let large parts of the world go to hell in a handbasket, hoping the
hand-basket won't blow up in our faces". [12]

Christopher Hitchens [13], the one-time Trotskyist turned neo-con fellow traveler and
eternal polemicist [14], derides Fukuyama for "conceding to the fanatics and
beheaders the claim that they are a response to American blunders and excesses", and
for yearning for a return of Kissingerian realism in foreign affairs. [15]

The fact, however, remains that future Bush policymakers who signed the PNAC nine
years ago are now mostly gone. Paul Wolfowitz [16], the war's most relentless and
starry-eyed promoter, has moved on to the World Bank, silent about the mess he did so
much to create. Richard Perle [17], leader of the resident hawks department at the
[Jewish] American Enterprise Institute think-tank here, has vanished from the scene.
Lewis Libby [18] meanwhile has stepped down as Vice-President Dick Cheney's chief of
staff, to focus his energy on staying out of jail.

Yet another signatory was [Pashtun criminal] Zalmay Khalilzad [19], now the U.S.
ambassador to Iraq. This week even he - Afghan born and the one original neo-con who
had the region in his blood - admitted that the invasion had opened "a Pandora's box"
that could see the Iraq conflict spread across the entire Middle East.

Those left in the administration - primarily Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld [20],
the Defence Secretary, are not so much neo-conservatives as "Hobbesian
unilateralists" [21], concerned to protect and advance U.S. national interests in a
lawless and violent world, whatever it takes.

As for Condoleezza Rice, never a signed-up member of the movement but mostly
sympathetic to it when she was the President's security adviser - she has
metamorphosed from hawk into pragmatist with her move from the White House to the
State Department.

It is on George Bush's lips that neo-conservatism most obviously survives - in the
commitment to spreading freedom and democracy that he proclaims almost daily, and
most hubristically in his second inaugural in 2005 that promised to banish tyranny
from the earth.

But even the extravagant oratory of that icy January day cannot obscure the irony of
America's Iraq adventure. The application of a doctrine built upon the supposed
boundlessness of U.S. power has succeeded only in exposing its limits.

Thus chastened, Francis Fukuyama now wants to temper the idealism of the
neo-conservative doctrine with an acceptance that some things are not so easy to
change, and that the U.S. must cut its cloth accordingly. He calls it "realistic
Wilsonianism" [22]. A better description might be neo-realism. And if that brings a
smile to the face of a certain former U.S. high priest of realism [23] with a
pronounced German accent, who can blame him?

Notes:
--------
[1] Neoconservatism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoconservatism

[2] William Buckley
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Francis_Buckley

[3] Andrew Sullivan
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Sullivan

[4] George Will
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Will

[5] Bush delivers State of the Union Address, January 29, 2002.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/01/20020129-11.html

[6] Time Madazine, Sunday, March 5, 2006
What I Got Wrong About the War: As conservatives pour out their regrets, I have a few
of my own to confess
By Andrew Sullivan
Was I wrong to support the war in Iraq? Several conservatives and neoconservatives
have begun to renounce the decision to topple Saddam Hussein three years ago. William
F. Buckley Jr., as close to a conservative icon as America has, recently wrote that
"one can't doubt that the American objective in Iraq has failed". George F. Will has
been a moderate skeptic throughout. Neoconservative scholar Francis Fukuyama has just
produced a book renouncing his previous support. The specter of Iraq teetering closer
to civil war and disintegration has forced a reckoning. In retrospect,
neoconservatives (and I fully include myself) made three huge errors. The first was
to overestimate the competence of government, especially in very tricky areas like
WMD intelligence. The shock of 9/11 provoked an overestimation of the risks we faced.
And our fear forced errors into a deeply fallible system. When doubts were raised,
they were far too swiftly dismissed. The result was the WMD intelligence debacle,
something that did far more damage to the war's legitimacy and fate than many have
yet absorbed. Fukuyama's sharpest insight here is how the miraculously peaceful end
of the cold war lulled many of us into overconfidence about the inevitability of
democratic change, and its ease. We got cocky. We should have known better. The
second error was narcissism. America's power blinded many of us to the resentments
that hegemony always provokes. Those resentments are often as deep among our global
friends as among our enemies--and make alliances as hard as they are important. That
is not to say we should never act unilaterally. Sometimes the right thing to do will
spawn backlash, and we should do it anyway. But that makes it all the more imperative
that when we do go out on a limb, we get things right. In those instances, we need to
make our margin of error as small as humanly possible. Too many in the Bush
Administration, alas, did the opposite. They sent far too few troops, were reckless
in postinvasion planning and turned a deaf ear to constructive criticism, even from
within their own ranks. Their abdication of the moral high ground, by allowing the
abuse and torture of military detainees, is repellent. Their incompetence and
misjudgments might be forgiven. Their arrogance and obstinacy remain inexcusable. The
final error was not taking culture seriously enough. There is a large discrepancy
between neoconservatism's skepticism of government's ability to change culture at
home and its naiveté when it comes to complex, tribal, sectarian cultures abroad. We
have learned a tough lesson, and it has been a lot tougher for those tens of
thousands of dead, innocent Iraqis and several thousand killed and injured American
soldiers than for a few humiliated pundits. The correct response to that is not more
spin but a real sense of shame and sorrow that so many have died because of errors
made by their superiors, and by writers like me. All this is true, and it needs to be
faced. But it is also true that we are where we are. And true that there was no easy
alternative three years ago. You'd like Saddam still in power, with our sanctions
starving millions while UN funds lined the pockets of crooks and criminals? At some
point the wreckage that is and was Iraq would have had to be dealt with. If we hadn't
invaded, at some point in the death spiral of Saddam's disintegrating Iraq, others
would. It is also true that it is far too soon to know the ultimate outcome of our
gamble. What we do know is that for all our mistakes, free elections have been held
in a largely Arab Muslim country. We know that the Kurds in the north enjoy freedoms
and a nascent civil society that is a huge improvement on the past. We know that the
culture of the marsh Arabs in the south is beginning to revive. We know that we have
given Iraqis a chance to decide their own destiny through politics rather than murder
and that civil war is still avoidable. We know that the enemies of democracy in Iraq
will not stop there if they succeed. And we know that no perfect war has ever been
fought, and no victory ever won, without the risk of defeat. Despair, in other words,
is too easy now. And it too is a form of irresponsibility. Regrets? Yes. But the
certainty of some today that we have failed is as dubious as the callow triumphalism
of yesterday. War is always, in the end, a matter of flexibility and will. And
sometimes the darkest days are inevitable--even necessary--before the sky ultimately
clears.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/printout/0,8816,1169898,00.html
http://time.blogs.com/daily_dish/2006/week9/index.html