Christopher Hitchens declares ‘The End of Fukuyama’

Christopher Hitchens today grabs hold of Francis Fukuyama’s recent essay and dissects the daunted ex-neocon’s lame argument that looking good is more important than doing good.

Fukuyama, a foreign policy analyst, asserted in the Feb. 19 New York Times Magazine that the advocates of liberating Iraq believed wrongly "that the ‘root cause’ of terrorism lay in the Middle East’s lack of democracy, that the United States had both the wisdom and the ability to fix this problem and that democracy would come quickly and painlessly to Iraq." Fukuyama says the Iraq invasion has only made the U.S. unpopular and Iraq a terrorist "magnet."

Hitchens answers that Fukuyama fails to describe accurately the pro-intervention assumptions. Hitchens contests even Fukuyama’s assertion that the liberationists believe the "root cause" of terrorism is the scarcity of democracy. Here I disagree slightly with Hitchens. Lots of us who backed the invasion do believe the lack of Middle East democracies is at least a root cause of terrorism, and certainly dictatorship was the root cause of massive suffering for Iraq and its neighbors.

‘Any change.’ But there is no question that Fukuyama wasn’t being honest in saying we believed "democracy would come quickly and painlessly to Iraq." I think most of us were realistic enough to understand that the toppling of Saddam could claim half the U.S. casualties we saw in either Korea or Vietnam, and that the democratization of Iraq probably would take seven to 10 years.

Says Hitchens:

It wasn’t that the Middle East "lacked democracy" so much that one of its keystone states was dominated by an unstable and destabilizing dictatorship led by a psychopath. And it wasn’t any illusion about the speed and ease of a transition so much as the conviction that any change would be an improvement.

Three questions. Then Hitchens lists the central problems with Saddam’s Iraq that Fukuyama intentionally ignores:

The three questions that anyone developing second thoughts about the Iraq conflict must answer are these: Was the George H.W. Bush administration right to confirm Saddam Hussein in power after his eviction from Kuwait in 1991? Is it right to say that we had acquired a responsibility for Iraq, given past mistaken interventions and given the great moral question raised by the imposition of sanctions? And is it the case that another confrontation with Saddam was inevitable; those answering "yes" thus being implicitly right in saying that we, not he, should choose the timing of it? Fukuyama does not even mention these considerations. Instead, by his slack use of terms like "magnet," he concedes to the fanatics and beheaders the claim that they are a response to American blunders and excesses.

Hitchens says last week’s Muhammad cartoon riots and the destruction of the Golden Mosque demonstrate that the Islamists didn’t need U.S. troops removing an Arab dictator as an excuse for their violence. The Islamists are all too willing to kill and destroy at the most grand or trivial of provocations.

‘Fat chance, Francis.’ Fukuyama envisions a foreign policy that encourages democracy through diplomacy and refrains from military action against despotic regimes. But he fails to explain what diplomacy ever did for the Iraqis who died in Saddam’s wars or ended up in Saddam’s mass graves.

Hitchens:

Fukuyama’s essay betrays a secret academic wish to be living in "normal" times once more, times that will "restore the authority of foreign policy ‘realists’ in the tradition of Henry Kissinger." Fat chance, Francis! Kissinger is moribund, and the memory of his failed dictator’s club is too fresh to be dignified with the term "tradition."

Let’s go a step farther. Fukuyama is one of those weak academics who shapes his principles to the whining of his anti-Bush, anti-liberation traveling companions rather than to the distant screams of tyranny’s victims. Fukuyama would not help the helpless or free the oppressed. Unfortunately, liberation has no place for those who believe history ended with the world half free.

Frank Warner

SEE ALSO: Bush answers Fukuyama.

Comments

[Neo]

The wish that "democracy would come quickly and painlessly to Iraq" just shows that Fukuyama is merely yet another analyst burdened with a short attention span.

Anyone who thought this would be quick and painless should share whatever drugs he is using.