Francis Fukuyama and the Mess in Mesopotamia

Francis Fukuyama is always worth paying attention to, but he's been drawing more scrutiny than usual lately because he more or less renounces his neocon roots in his new book -- "America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power and the Neoconservative Legacy" and takes to task the neocons who are responsible for the ongoing Mess in Mesopotamia.

In contrasting articles in Slate, Christopher Hitchens has his knickers in a bit of a knot over Fukuyama, whom he accuses of yearning for the good (bad) old days, while Jacob Weisberg sings his praises.

Says Hitchens:

I have my own criticisms both of my one-time Trotskyist comrades and of my temporary neocon allies, but it can be said of the former that they saw Hitlerism and Stalinism coming—and also saw that the two foes would one day fuse together—and so did what they could to sound the alarm. And it can be said of the latter (which, alas, it can't be said of the former) that they looked at Milosevic and Saddam and the Taliban and realized that they would have to be confronted sooner rather than later. 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." If you can't have a sense of policy, you should at least try to have a sense of history. "America at the Crossroads" evidently has neither.

And Weisberg:

While he remains sympathetic to the democracy-spreading mission, Fukuyama castigates the unilateral and militaristic turns that gave us such concepts as "preventive war," "benevolent hegemony," and "regime change." Neoconservatives, he contends, have abandoned their fundamental political insight, namely that ambitious schemes to remake societies are doomed to disappointment, failure, and unintended consequences. "Opposition to utopian social engineering," Fukuyama writes "… is the most enduring thread running through the movement." Yet neoconservatives today are bogged down in an attempt to remake a poorly understood, catastrophically damaged, and deeply alien semi-country in the Middle East. How did these smart people stray—and lead the country—so far off course?