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Why shouldn't he change his mind? His end of history thesis was the
most lightweight hubristic concept I have read for many
years. Completely ill thought through - although I hesitate to
suggest that he really thought about what he was writing. Was a
crackpot type of thing that one would expect in a nation where one's
advancement depended upon saying nice things about the governing
philosophy. I mean - human history had reached the end of its
socio-economic development in the system that the US has and would
not/could not perfect itself any more. Sounds like something from
sixty years ago when certain people were saying that a certain
nation's history/political system was now perfect and would remain so
for a thousand years.
And what is even more frightening was that at the time he was not
criticized more for such a stupid concept.
But don't worry, on the strength of the (lack of) depth of thought he
showed in that thesis that he seems capable of achieving he will
change his mind again. In this regard he is either a lightweight or
easily impressed by the self importance of the empty rhetoric that
the administration pumps out about "democracy" and "freedom".
This is not a flame - I have always held this opinion about this man
and his intellect - or, rather, his capacity to allow his intellect
to be overridden by his pride in being American. Sad thing is that
there are so many people like him that people like Bush can get away
with what he does
Garth Cartledge
At 06:57 AM 12/04/2006, you wrote:
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>Progressive News & Views (since 1982)
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>
>
>--
>
>
>Why shouldn't I change my mind?
>
> A famed neoconservative switches sides on the Iraq war -- and all hell
> breaks loose.
>
> By Francis Fukuyama, Francis Fukuyama is a professor at the Johns
> Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and the author of
> "America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power and the Neoconservative
> Legacy."
>
> April 9, 2006
>
> SEVEN WEEKS AGO, I published my case against the Iraq war. I wrote
> that although I had originally advocated military intervention in
> Iraq, and had even signed a letter to that effect shortly after the
> 9/11 attacks, I had since changed my mind.
>
> But apparently this kind of honest acknowledgment is verboten. In the
> weeks since my book came out, I've been challenged, attacked and
> vilified from both ends of the ideological spectrum. From the right,
> columnist Charles Krauthammer has accused me of being an opportunistic
> traitor to the neoconservative cause -- and a coward to boot. From the
> left, I've been told that I have "blood on my hands" for having
> initially favored toppling Saddam Hussein and that my "apology" won't
> be accepted.
>
> In our ever-more-polarized political debate, it appears that it is now
> wrong to ever change your mind, even if empirical evidence from the
> real world suggests you ought to. I find this a strange and disturbing
> conclusion.
>
> For the record, I did change my mind, but in the year preceding the
> war -- not after the invasion. In 2002, I told the London Times that
> "the use of military power to push [Iraqi democracy] forward is a big
> roll of the dice. We may not win on this one." On the first
> anniversary of 9/11, I argued in the Washington Post that we should
> invade Iraq only with approval from the U.N. Security Council, and in
> December of that year, I wrote a piece for the Wall Street Journal
> warning that the project of democratizing Iraq and the Mideast might
> come to look like empire and that it violated the conservative
> principle of prudence.
>
> But when my political shift occurred is not important: Even if it had
> come a year or two later, it would still not have represented a
> cowardly retreat or an apologia, but a realistic, intellectually
> honest willingness to face the new facts of the situation.
>
> In my view, no one should be required to apologize for having
> supported intervention in Iraq before the war. There were important
> competing moral goods on both sides of the argument, something that
> many on the left still refuse to recognize. The U.N. in 1999 declared
> that all nations have a positive "duty to protect, promote and
> implement" human rights, arguing in effect that the world's powerful
> countries are complicit in human rights abuses if they don't use their
> power to correct injustices. The debate over the war shouldn't have
> been whether it was morally right to topple Hussein (which it clearly
> was), but whether it was prudent to do so given the possible costs and
> potential consequences of intervention and whether it was legitimate
> for the U.S. to invade in the unilateral way that it did.
>
> It was perfectly honorable to agonize over the wisdom of the war, and
> in many ways admirable that people on the left, such as Christopher
> Hitchens, George Packer, Michael Ignatieff and Jacob Weisberg,
> supported intervention. That position was much easier to defend in
> early 2003, however, before we found absolutely no stocks of chemical
> or biological weapons and no evidence of an ongoing nuclear weapons
> program. (I know that many on the left believe that the prewar
> estimates about Hussein's weapons of mass destruction were all a
> deliberate fraud by the Bush administration, but if so, it was one in
> which the U.N. weapons inspectors and French intelligence were also
> complicit.) It was also easier to support the war before we knew the
> full dimensions of the vicious insurgency that would emerge and the
> ease with which the insurgents could disrupt the building of a
> democratic state.
>
> But in the years since then, it is the right that has failed to come
> to terms with these uncomfortable facts. The failure to find WMD and
> to make a quick transition to a stable democracy -- as well as the
> prisoner abuse and the inevitable bad press that emerges from any
> prolonged occupation -- have done enormous damage to America's
> credibility and standing in the world. These intangible costs have to
> be added to the balance sheet together with the huge direct human and
> monetary costs of the war.
>
> Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice recently admitted that the United
> States made numerous tactical errors in Iraq, but she insisted that
> the basic strategic decision to go to war was still as valid as ever
> because we foreclosed once and for all the possibility that Iraq would
> break out of sanctions and restart its WMD programs.
>
> But we now know a lot that throws that fundamental strategic rationale
> into question.
>
> The Iraq Survey Group and the U.S. military have released hundreds of
> pages of documents on Iraq's prewar WMD programs showing that, at
> times, Hussein believed he possessed biological weapons that didn't
> exist and that, at other times, he led his most senior commanders to
> believe he had WMD capabilities that he knew were entirely fictitious.
> His government was so corrupt, incompetent and compartmentalized that
> it is far from certain that he would have succeeded in building a a
> nuclear program even if sanctions had been lifted. Nor is it clear
> that a breakdown of the sanctions regime was inevitable, given an
> energized United States and the very different political climate that
> existed after 9/11.
>
> The logic of my prewar shift on invading Iraq has now been doubly
> confirmed. I believe that the neoconservative movement, with which I
> was associated, has become indelibly associated with a failed policy,
> and that unilateralism and coercive regime change cannot be the basis
> for an effective American foreign policy. I changed my mind as part of
> a necessary adjustment to reality.
>
> What has infuriated many people is President Bush's unwillingness to
> admit that he made any mistakes whatsoever in the whole Iraq
> adventure. On the other hand, critics who assert that they knew with
> certainty before the war that it would be a disaster are, for the most
> part, speaking with a retrospective wisdom to which they are not
> entitled.
>
> Many people have noted the ever-increasing polarization of American
> politics, reflected in news channels and talk shows that cater to
> narrowly ideological audiences, and in a House of Representatives that
> has redistricted itself into homogeneous constituencies in which few
> members have to appeal to voters with diverse opinions. This
> polarization has been vastly amplified by Iraq: Much of the left now
> considers the war not a tragic policy mistake but a deliberate
> criminal conspiracy, and the right attacks the patriotism of those who
> question the war.
>
> This kind of polarization affects a range of other complex issues as
> well: You can't be a good Republican if you think there may be
> something to global warming, or a good Democrat if you support school
> choice or private Social Security accounts. Political debate has
> become a spectator sport in which people root for their team and cheer
> when it scores points, without asking whether they chose the right
> side. Instead of trying to defend sharply polarized positions taken
> more than three years ago, it would be far better if people could
> actually take aboard new information and think about how their earlier
> commitments, honestly undertaken, actually jibe with reality -- even
> if this does on occasion require changing your mind.
>
>
> Copyright 2006 Los Angeles Times
>
>
>Accolades to Professor Fukuyami for a courageous statement and for setting
>the record straight. Left and right labels have really lost their efficacy
>in this battle of ideas. The truth is what is important, not whether or
>not one follows a specific "line of march" and comes down on one side or
>another because this isn't a team sport and there are real people and real
>event involved and folks are dying because of a dishonest and not
>too bright, pro-corporatist president.
> Hank
>
>
>
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Garth Cartledge
" Despotism sits nowhere so secure as under the effigy and ensigns of
Freedom", From Imaginary Conversations of Greeks and Romans (1853) by
Walter Savage Landor 1775-1864
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