Yusuf Toropov
Question One: Is there a war against Islam?
Question Two: Does George W. Bush believe that the apolcaypse is imminent?
The White House has an increasingly unpersuasive answer for the first question ("No") and a curious inability to answer the second one. At a recent event in Cleveland, Bush rather gracelessly dodged a question phrased with surgical precision on just this very issue. No, I am not kidding.
Joining those of us wondering what on earth George W. Bush was (and is) thinking about Iraq is -- surprise! -- Francis Fukuyama, whose new book is "America at the Crossroads." Fukuyama appears to avoid direct, and potentially embarrassing, encounters with Question One and Question Two, above. But the neocon icon has, just like the eggheads on the left, grave doubts about the direction of American foreign policy.
Make that former neocon icon. Fukuyama has, with this book, officially resigned from the American Neoconservative club. This is not unlike Lawrence Welk resigning from his own band, but I digress.
Today, in a sober New York Times Book Review assessment, Paul Berman takes Fukuyama, author of 1992's influential "The End of History and the Last Man," to task for his occasionally-too-selective critique of recent foreign policy initiatives. Berman's analysis is too good not to quote verbatim.
[Reviewing Fukuyama's book, Berman writes:] ... (T)he neoconservatives eventually generated "a set of coherent principles," which, taken together, ended up defining their impulse in foreign affairs during the last quarter-century. They upheld a belief that democratic states are by nature friendly and unthreatening ...Portions of the surviving civilian population of Iraq might dispute that, but let's not get too picky too quickly.
... and therefore America ought to go around the world promoting democracy and human rights wherever possible. They believed that American power can serve moral purposes. They doubted the usefulness of international law and institutions. And they were skeptical about what is called "social engineering" -- about big government and its ability to generate postive social changes.Remember George W. Bush's blithe dismissals of "nation-building" in the 2000 campaign? So, presumably, does Fukuyama -- and so does Berman, who proceeds to lacerate Fukuyama with the following:
Such is Fukuyama's summary. It seems to me too kind. For how did the neoconservatives propose to reconcile their ambitious desire to combat despotism around the world with their cautious aversion to social enginering? Fukuyama notes that during the 1990s the conservatives veered in militarist directions, which strikes him as a mistake. A less sympathetic observer might recall that that neoconservative foreign policy has all along indulged a romance of the ruthless -- an expectation that small numbers of people might be able to play a decisive role in world events, if only their ferocity could be unleashed. It was a romance of the ruthless that led some of the early generation of neoconservatives in the 1970s to champion the grisliest of anti-Communist guerrillas in Angola, and, during the next decade, led the neoconservatives to champion some not very attractive anti-Communist guerrillas in Central America, too; and led the Reagan administration's neoconservatives into the swamps of the Iran-Contra scandal in order to go on championing their guerrillas."Cue the 'connect-the-dots' question here, please." Berman, unlike those of his colleagues in the mainstream American media who resemble a fleet of zombies marching to some otherwordly, triumphalist drumbeat, proves that someone in the Fourth Estate has managed avoid joining the army of the walking dead. He asks:
Doesn't this same impulse shed a light on the baffling question of how the Bush administration of our own time could have managed to yoke together a stirring democratic oratory with a series of grotesque scandals involving American torture -- this very weird and self-defeating combination of idealism and brass knuckles? But Fukuyama must not agree.Later in the article, Berman observes:
The neoconservatives, (Fukuyama) suggests, are people who, having witnessed the collapse of Communism long ago, ought to look back on those gigantic events as a one-in-a-zillion lucky break, like winning the lottery. Instead, the neoconservatives, victims of their own success, came to believe that Communism's implosion reflected the deepest laws of history, which were operating in their own and America's favor--a formula for hubris. This is a shrewd observation, and might seem peculiar only because Fukuyama's own "End of History" articulated the world's most eloquent argument for detecting within the collapse of Communism the deepest laws of history.As the basketball afficionados say -- "In your face." The Communists believed that history was a closed book, and they believed that they could guide history toward an (inevitable) landing-point. The Christian extremists who have now seized America's foreign policy apparatus, and who will in all likelihood control it for some time to come, took Fukuyama's cue in 1992 and turned it into something very close to nationalist triumphalism driven by fundamentalist Christian values. (Specifically including, I might add, Christian Zionism.) Now, in 2006, believing much the same thing that the Communists before them believed about history's ultimate vindication of their beliefs, and adding to it the tart, subtle aftertaste of tacit endorsement from the Almightly, they are fomenting a global confrontation with the world's one billion Muslims. And they are recruiting fellow zombies. Fukuyama now wants out, and I don't blame him.
Vice President Cheney requires that the hotel room he walks into must have all the televisions turned on and tuned to Fox News. I wonder if that datum reached Francis Fukuyama's ears, and if so, what strange nightmares about zombies, and about the pale bluish-green cast of the Vice President's skin, resulted.
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{Invite (mankind, O Muhammad ) to the Way of your Lord (i.e. Islam) with wisdom (i.e. with the Divine Inspiration and the Qur'an) and fair preaching, and argue with them in a way that is better. Truly, your Lord knows best who has gone astray from His Path, and He is the Best Aware of those who are guided.}
(Holy Quran-16:125)
{And who is better in speech than he who [says: "My Lord is Allah (believes in His Oneness)," and then stands straight (acts upon His Order), and] invites (men) to Allah's (Islamic Monotheism), and does righteous deeds, and says: "I am one of the Muslims."} (Holy Quran-41:33)
The prophet (peace and blessings of Allah be upon him) said: "By Allah, if Allah guides one person by you, it is better for you than the best types of camels." [al-Bukhaaree, Muslim]
The prophet (peace and blessings of Allah be upon him) also said, "Whoever calls to guidance will have a reward similar to the reward of the one who follows him, without the reward of either of them being lessened at all."
[Muslim, Ahmad, Aboo Daawood, an-Nasaa'ee, at-Tirmidhee, Ibn Maajah]
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