5-02-06, 9:26 am
Francis Fukuyama is one of that growing band of pundits who are safely cloistered over their keyboards, who now reckon that perhaps the US-led invasion of Iraq was not such a good idea and that, in any case, the post-war 'peace' has been badly handled. So far, so honest and so mind-numbingly obvious.
If I were religious, I'd utter some cliche about welcoming a sinner called to repentance. As it is, I deplore Fukuyama's self-satisfied navel-gazing, the way he glosses over history and the sheer silliness of some of his comments.
He tells us that the materials in this book were initially presented in lectures at Yale University in April 2005 and, moreover, that 'a great many people provided comments or else responded when it was presented publicly.'
He lists more than two dozen of them. What a pity that a better book did not emerge from all this prolific input.
Perhaps we should take some comfort from Fukuyama's admission that his wife 'was a sceptic about the war from the beginning.'
She obviously did not manage to persuade him not to sign - along with Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Bolton, Khalilzad, Perle and the rest of the gang - the 1998 neocon letter to Clinton urging military action against Iraq for the purpose of regime change.
Let's quickly get the merits of the book out of the way. He profiles various writers and academics who have shaped the 'neoconservative legacy,' so that, if you bother with these items, you can drop names with the best of them.
He also provides a useful insight into the emerging international organisations - such as the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which was set up by Clinton to help organise internet addresses - that are driven largely by corporate requirements.
The implied question is: Who needs the United Nations and similar bodies when capitalism is shaping the fabric of global institutions? There is scope for a whole book on the emergence of commerce-driven global organisations.
After the Iraq war had started, Fukuyama decided that it 'didn't make sense.' Well done, Francis. He parades the absurdities of the rationale for war as if he had just discovered them.
He also declares that Ronald Reagan was 'an intellectual' and that US foreign policy has been motivated by the notion of 'benevolent hegemony.' Did he ask the three million Vietnamese dead and the two million Iraqi dead, killed by sanctions and war, how 'benevolent' they found the US?
He comments that the 1981 Israeli bombing of the Iraqi Osirak nuclear reactor 'was widely seen as a successful application of preventive war.' But we are spared the details that, at the time, it was condemned by Reagan and Thatcher, with the US and Britain supporting UN security council resolution 487, which deplored the Israeli action, demanded that Israel submit to IAEA nuclear inspections and pay Iraq compensation for the damage wrought.
He declares that the 'sanctions regime of the 1990s had apparently been sufficient to convince Saddam to get rid of his residual weapons.' Later, he declares that the UN security council 'failed to follow through in enforcing its own disarmament resolutions on Baghdad.'
Fukuyama claims that the US brokered a negotiated end to the 'civil war' in El Salvador, without bothering to tell us that it was the US that first stimulated the war of the landowners against the impoverished people and trained death squads to roam the land hunting radical trade unionists and teachers.
He claims that the US achieved 'a democratic transition' in Nicaragua, without bothering to tell us that, in 1986, the World Court judged the US to have been guilty of a terrorist campaign and it demanded that Washington pay compensation.
He mentions that 'coercive regime change was successfully employed in Panama in 1991,' without saying that the deposed President Noriega was a former CIA-funded buddy of the first George Bush.
He reckons that the fall of Slobodan Milosevic was an example of 'nonviolent' regime change.
What happened to the 78 days of NATO bombing?
He mentions that, when the Soviet Union walked out of the security council in 1950, 'the other four members' were able to vote for intervention in Korea. He means 'permanent' members.
He says that the security council authorised military action against Iraq after the invasion of Kuwait, when, in fact, there was never a council vote on what action was 'necessary,' as specified in resolution 678. And he says that Saddam Hussein 'expelled' UNSCOM inspectors in 1999, when, in fact, they were withdrawn by the US as a prelude to the Desert Fox bombing onslaught - and it happened in 1998.
Fukuyama tells us that the Bush administration 'has signalled that it does not intend to use military force to bring about regime change' in Iran, when we are constantly reminded by Bush, Rice and the rest that the military option is always 'on the table' and when details of US and Israeli military plans have been comprehensively exposed in the media.
Fukuyama is a typical member of the US academic establishment, today able to criticise the Bush administration because so much domestic and international opinion is turning against the crass and brutal folly of US policies.
But, even now, he cannot summon up even a hint of outrage at the suffering heaped upon helpless people by the political tradition to which he still belongs. This new book contains only one sentence about the human cost of the Iraq war. Better by far to juggle bits of academic information at Johns Hopkins University. You'd have thought that, with his two dozen helpers, he'd have got it right.
From Morning Star
