Fukuyama: Neocons a gang of ‘Leninists’

Fukuyama: Neocons a gang of ‘Leninists’ March 10, 2006

While there are few more stinging put-downs on the American Right than "Leninist", I actually think Fukuyama lets them off easy in some ways. 

Sure, he exposes their incredible inconsistency and brashness, but I think a full reckoning would include a few paragraphs on their stunning incompetance in governance, their Inspector Clouseau-like bumbling.

I applaud him for his integrity and courage in speaking out, but too bad it took him so long to detect his comrades’ manifest naivete.  I think it and the inevitably disastrous outcome of their policies were obvious from the very beginning.

As usual, though, the "liberal" media was a key enabler in this latest rightwing-led disaster for America.  It was too spineless to hold these Jacobin zealots ideologically accountable when it could have made a huge difference, had it just done it’s job and reported the whole story.  A reasonably independent and competent media would have exposed these peoples’ hollow, inconsistent arguments to such withering scrutiny that they would never have dared drag us into Iraq.  Instead, we had an "embedded" media that provided political cover for these misadventures.

Jim Lobe on "Leninists!" Cries Neo-Con Nabob, Suing for Divorce  (IPS News Service):

WASHINGTON, Feb 21 (IPS) – The Washington foreign policy elite finds itself on pins and needles this week awaiting a response from the neo-conservative heavyweights at the Weekly Standard magazine to a scorching denunciation by one of their most venerable fellow-travelers, Francis Fukuyama, in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine.

Fukuyama, best known for his post-Cold War essay proclaiming the historic inevitability of liberal democracy, "The End of History", argued in the Times article that neo-conservatives so badly miscalculated the myriad costs of the Iraq war that they may have empowered their two foreign policy nemeses — realists, who disdain democracy promotion; and isolationists, who oppose foreign entanglements of almost any kind.

Even more provocatively, Fukuyama called the Standard’s editor, William Kristol, his ideological sidekick, Robert Kagan, and their neo-conservative comrades who led the drive to war in Iraq "Leninist" in their conviction that liberal democracy can be achieved through "coercive regime change" or imposed by military means.


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