A celebrated New Yorker cartoon of the 1950s showed a plane crashing on arunway. As everyone rushed to rescue the crew a solitary scientist walkedin the opposite direction. He sighed, "Oh well, back to the drawing board."
As the George Bush's Iraq adventure smoulders on the tarmac, asmall group of neo-cons are starting to escape the scene with varyingdegrees of dignity. Some such as Paul Wolfowitz and Paul Bremer havevanished. A handful, including Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Tony Blair,remain in denial, parroting the Vietnam line that "we are winning, really".Others such as Francis Fukuyama have a more valid licence to recant, havingdoubted whether neo-conservatism was relevant to Iraq all along.
In a devastating resume of the saga so far, Fukuyama concludes thatthe so-called creation of democracy in Iraq cannot "justify the blood andtreasure that the United States has spent on the project". The war is notworked. In any counter-terrorism operation, "successful pre-emption dependson the ability to predict the future accurately and on good intelligence,which was not forthcoming." The Bush doctrine "is now in shambles". Americais as isolated as never before. The chaos in Iraq is spoiling the case forany further global projection of American values.
More Americans than since the end of Vietnam are now saying that America"should mind its own business". The realists are coming back into theascendancy. From Afghanistan through Iran and Iraq to the Levant America isin strategic retreat. It cannot realistically fight another war. The Bushdoctrine has polluted not promoted American values. It has made Americaless not more safe, and its ally Israel with it.
None of this will come as particularly new to consumers of thevoluminous catalogue of Iraq book so far. It was predicted by the StateDepartment and many in the American military and round the world (not leastin Europe) before being discovered by Fukuyama. To him the realisation mustbe the more bitter since part his "end of history" thesis was that Americahad won not just the cold war but the global argument.
Fukuyama, the supreme rationalist, assumed that the rest of the world wouldaccept defeat and American hegemony. Like many Americans he forgotnationalism, and did not predict how ineptly Americans would react to beingstung He forgot that the nuclear bomb is a useless weapon since the ownerscannot really use it. It has no deterrence value, as aggressors from NorthVietnam to Iraq to Argentina to al-Qaeda have realised. Military supremacydoes not conquer all. Philip Bobbitt and others have shown that it merelychanges the nature of the game. America's biggest enemy after 9/11 wasparanoia, risk aversion and a belligerent revenge psychosis. It now spendsmore on protecting itself against its own fears than it did againstcommunism. In the process it has sown mayhem across the muslim world.
Fukuyama is intrigued by how this disaster came about. He rehearsesthe often told story of the early neo-cons, born of a mixture of Zionism,oil imperialism and honest evangelism for democracy. Among the many ironieswas the neo-conservatives' libertarian aversion to state power at home yetan enthusiastic belief in its legitimacy and efficacy abroad when deployedagainst foreigners. Watching eager neo-cons at work in Baghdad's Green ZoneI remember wondering where I had seen this before. It was under the BritishLabour government of Harold Wilson.
I am sure Fukuyama is right to see his former friends' desire tonanny the world as arising out of the cold war. I am less sure that itsmotives were wholly benign. The cold war left a giant military apparatuseager for employment. It left Washington's multitudinous defence thinktanks seeking new enemies. It left rich lobbies swirling round Israel andoil. To all these, the crusade to bring democracy to the Middle East wasuseful as much as noble.
What is extraordinary, and what Fukuyama does not fully answer, ishow so small a group of often crackpot intellectuals came to hijack asuperpower. Under Bush men such as Wolfowitz, Cheney, Richard Perle,William Kristol and Charles Krauthammer should have been locked away insome log cabinet. Kristol declared, "It is precisely because Americanforeign policy is infused with an unusually high degree of morality thatother nations find they have less to fear from its otherwise dauntingpower." On what planet do these people live?
Such words would have been hubristic arrogance at the height of theBritish Empire. The neo-cons still cannot see what harm is done their causeby Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, the 101st Airborne and extraordinary rendition.They cannot see that these methods of hegemony, minor in themselves, are9/11 to the defenceless poor of Afghanistan, Iraq and the ghettoes ofPalestine. American cried feel out pain after 9/11. They cry it now.Justified or not, this is a fact with which diplomacy (or war) mustcontend.
The good intentions of the neo-cons may seem axiomatic from withinthe beltway. America's friends abroad can only reply, and at the tops oftheir voices, that is now how it seems elsewhere in the world. When Cheneyand company now threaten Iran, again with the best of intentions, thosefriends wonder respectfully if American has taken leave of its senses.
Kantian ethics requires as the test of a moral precept that it becapable of generalisation. Fukuyama protests a central flaw in the 2002National Security Strategy, Bush's core document of global intervention,that "it could not safely be generalised through the international system."America, he points out, "would be the first to object if Russia, China,India or France declared a similar right of unilateral action." Washingtoncannot pass judgment on others, however venal, "while being unwilling tohave its own conduct questioned in places like the International CriminalCourt."
Fukuyama writes clear prose and is a pleasure to read. Nor is hechary of offering advice. His old creed is now discredited, "indeliblyassociated with coercive regime change, unilateralism and Americanhegemony". A new international order, he says, can only be promoted bypeaceful persuasion through international institutions so derided by theneo-cons. While no friend of the United Nations, he preaches"multi-multilateralism". America must move forward through "its ability toshape international institutions", not sideline them. Either way, ifAmerican policy can only stop making the world a worse place it might be onthe road to making it a better one. Amen.