I worked it out wrong

Frances Fukuyama, one of the smartest Neo-Cons, once said this:

"What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government." (quoted from "The End of History?", 1989)

All I want to know is, how's that working out for you now?

Fukuyama has changed his mind. He self consciously picks the scabs on his conscience during an interview in Der Spiegel:

A lot of the neo-conservatives drew the wrong lessons from the end of the Cold War and the collapse of communism. They generalized from that event that all totalitarian regimes are basically hollow at the core and if you give them a little push from the outside, they're going to collapse. Prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall, most people thought that communism would be around for a long time. In fact, it disappeared within seven or eight months in 1989. That skewed the thinking about the nature of dictatorships and neo-conservatives made a wrong analogy between Eastern Europe and what would happen in the Middle East.

. . .

Iraq has become a breeding ground for terror. The upside to the war is not very high. We could get a government in Iraq, but it will be relatively weak. There will be a continuing level of violence and continued instability in that area. A model democracy is not going to emerge and set off a further wave of democratization.

This from a guy who, while active in the Project for the New American Century signed the now infamous letters to Clinton and later, GWBush. In these letters, the PNACers stamped their feet and demanded that we invade Iraq now, "even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the attack."

In all fairness, Fukuyama called for Rumsfeld's resignation:

In addition to distancing himself from the current administration, Fukuyama told TIME magazine that his old friend, US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, should resign.

And in an essay that I'm sure got him dis-invited from the Kool Kidz club, he wrote in the NYTimes that:

Leninism was a tragedy in its Bolshevik version, and it has returned as farce when practiced by the United States. Neoconservatism, as both a political symbol and a body of thought, has evolved into something I can no longer support.

Still, we can't get too excited by Fukuyama's new-found reasoning. After, he is on the steering committee of the Scooter Libby Legal Defense Trust.


Also, just so we never forget, the other authors of the GWBush letter included these fine folks:

Richard V. Allen
Gary Bauer
William Bennett
Elliot Cohen
Charles Krauthammer
Richard Perle
Norman Podhoretz
Jeane Kirkpatric
Clifford May

and many other thoughtful Neo-Cons. Thanks, kids.