Francis Fukuyama lays it all out for the uneducated and ill-informed:
“The End of History,” in other words, presented a kind of Marxist argument for the existence of a long-term process of social evolution, but one that terminates in liberal democracy rather than communism. In the formulation of the scholar Ken Jowitt, the neoconservative position articulated by people like Kristol and Kagan was, by contrast, Leninist; they believed that history can be pushed along with the right application of power and will. 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.
Remember, this is coming from a quasi-Marxist supporter of Wilsonian global democratic revolution. Note also the link between liberal democracy and communism and the fundamentally similar way the two are brought about. The following paragraph, too, is significant; longtime readers will recall that I have been skeptical of the military threat posed by the jihad to the United States since my first political column in 2001.
The most basic misjudgment was an overestimation of the threat facing the United States from radical Islamism. Although the new and ominous possibility of undeterrable terrorists armed with weapons of mass destruction did indeed present itself, advocates of the war wrongly conflated this with the threat presented by Iraq and with the rogue state/proliferation problem more generally. The misjudgment was based in part on the massive failure of the American intelligence community to correctly assess the state of Iraq’s W.M.D. programs before the war. But the intelligence community never took nearly as alarmist a view of the terrorist/W.M.D. threat as the war’s supporters did. Overestimation of this threat was then used to justify the elevation of preventive war to the centerpiece of a new security strategy, as well as a whole series of measures that infringed on civil liberties, from detention policy to domestic eavesdropping.
An excellent and informative piece, well worth the reading. It is this sort of thing that makes the New York Times still relevant, its ludicrous daily columnists and sophmoric political reporting notwithstanding. Fukuyama’s recommendations are more neo-Marxian globalist nonsense, of course, but his critique of neoconservatism is completely correct.