The Neocons Have Learned Nothing from Five Years of Catastrophe (Fukuyama)

[cool user name]

The Neocons Have Learned Nothing from Five Years of Catastrophe
Their zealous advocacy of the invasion of Iraq may have been a disaster, but now they want to do it all over again - in Iran

by Francis Fukuyama

The United States today spends approximately as much as the rest of the world combined on its military establishment. So it is worth pondering why it is that, after nearly four years of effort, the loss of thousands of American lives, and an outlay of perhaps half-a-trillion dollars, the US has not succeeded in pacifying a small country of some 24 million people, much less in leading it to anything that looks remotely like a successful democracy.

One answer is that the nature of global politics in the first decade of the 21st century has changed in important ways. Today's world, at least in that band of instability that runs from north Africa and through the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa and central Asia, is characterised by numerous weak and sometimes failed states, and by transnational actors who are able to move fluidly across international borders, abetted by the same technological capabilities that produced globalisation. States such as Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Somalia, Palestine and a host of others are not able to exercise sovereign control over their territory, ceding power and influence to terrorist groups such as al-Qaida, political parties-cum-militias such as Hizbullah in Lebanon, or various ethnic and sectarian factions elsewhere.

American military doctrine has emphasised the use of overwhelming force, applied suddenly and decisively, to defeat the enemy. But in a world where insurgents and militias deploy invisibly among civilian populations, overwhelming force is almost always counterproductive: it alienates precisely those people who have to make a break with the hardcore fighters and deny them the ability to operate freely. The kind of counterinsurgency campaign needed to defeat transnational militias and terrorists puts political goals ahead of military ones, and emphasises hearts and minds over shock and awe.

A second lesson that should have been drawn from the past five years is that preventive war cannot be the basis of a long-term US nonproliferation strategy. The Bush doctrine sought to use preventive war against Iraq as a means of raising the perceived cost to would-be proliferators of approaching the nuclear threshold. Unfortunately, the cost to the US itself was so high that it taught exactly the opposite lesson: the deterrent effect of American conventional power is low, and the likelihood of preventive war actually decreases if a country manages to cross that threshold.

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[denverbill]

1. Hey, Francis Fukuyama finally learned the lesson of Vietnam. 30 years later.

Idiot. At least his 2nd lesson is new. I only started talking about that one 4 years ago, before Shrub's decision to pre-emptively invade Iraq. Unfortunately, Fukayama ignored all the people who claimed that at the time.

[cool user name]

3. I understand ... I don't like the guy and it appears ...

.. that he's jumping ship from the ridiculous neo-jerk plan for world domination.

He's an idiot par excellance!

[rox63]

2. Unfortunately, Fukuyama was one of those beating the war drums back in 2002 n/t

[FrenchieCat]

4. Well apparently he's not the only one who's sorry about

their words and actions in 2002.

I'm glad he's out here now......just too bad that it took as long as it did for him to get a clue.

I prefer them rehabilitated then not at all....

I prefer them right from the get if at all possible!

[nealmhughes]

5. Fukuyama did it out of his reading of Hegel, in which he posits that

a liberal democratic world that is rapidly turning into a global community with universal and cosmopolitan values, i.e., capitalist, representative government, etc. would result in an end of "history," rather, that nationalism, regionalism, Communism, feudalism, all would be things of the past, and that Democracy on the March was indeed true, witnessed by the collapse of the Warsaw Pact.

He read into Hegel that society was now maturning, and as a consequence, there would be only "chronicles" of scientific advances, extreme weather phenomena, etc. since there would be universal agreement on the issues affecting mankind, such as governance, ethnic and religious identity would be irrevelent, etc.

Now, he was basing all of this on his analysis of a Unified Western Culture which was, indeed, becoming open and democratic representative in governance. That old Cerebus of Greed, Entrenchment and Nationalism has proven him wrong again, just as it did Marx.

That is the problem with seeing ony a dialectic and not a variety of forces affecting history, the various theses being constantly assaulted with competing antitheses, or even more accurately, demiantitheses, and at vectors, not head on.

Damn! Glad I paid attention to all that historiography for six years!