Outing himself as a Bush Kultist, WSJ editorial board member Bret Stephens takes issue with (running anti-lock step with the sanctified Bush rejecters, whose rejections are inviolable and unavailable for critique or counter, is the most prominent symptom of Bush Kultism&trade the highly-publicized Iraq reconsiderations of former arch-neocon Frances Fukuyama.  From “Fukuyama’s Pivot:  He urged the liberation of Iraq. Now he claims he had misgivings all along”:

In January 1998, a group called the Project for the New American Century issued a public letter to President Clinton on the subject of Iraq. The threat posed by Saddam Hussein, it said, was “more serious than any we have known since the end of the Cold War.” Efforts to contain the dictator were “steadily eroding.” If Saddam acquired weapons of mass destruction, “as he is almost certain to do if we continue along the present course,” the whole Middle East would be put at risk.

“The only acceptable strategy,” the authors concluded, “is one that eliminates the possibility that Iraq will be able to use or threaten to use weapons of mass destruction. In the near term, this means a willingness to undertake military action as diplomacy is clearly failing. In the long term, it means removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power.”

Among the letter’s 18 signatories were Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Zalmay Khalilzad, John Bolton and the neoconservative political theorist Francis Fukuyama, best known for his 1992 book, “The End of History and the Last Man.” And yet, as the invasion of Iraq loomed in 2002, Mr. Fukuyama tells us in “America at the Crossroads,” he came to the conclusion that “the war didn’t make sense.” The book attempts to explain why and to sketch out a new set of principles for a prudent foreign policy.

I’ll get to the argument in a moment, but a point of clarification is in order. On April 14, 2003–five days after the fall of Baghdad to U.S. troops–Mr. Fukuyama published an article in The Wall Street Journal (it appeared on this Web site a few days later) in which he noted that Americans have ”justly celebrated the downfall of Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship” (my emphasis). There is not a word in the article to suggest the misgivings Mr. Fukuyama claims to have been harboring for a year.

The chronology here has no bearing on the validity of Mr. Fukuyama’s views. Nor does it count against him that he changed his mind. Credibility is another matter. Mr. Fukuyama is a public intellectual of the first rank, with influence and connections at the highest reaches of the Bush administration. Several thousand U.S. troops have now been killed or injured in a war he gave every appearance of supporting well after the Rubicon was crossed. If Mr. Fukuyama now judges the effort a terrible folly, the least he can do is offer an honest account of the part he played cheering it on.

As for Mr. Fukuyama’s objections to the war, most of them are familiar, though they do have the virtue of being put with great clarity, sophistication and nuance. The administration overestimated the threat from Iraq. The risk that Saddam would have passed nuclear material to terrorists was remote. And while a preventive war might have been justified to stop Saddam from acquiring the bomb and dominating the region, the “prevention” took place far too prematurely. Yet these points are speculative and, with the decision to go to war now behind us, essentially moot.

[My emphases]

I highlight these portions of Stephen’s piece to forestall suggestions by the “gotcha” crowd looking for signs of Bush Kultism that those of us who continue to support the effort in Iraq on broad strategic grounds are bothered by any “growth” or “regression” (depending on your point of view) of opinion on the matter; that is, that we celebrate intellectual intransigence in and of itself.  Instead, we are concerned with disagreeing with Fukuyama (and Buckley and Will and Buchanan, et al, before him) on the objections themselves—many of which, in Fukuyama’s case, were launched from the safety of hindsight, and in light of growing concerns expressed in the US press that a civil war in Iraq was imminent.

Keeping that in mind, here is how Stephens responds to the substance of Fukuyama’s criticisms:

Mr. Fukuyama’s more relevant objections are as follows. First, he says, the administration failed to anticipate the extent to which the war would aggravate anti-Americanism and reshape global politics accordingly. Second, it mischaracterized and exaggerated the threat posed by radical Islamism: Jihadism, he writes, is “a byproduct of modernization and globalization, not traditionalism,” which is better dealt with by integrating Muslims already living in the West than by “ ‘fixing’ the Middle East.” Third, the administration neglected the insight of the founding neoconservatives—intellectuals like Irving Kristol and Daniel Patrick Moynihan who, beginning in the 1960s, wrote critiques of large-scale government programs—that ambitious attempts at social engineering tend to backfire.

On the first point, there’s no doubt that the war was deeply unpopular around the world. But it plainly wasn’t so unpopular as to create the kind of catastrophic backlash Mr. Fukuyama imagines. Since the war, four of the most prominent members of the “Coalition of the Willing”—Britain’s Tony Blair, Australia’s John Howard, Denmark’s Anders Fogh Rasmussen and Japan’s Junichiro Koizumi—have been returned to office by large majorities. Canada’s Paul Martin and Germany’s Gerhard Schroeder have been cashiered in favor of Stephen Harper and Angela Merkel, both of whom campaigned on the explicit promise of better ties with the U.S. France’s Jacques Chirac looks to be politically finished; Nicolas Sarkozy, his likeliest successor, is avowedly pro-American. In the Middle East, where we once had enemies in Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan, we now have pro-American, democratic governments.

Next there is Mr. Fukuyama’s view about the nature of jihadism. It is true that Europe’s failure to assimilate its Muslims has helped spawn the likes of Mohamed Atta and the London bombers. Then again, Osama bin Laden is not an alienated child of Europe, nor is Abu Musab al Zarqawi. The religious madrassas through which jihadist ideology spreads are funded by Saudi Arabia. Hezbollah’s Al-Manar satellite TV station broadcasts its message of hate from Beirut and gets its funding from Tehran. Iran, in turn, also helps to arm groups such as the Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas, which is a sister organization of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, from which Ayman al Zawahiri sprang. Before 9/11, most of the jihadists got their “military” training in Afghanistan and possibly also in Saddam’s Iraq. Mr. Fukuyama may or may not be right that Islamist radicalism is a “byproduct of modernization,” but the idea that the heart of the problem is somewhere other than the Middle East is inane.

Well, the problem is in fact somewhere in addition to the middle east, but this is largely a product of outsourcing of radicalism to westernized countries with immigration and multicultural policies that work to the advantage of jihadists (whether it is Britain’s institutionalized refusal to judge, or France’s propensity for keeping assimilation a class system, providing radical Muslims with both legitimate grievances and a cover for radicalism).

Hardly more persuasive is Mr. Fukuyama’s argument about social engineering, a term he tends to abuse. Properly understood, social engineering isn’t simply a matter of instituting radical change per se. What counts is the kind of change. Imposing price controls, for instance, is a form of social engineering because it upsets the natural balance of supply and demand. But it would be absurd to argue that removing price controls is also a kind of social engineering, even if it entails short-term economic dislocations.

The question then becomes whether removing dictators is an example of the former or the latter. Mr. Fukuyama devotes a chapter to the subject and concludes that solid democratic institutions will take root only when there is strong internal demand for them. True enough. But on what basis should we conclude there is no strong internal demand for democracy in Iraq, or Burma, or Iran?

None of this is to ignore the very real difficulties the U.S. faces in Iraq and the very real possibility of failure. The work of liberators is never easy, and the Bush administration may be faulted for suggesting that it would be. But I’ll wager that it’s considerably more doable than the delicate concept that Mr. Fukuyama proposes: a world in which the U.S. operates within and between “multiple multilateralisms”; seeks to “downplay its dominance”; reinvents the World Bank (again) to better disburse foreign aid, and so on.

[My emphasis]

Here, Fukuyama seems to tack close to Buckley, and in some ways even moves farther to the traditional conservative right than the founder of National Review.  Because whereas Buckley noted that the impulse to promote democracy is both legitimate and a strength of our national character for which the middle east [read:  Muslim / Arab culture] might not be ready, he nevertheless wrote:

What do we do when we see that the postulates do not prevail — in the absence of interventionist measures (we used these against Hirohito and Hitler) which we simply are not prepared to take? It is healthier for the disillusioned American to concede that in one theater in the Mideast, the postulates didn’t work. The alternative would be to abandon the postulates. To do that would be to register a kind of philosophical despair. The killer insurgents are not entitled to blow up the shrine of American idealism.

Conversely, Fukuyama seems to have retreated into a institutionalized foreign policy realism of the kind that served the Bush I administration so poorly, in retrospect.

Six months after 9/11, it was noted that “a passive policy that did nothing to clean up festering pockets of instability does not necessarily produce security, and there are times when bolder action is required.” One can only wish that Mr. Fukuyama would heed those words, particularly since they are his own.

And this remains the argument proffered by war supporters:  that the foreign policy realism and our long-standing strategy of “stabilization” (code for propping up useful dictators—which the pre-Buchananite left used to abhor, and which gave us two World Trade Center attacks, as well as attacks on Khobar Towers, the USS Cole, etc, and has fueled anti-Israeli sentiment) was failing, and that a sea-change in the middle east needed to take place before the increasingly noxious combination of anti-US sentiment, pro-Islamic fundamentalist populism, Wahabbist teachings, and the rise of transnational terror groups—joined to rogue states looking to harm the US without leaving a national footprint of their complicity—were allowed to build into coalitions capable of providing the world’s most dangerous weapons to organizations pre-situated to use them.

Which, I suppose, is the basis for our Bush Kultism:  that we continue to believe in the righteousness and propriety of the strategy.  Whereas walking back our convictions marks us, in the eyes of those prone to citing us as Kultists, as people of conviction.

Strange, that.  But so it goes.

(h/t Terry Hastings)