Hitchens answers Fukuyama

Francis Fukuyama's "The End of History and the Last Man" is probably the most interesting book I have ever read, as it deals with the nature of man and how man's nature influences the social systems (dictatorship, democracy, etc.) he is forced to live under. But I haven't had the opportunity to agree with Fukuyama for years, now that the famous author has become a naysayer regarding Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Fortunately, Christopher Hitchens has answered back at one of Fukuyama's recent criticisms in his column The End of Fukuyama

The first requirement of anyone engaging in an intellectual or academic debate is that he or she be able to give a proper account of the opposing position(s), and Fukuyama simply fails this test. The term "root causes" was always employed ironically (as the term "political correctness" used to be) as a weapon against those whose naive opinions about the sources of discontent were summarized in that phrase. It wasn't that the Middle East "lacked democracy" so much that one of its keystone states was dominated by an unstable and destabilizing dictatorship led by a psychopath. And it wasn't any illusion about the speed and ease of a transition so much as the conviction that any change would be an improvement. The charge that used to be leveled against the neoconservatives was that they had wanted to get rid of Saddam Hussein (pause for significant lowering of voice) even before Sept. 11, 2001. And that "accusation," as Fukuyama well knows, was essentially true—and to their credit.

The three questions that anyone developing second thoughts about the Iraq conflict must answer are these: Was the George H.W. Bush administration right to confirm Saddam Hussein in power after his eviction from Kuwait in 1991? Is it right to say that we had acquired a responsibility for Iraq, given past mistaken interventions and given the great moral question raised by the imposition of sanctions? And is it the case that another confrontation with Saddam was inevitable; those answering "yes" thus being implicitly right in saying that we, not he, should choose the timing of it? Fukuyama does not even mention these considerations. Instead, by his slack use of terms like "magnet," he concedes to the fanatics and beheaders the claim that they are a response to American blunders and excesses.

What is most mystifying about Fukuyama's "conversion" to the realist school of foreign policy is that he explicitly rejected those ideas in a chapter titled "The Unreality of Realism." Hitchens wins this exchange hands down.