Even neo-cons have changed

Even some neo-cons, who encouraged the Bush administration to take such a move, now, think it was a mistake to go into war in Iraq. One such prominent neo-con is Francis Fukuyama, a former senior State Department official, who first propounded his theory of the victory of the US-style capitalist democracy after the collapse of the Soviet Union. When the Soviet Union collapsed by the late 1980s, Fukuyama came up with a theory which made him a celebrity overnight.

'What we are witnessing,' he wrote in an article entitled "The End of History", "is not just the end of the Cold War, or a 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 universalisation of western liberal democracy as the final form of human government."

It was the summer of 1989 and the Berlin Wall was about to fall. The velvet revolution in Eastern Europe followed in short order and the Soviet empire was to collapse. It was an exhilarating time for neo-conservatism and Fukuyama was encouraged to turn his article into a book, which became a runaway bestseller. Although Margaret Thatcher famously remarked, 'end of history? Beginning of nonsense,' Fukuyama became a darling of the neo-conservatives who were articulating their ideas about what they called Project for the New American Century. Their ideas were centred on the premise that America should use its overwhelming economic, political and military powers to bring down the remaining autocratic regimes and reshape them on its own image.

It was Francis Fukuyama who wrote a letter in 1998 to then President Bill Clinton on behalf of the Project for the New American Century, urging him to overthrow Saddam Hussein over his rows with the weapons inspectors. Among other signatories were present Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and current World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz. Not surprisingly, Rumsfeld has become the principal cheerleader for Bush's decision to invade Iraq. Naturally, Fukuyama also celebrated the US invasion of Iraq.

Now he thinks that the war in Iraq is wrong and will have disastrous consequences if not quickly resolved. In his new book After the Neo-cons, published recently, Fukuyama says: "I have concluded that neo-conservatism, both as a symbol and a body of thought, has evolved into something I can no longer support.'" He thinks that Iraq war is a bad war and that democracy cannot be imposed at gunpoint.

It is now clear that democracy works best when it is home grown, not when outsiders do impose it. By trying to bring democracy through the point of a gun, the Bush administration might have undermined the very existence of Iraq as a unified nation. The once-dominant Sunni minority have shown no interest to submit to the rule of Shi'ite majority in the name of democracy and the now-dominant Shi'ite majority are not interested in any compromise which they fear might bring back the Sunni domination and the Kurds are looking for an opportunity to secede. Interestingly, Iraq's Shi'ite prime minister Jaafari, who gained office through the democratic process, is now warning the United States to stop interfering with the country's political process.

The result has been a never-ending bloodletting among various groups with the American forces caught in the middle.