Wednesday, August 31, 2005
(8:06 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
The Impossible Sometimes Happens
Francis Fukayama is not wrong. In his latest editorial in the New York Times, he assesses the course of US foreign policy since 9/11 and concludes:We do not know what outcome we will face in Iraq. We do know that four years after 9/11, our whole foreign policy seems destined to rise or fall on the outcome of a war only marginally related to the source of what befell us on that day. There was nothing inevitable about this. There is everything to be regretted about it.Of course, he thinks that the foreign policy of the past four years has been a problem because it betrayed the neoconservative movement and hurt the future chances for a thoroughgoing neoconservative revolution in US foreign policy, and to that extent one might say he's right for the wrong reasons. Yet this is good news: when a leading neoconservative, a signatory to the Project for a New American Century, thinks that the Iraq War was a tremendous clusterfuck, you know that the project is in trouble.
Now I suspect that the people who support the Iraq War just plain support war, and they support Bush because he's leading a war -- war, of course, carrying its own justification: "We have to keep fighting this war because damn it, we started it, and we're going to finish it!" The most frequent variation on this basic idea is the grotesque argument that soldiers have to continue to die in order to redeem those soldiers who have already died -- and you can tell that it's just "my country right or wrong" nationalism because no one seems to worry that the vastly larger number of dead Iraqis will have "died in vain" if we pull out now.
