That Hard Wilsonianism, it's Hard That Way...

If success has a thousand fathers and failure is an orphan, it is no wonder that the number of intellectuals willing to endorse the Iraq war is shrinking fast. For the small but significant camp of pro-war liberals, the decision to support the American invasion of Iraq was always deeply conflicted, a matter of weighing security concerns and humanitarian promise against the dangers of unilateralism and militarism.
...
The real man-bites-dog story comes when a self-proclaimed neoconservative, a genuine Middle East hawk, decides that the war was a mistake. That is why Francis Fukuyama's recent New York Times Magazine essay, "After Neoconservatism," created such a stir. Mr. Fukuyama, after all, has long been one of the most prominent neoconservative policy intellectuals. As he writes in "America at the Crossroads" (Yale University Press, 240 pages, $25), the new book from which his essay was excerpted, he has worked or studied with most of the leading neoconservatives, both in and out of government: Paul Wolfowitz, Allan Bloom, William Kristol, Albert Wohlstetter. Most important, he is the author of "The End of History and the Last Man," a book both celebrated and reviled as the classic neoconservative verdict on the Cold War.
[ cf The Tactical Retreat of an Apostate ]

The fiasco in Iraq was predictable, and so was the defection of Francis Fukuyama from the neo-conservative camp. There have always been two Francis Fukuyamas: the ideologue who elevated the fleeting moment of American supremacy at the end of the Cold War into the end of history, and the sober policy analyst who for many years produced research papers for the Rand Corporation and other think tanks on subjects such as democratic transition in South Africa and the political prospects of the post-Brezhnev Soviet Union. As a realistic analyst, Fukuyama seems always to have harboured doubts about regime change in Iraq, and as the country descended into chaos it was to be expected that the analyst would at some point take over from the ideologue.
[ cf After the Neo-Cons: America at the Crossroads, by Francis Fukuyama ]

The rats are deserting a sinking ship. The war in Iraq has long divided the American left between antiwar refuseniks and Humvee liberals and split the American right between paleoconservative isolationists, realpolitik realists and neoconservative imperialists. Now the war has begun to shatter the ranks of the neoconservatives themselves—the faction that, above all, gave us this disaster.

The most prominent neoconservative turncoat is Francis Fukuyama, he of the prophecy of an "end to history" and the eventual triumph of liberal democracy—a forecast that played no small part in the neoconservative project of a war to make the Middle East safe for Halliburton and Republican political consultants. America at the Crossroads is his apologia for apostasy.

He has much to regret. Fukuyama, along with such luminaries as Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Scooter Libby, was a founder in 1997 of the Project for the New American Century, whose statement of principles provided the Bush Doctrine of preventive war and coercive regime change with its first draft. Shortly thereafter, he was among those calling upon the Clinton administration to consider military action to topple Saddam Hussein, and then complaining months later when their plea was unavailing.
[ cf Second thoughts
A neocon backs off on Iraq ]