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February 27, 2006
A good question:
Three years after the invasion of Iraq, as you have suggested, it looks like the U.S. has created a self-fulfilling prophecy: It went to war to thwart any link between Islamic extremists and weapons of mass destruction, but has ended up creating the "Shiite Crescent" King Abdullah of Jordan worries about with religious-oriented Shiites empowered in Baghdad sympathetic to a radical Iran seeking a nuclear bomb. Now civil war is around the corner.
What were the illusions of the American neoconservatives who sought this war that led to such folly?
It is asked of Francis Fukuyama. He answers:
The really big illusion was the idea that Iraq would somehow transition easily out of a totalitarian dictatorship into a peaceful and relatively successful democracy. This was a peculiar illusion for neocons because in the past neoconservative thinkers were known for being skeptical of the prospects of ambitious social engineering in U.S. domestic policy....The other important illusion was their perception of how the world would react to the U.S. invasion of Iraq. There was a belief in the legitimacy of the moral uses of American power, something the neocons share, I think, with most Americans. Unlike Europeans, Americans have a benign view of the use of force by their state from the Revolution to the Civil War to the world wars and the Cold War, in which American force was used for ultimately good, democratic outcomes.The neocons...failed to realize how in the period between the end of the Cold War up to the beginning of the Iraq war the imbalance in the distribution of power around the world created tremendous resentment and fertile ground for anti-Americanism. The neocon promoters of the Iraq war simply failed to anticipate how negatively the rest of the world would react to the use of American power in such a preemptive war.
A good answer, don't you think?
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