At Last, the Warmongers Are Prepared to Face the Facts and Admit They Were Wrong

After three years of fighting, the loss of tens of thousands of lives, both US and Iraqi, and an expenditure of $200 billion, neoconservatives have started to question the wisdom of the war in Iraq. The shift in thinking extends across the conservative media landscape from William Buckley to George Will, who note that Iran, North Korea and Iraq are “more dangerous” than in 2002 when US President George Bush called them the “axis of evil.” The US objective in Iraq failed, Buckley said, because it was too ambitious, requiring “more than President Bush’s deployable resources.” Francis Fukuyama, in his book, “America at the Crossroads,” suggests that the war “fatally poisoned” the neoconservative legacy. He was the most prominent intellectual to sign the 1997 manifesto, “Project for the New American Century,” which contained the underlying principles of the neoconservative movement. The Iraq war represented the manifesto put in to action, with supporters hoping to resolve conflict throughout the Middle East. Yet the neoconservative stance was contradictory, opposing excessive government regulation in domestic affairs while naïvely undertaking massive social engineering in Iraq. Fukuyama argues that the world was already slowly moving toward liberal, free-market democracy. The neoconservatives, taking a page from Lenin, had hoped to push history forward. But power has limits, and the reconstruction fiasco has slowed progress in two countries, the US and Iraq. – YaleGlobal