NeoConservatives at the Crossroads

Every so often, I buy the New York Times, sunday edition, in Tower records to see how the other half lives. Amid the myriad supplements selling 30 million dollar apartments on 5th Avenue and the photo accompanied marriage announcements by horribly bouffant and manicured yuppies, I spotted this entertaining letter in the Book Review section. Knowing how close Charles Krauthammer is to the hearts of many on our small island nation, I thought it might be nice for those without a NYT subscription to have the opportunity to browse it. It's from one Francis "history is for chumps, fool" Fukuyama. Once again, I'm moved to plead, why can't we all just get along? *Sigh.

'America at the Crossroads' To the Editor: The overheated tone of Charles Krauthammer's letter (April 16) about my book "America at the Crossroads" suggests that he is in something of a panic that someone should hold him accountable for his advocacy of the Iraq war. He pretends that his 2004 speech at the American Enterprise Institute was an abstract, academic disquisition on international relations theory, unrelated to the momentous events swirling about at the time, and that he himself was expressing reservations about the war. This of course is nonsense; as everyone in the audience understood, he was trying to provide a theoretical justification for the Bush administration's foreign policy. Despite the small qualifications he cites, the overall tone was highly triumphalist, and he failed to address any of the obvious setbacks the administration had suffered like the growing insurgency and missing weapons of mass destruction that undermined his strategy of "democratic globalism". If anyone thinks I am misrepresenting the speech, they are welcome to read the 7,000 word critique of it that I wrote in The National Interest in the summer of 2004. My opposition to the war from early 2002 was not a secret; had Krauthammer done a simple Lexis-Nexis search he would have found any number of things I wrote expressing grave reservations about the war before it took place. The only thing "breathtaking" about this whole sorry affair is Krauthammer's determination to shift the focus of the debate from substance to personal invective. FRANCIS FUKUYAMA, Washington.

*Shakes head sadly.