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PNAC signatory Fukuyama: "everything to be regretted" in Iraq

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swag Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Aug-30-05 10:31 PM
Original message
PNAC signatory Fukuyama: "everything to be regretted" in Iraq
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/31/opinion/31fukuyama.html

"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."
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The_Casual_Observer Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Aug-30-05 10:44 PM
Response to Original message
1. Strange that this jerk, who signed on to the premise
that the US through shear will and military might could do anything it fucking pleased, regrets anything.
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swag Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Aug-30-05 10:49 PM
Response to Reply #1
2. It's odd. He urged Clinton to invade, yet rejected the 2003 invasion
from his wikipedia entry:

Fukuyama is sometimes criticised as being a bio-luddite because of his critiques of the political ramifications of transhumanism, though to others Fukuyama is considered a bioconservative because of his cautious support for GMO technologies.

Politically, Fukuyama is considered neoconservative. He was active in the Project for the New American Century thinktank starting in 1997, and signed the organization's letter recommending Bill Clinton overthrow the then President of Iraq, Saddam Hussein <1>; however, he did not approve of the 2003 invasion of Iraq as it was executed, and called for Donald Rumsfeld's resignation as Secretary of Defense <2>. As of 2004, he serves in the Bush administration as a member of the President's Council on Bioethics.


An odd duck. In the battle of which one could use the other best, it seems as though the Cheney crew got the better of Fukuyama, adding his intellectual heft (ersatz though it may be) to their strange and ultimately tragic plans for, er, something.
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swag Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Aug-30-05 10:52 PM
Response to Reply #2
4. But he may be another Tom Friedman "I would have done Iraq better"
disgruntled cheerleader.

I'll be doing some more reading on the guy, starting in the memory hole of the DU archives where I'm sure he has been chloroformed, pinned to the styrofoam, and deftly dissected.
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fujiyama Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Aug-31-05 12:07 AM
Response to Reply #4
17. Very possibly
Edited on Wed Aug-31-05 12:08 AM by fujiyama
The calling for Rumsfeld's resignation was not unique to Fukuyama among neoconservatives. Mr. Neocon himself, William Krystol also called for Rumsfeld's resignation and has been critical of HOW the war was conducted.

Of course, we have severeal in our own party that don't dispute the premise itself that Iraq should have been invaded. They simply repeat the tired old "Bush did it wrong" line, a line in my opinion, which is meaningless, because it still assumes that Iraq deserved to be invaded in the first place.
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swag Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Aug-31-05 12:40 AM
Response to Reply #17
21. True. The reticence of the leading Democrats to call bullshit on this
horrible and needless mistake of a war is cowardly, stupid, and atrocious. I raised funds for John Kerry, campaigned vigorously for him, voted for him, but why he calls for some strange "victory" in Iraq in his own latest fundraising missive is beyond my ken. "Friends of Kerry," have been told to quit calling my house.

Feingold is taking an important leadership step for our moment (I know that other great Democrats were there before him), and other Democrats need to put their campaign faces and egos aside and admit that his is a step in the only right direction: a swift and stern timetable for withdrawal.
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FreedomAngel82 Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Aug-30-05 10:54 PM
Response to Reply #2
6. Very interesting
So why the change??? :shrug:
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swag Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Aug-30-05 11:02 PM
Response to Reply #6
7. One explanation may be here:
(apologies to old hands at tracking all the PNAC players - some of us have either poor memories or day jobs. Some (me) have both).

http://www.opendemocracy.net/debates/article-3-117-2190.jsp


But the latest salvo against the war and its neocon architects has stung its targets like none other has done. That’s because the critique Francis Fukuyama has advanced is an inside job: not only is its author among the most celebrated members of the neo–conservative intelligentsia, but his dissection of the conceptual problems at the core of the Iraq undertaking appeared on the neocons’ home ground. “The Neoconservative Moment,” his twelve–page intervention into the Iraq debate, was published in the Summer 2004 issue of The National Interest, a flagship conservative foreign–policy journal.

This, in short, is different. Fukuyama is – to use a phrase patented by Margaret Thatcher – one of us. He’s part of the club. Indeed, he’s played as prominent a role as any of his co–thinkers in fostering the life of the neo-conservative mind since helping define the post–cold war moment fifteen years ago with his famous “end of history” thesis.

That’s why the neocon world is abuzz about Fukuyama’s jab, and about his decision not to support Bush for re–election. “I just think that if you’re responsible for this kind of a big policy failure,” he tells openDemocracy, “you ought to be held accountable for it.”



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blm Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Aug-31-05 09:44 AM
Response to Reply #2
40. At that time, Iraq was thought to HAVE nuclear capability, and even Scott
Ritter testified to congress at the time that they did.

They just DIDN'T KNOW after the weapons inspections ceased. Quite likely, Clinton's major bombing raid DID take out their WMDs at the time, but, without inspections, there was no way to know.

It was weapons inspections in early 2003 that were PROVING that war was unnecessary, that's why Bush hindered them as much as possible and then cut them off before they could finish.
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Me. Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Aug-30-05 10:50 PM
Response to Original message
3. Effing Bastard !
Edited on Tue Aug-30-05 11:07 PM by Me.
He and all his chickenhawk buddies which include the Kristols, Wolfowitz, Gingrich, Perle, Cheney, Franklin, Feith, Hannah, Rice, Ledeen, Libby, Bolton, Scalia and Rumsfeld, to name a few. They should all be put on trial and sent to prison for the rest of their lives, to sit in isolation where they can theorize all they want in the center of a cold dark cell.
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swag Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Aug-31-05 02:02 AM
Response to Reply #3
22. True. The awful junction of bad theory and worse practice.
Ivory tower whores, farting dainty dreams through one another's silk handkerchiefs.

1880 US troops killed so far on lies. Tens of thousands of others dead for PNAC delusions: garbage. Lives destroyed, history looted, cultures decimated, our treasury and our own decency looted.

For the daydreams of these crap artists.
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hatrack Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Aug-30-05 10:53 PM
Response to Original message
5. Day late, dollar short, fuck you Mr. End of History
End of Story.
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swag Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Aug-30-05 11:07 PM
Response to Reply #5
9. Indeed.
Well said.

And he has been trying to rebuild cred by writing his 2004 screeds, now this, then by appearing at Steve Clemons' upcoming conference on strategies against "terrorism."
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tonie61 Donating Member (2 posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Aug-31-05 08:28 AM
Response to Reply #5
31. Decoding W's lies.
“Mission Accomplished” “Operation Iraqi Freedom” is W “has destabilized the Middle East”.

Current GOP insiders, his Pop’s cronies, impartial experts—all see this for what is, was, and always will be, a failure from the start, with one objective, gaining GOP advantage.

And the CounterPunch March 14, 2003 article “GOP Memo: New Product Ready to Launch--The Roll Out for the War on Saddam” states "From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August."

White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card in 2003, explaining why "Project Stampede America Into Iraq War II" was introduced in September.

MEMO FROM: KARL ROVE
TO: ALL CONCERNED (EYES ONLY, BURN BAG)
RE: NEW PRODUCT LAUNCH
First of all, GREAT JOB, PEOPLE! Our dynamic Iraq War Product is just about ready to go! Think of what we've achieved in less than a year! We've managed to:
*Demonize Democrats as "objectively pro-Saddam, terrorist-loving traitors" when they've dared oppose us!
*Take America's Mind Off the Crappy Economy!
*Find A Great Reason To Stop Mentioning Bin Laden!
*Rally Our Wingnut Base!
*Keep Our Defense Contractor Campaign Contributors In Ecstasy!
*Trash NATO, AND the UN!”

For W, and his brain, Rove it is just another chapter in his “Mission Accomplished” “Arabian Nights” fantasy/nightmare. The only people who have previously believed his lies, “thickly painted over with unending coats of misinformation” have to believe that two sets of Iraqis, the Shia and the Kurds, who have been persecuted by Sunni Baathists, will not attempt to re-pay every atrocity committed against them. Why wouldn’t they with revenge against the Sunnis? And they are getting their revenge in the draft they agreed upon, without Sunni participation by the way. What the draft of the constitution does is put the Sunnis into a spiral of death and destruction, with no resources or source of income. The former ruling party members will have no alternative other than to attack innocent Iraqis and our dear US boys and girls, soldiers in a war they can’t win.


“We should start figuring out how we get out of there,” Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska said on ABC’s “This Week.” “I think our involvement there has destabilized the Middle East. And the longer we stay there, I think the further destabilization will occur.”

Is it improving for the Middle East, Iraqis or our soldiers?

Hagel said that it was the presence of U.S. troops in Iraq that was causing the destabilization, and that the administration needed to start articulating its long-range plans for withdrawal immediately or risk having Iraq become as politically costly as the Vietnam War.
“We are locked into a bogged-down problem not unsimilar or dissimilar to where we were in Vietnam. The longer we stay, the more problems we are going to have,” Hagel said. He was particularly harsh in his criticism of Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, the Army chief of staff, for saying in an Associated Press interview a day earlier that the Pentagon was making contingency plans for having more than 100,000 U.S. troops in Iraq through 2009.
Such plans, even if they are a worst-case and unlikely scenario, are “complete folly,” Hagel said. “There’s no way America is going to have 100,000 troops in Iraq, nor should it, in four years.”

Recent Iraq history predicted that the Shia and Kurds would exact revenge against the Sunnis!

The Iraq no-fly zone started just fourteen years ago. Saddam’s Sunni Baath Party members were massacring the other Iraqis. A representative article “No-Fly Zones - Iraq - Global Policy Forum - UN Security Council” states “In April 1991, Security Council Resolution 688, the US, UK and France began to patrol the skies over northern Iraq, excluding Iraqi aircraft from this zone. The same powers started to enforce a second “no fly” zone in southern Iraq a few months later.
Announced as a means to protect Iraqi Kurds (in the north) and Iraq’s Shi’a population (in the south).”


Even leaders of his Pop’s war against Hussein, W’s cronies, each one of them, earlier knew this had to become a disaster!

Norman Schwarzkopf, Bush 41’s general who commanded U.S. forces in the 1991 Gulf War, is still involved with the Bushes, and the PNAC crew. A January 28th, 2003 article “Desert Caution” states “he (Schwarzkopf) hasn't seen enough evidence to convince him that his old comrades Dick Cheney, Colin Powell and Paul Wolfowitz are correct in moving toward a new war now.”
He also stated, regarding the task the U.S. military might face after a victory "What is postwar Iraq going to look like, with the Kurds and the Sunnis and the Shiites? That's a huge question, to my mind. It really should be part of the overall campaign plan."


Was this predictable? Of course said Rami Khouri, a U.S.-educated Arab analyst and editor of Lebanon’s Daily Star newspaper wrote “The theme in this region is the reality of a foreign military power that comes in with great determination and overwhelming force, defeats people, subjugates a nation and then gets completely lost in the local maelstrom of interests and the irresistible force of indigenous identity—religious, ethnic, sectarian, national. People act in a maniacal way when they assert these identities, which includes nurturing and protecting them.
Every single foreign power that has been in this region since Alexander the Great—through the Romans, Greeks, Ottomans, British, French and now Americans has learned the same lesson,” Khouri said.


Watch out for “reverse domino theory.”

Lewis M. Simons, an ex-Marine who covered the Vietnam war for the Associated Press and the Post, says that he had an ‘eerily reminiscent experience’ when he visited Iraq recently to write a piece for National Geographic.

In an attempt to understand the concept of winning the war in Iraq, Mr.
Simons asks “What would ‘winning’ in Iraq mean, anyway? A democratic society that’s free to elect an anti-American, pro-Iranian, fundamentalist Islamic government? A land of gushing oil wells feeding international oil company profits at US taxpayers’ expense? Shias, Kurds and Sunnis joining hands to end terrorism around the world?”

Like Vietnam, says Mr. Simons, the Americans do not understand Iraq. “The truth — that Iraq was not a terrorist haven before we invaded, but we’re making it into one today — has been thickly painted over with unending coats of misinformation.”

He warns that what American failed to understand in Vietnam – ‘that people who want foreign occupiers out of their country are willing and prepared to withstand any kind of privation and risk for however long it takes – are failing, once again, to grasp in Iraq’.

Arguing that there’s no ‘good way’ to quit Iraq, he says that if
America stays, the ‘insurgency’ continues. If it leaves, the insurgency will most likely expand into an all-out civil war, the fragmenting of Iraq and the intervention of Iran, Turkey and Syria, followed by the collapse of promised democracy in the Middle East: a kind of reverse domino theory.”

The article “Iraqis Finish Draft Charter That Sunnis Vow to Defeat” states “Sunni Arabs, whose community is the seat of the insurgency, are opposed to the constitution and have vowed to undermine it in a referendum by October.”

Doesn’t that sound great? No, but this does “The draft lays down the political system of Iraq as “republican, parliamentary, democratic and federal”, and refers to Islam as “a main source of legislation”.
The word “party” was omitted from Article 7, referring only to banning “Saddam’s Baath” instead of “Saddam’s Sunnis Baath Party” in an earlier draft.” This is an open fatwa against the Sunnis by those who they ruled earlier. Now, instead of having all of Saddam’s military might behind them, they have to resort to IEDs and acts of terrorism.

W wants it look like the US is achieving “Operation Iraqi Freedom” and you might until you realize it is only lies.

The reality is that this draft will not work!

“Ali Dabbagh, a Shiite member of the constitutional committee, expressed concern that violence could result if Sunni attempts to block the document failed. “We are ready for the referendum and we will win,” he said. If the Sunnis “feel they are outside of Iraq and want to cause problems, that is up to them.”
Peter Galbraith, a former U.S. diplomat and an adviser to the Kurds, said that if the referendum failed, the Kurds might push for full independence from Iraq.
“If this constitution is rejected, the next negotiations are going to be about the partition of the country,” he said.”

When it mattered, during the reign of the CPA, a former CPA official stated that this atrocity was a failure. Why didn’t we act on it earlier? W wanted progress, even if it was phony, in his schemes which has a sole motive—that of obtaining advantage for the GOP!

“We are on the edge of a generalized civil war in Iraq'', said Larry Diamond, a senior adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), who also said that occupation authorities must follow through on any crackdown against Sadr's forces by disarming and dismantling all of Iraq's militias if the transition process and future elections are to have any hope of success.

Diamond, a democracy specialist at the Hoover Institution in California, also called on the administration to sharply increase the number of U.S. troops in Iraq in order to disarm and dismantle the militias, and accused Iran of financing and arming Sadr and other Shiite militias, which he says are building up arms in advance of elections or possible civil war.

“Iran is embarked on a concerned, clever and lavishly resourced campaign to defeat any effort to create a genuine pluralist democracy in Iraq, and we've been sitting back”, he said in what has become a growing refrain among neo-conservatives and administration officials who blame Tehran for the coalition's growing problems among the Shiites.
“I think we should tell the Iranian regime that if they don't cease and desist, we will play the same game -- we will destabilize them.”


This is a complete failure geared to promoting civil war in Iraq. The end result is the same.--Iraqis being protected from murdering one another—so what is the difference between partitions of the country and no-fly zones?

Why then did all the death occur to create another “an anti-American, pro-Iranian, fundamentalist Islamic government” which as the New York Times reported on Wednesday “Secular Iraqi leaders complained that the country’s nearly finished constitution lays the groundwork for the possible domination of the country by Shiite Islamic clerics, and that it contains specific provisions that could sharply curtail the rights of women.”

Regarding this farce of a draft, W can only lie stating it “contains far-reaching protections for fundamental human freedoms including religion, assembly, conscience and expression”.

Those are all lies. If you are not a fundamentalist Islamic male in Iraq you are not going to be treated equally. The Shia and Kurds will have all of the oil and money and will have good militias to retaliate against the Sunni insurgents, who without any natural resources, will only have one recourse, that of becoming a teaching area for jihadists. That is how you want to build “Operation Iraqi Freedom”?

And W asserted, as democracy unfolds in Iraq "not only will it help make America more secure, but it will affect the broader Middle East. Democracies don't war with their neighbors; democracies don't become safe haven for terrorists who want to destroy innocent life."
"We have hard work ahead of us, but … we're making good progress toward making sure this world of ours is more peaceful for generations to come," he said.

He is destabilizing the region, and his advisors warned him of this before W started this war. Everyone knows that it was premeditatedly timed for one purpose by Rove, to get the GOP votes in 2002 mid-term election.

Winston smith
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Binka Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Aug-31-05 09:16 AM
Response to Reply #5
38. I Know Frank FuckAroundyama
He groped me at a seminar at UC Berkeley in the mid 1990's. Nasty old man. PS Frank if you are reading this your breath really STANK.
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Roland99 Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Aug-30-05 11:06 PM
Response to Original message
8. Nice try distancing himself from this administration.
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derby378 Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Aug-30-05 11:10 PM
Response to Original message
10. "Welcome to 'No Sympathy' Night." - Bill Hicks
Sorry, Mr. Fukuyama - your opportunity to speak was back in February 2003. Now it's Cindy Sheehan's turn. Boy, did you miss out.
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swag Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Aug-30-05 11:13 PM
Response to Reply #10
11. Maybe he can still earn some bucks debating drink-soaked former Trotskyist
Edited on Tue Aug-30-05 11:14 PM by swag
popinjays.

They'll make a killing in frayed velvet auditoriums on the Chamber of Commerce circuit.

More and more he does seem pathetically Friedmanesque in his conversion.
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hatrack Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Aug-30-05 11:14 PM
Response to Reply #11
12. "Your hands are shaking. You badly need another drink"
Edited on Tue Aug-30-05 11:15 PM by hatrack
God, LOVED Galloway's repartee with Snitchens at the Senate hearings!
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swag Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Aug-30-05 11:25 PM
Response to Reply #12
13. Hitchens spins academic-sounding verbiage around a tissue of narcissism.
Clearly Galloway was on to his entire game, as Wonkette was on to a portion of the Hitchens game last week: the sound and fury of his articulateness signifying, upon any close investigation, nothing.

To see the gloriously inverted debate between two ersatz intellectuals on the order of Fukuyama and Hitchens would be worth a plug nickel I'm sure. I'd rather see them in an Ultimate Fighting Cagematch, of course, with free pelting from a jeering crowd.
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nashville_brook Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Aug-31-05 09:10 AM
Response to Reply #10
37. it's amazing how relevant Mr. Hicks is lately
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Raster Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Aug-30-05 11:59 PM
Response to Original message
14. Give me a f***ing break!
"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.
_________________

Even though he whines about the Iraq war he still trys to drag the old canard that Iraq was related to 9/11. Iraq, in any shape, form or fashion was NEVER--repeat loudly NEVER--related to 9/11, marginally or otherwise.

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swag Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Aug-31-05 12:05 AM
Response to Reply #14
16. Excellent point. Why is he still dissembling on well-known horseshit?
Not even marginally related. You are absolutely correct. Richard Clarke was clear enough on this. Everyone who saw the insane rush to war in mid-late 2002 was clear on this.
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tk2kewl Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Aug-31-05 09:06 AM
Response to Reply #14
36. All the PNACers belong on trial for lies and treason
:grr:
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Peace Patriot Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Aug-31-05 12:20 PM
Response to Reply #14
42. Good catch, raster! We've got to watch these "think tank" bunnies like..
...hawks.
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kodi Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Aug-31-05 12:01 AM
Response to Original message
15. my brother's in iraq in 2 weeks. maybe fukuyama wants to switch places
these sons of bitches never ever pay for their own mistakes, its innocent young men and women who do.

fukuyama was the clown who was spounting on about the end of history a decade ago. the only ends i see are thousands of lives due to people like him.
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swag Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Aug-31-05 12:07 AM
Response to Reply #15
18. Best to you, your brother, and your family.
I hope the abuse of the military ends, for the sake of all citizens, but especially for those in uniform.
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Raster Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Aug-31-05 12:17 AM
Response to Reply #15
19. best to you and your family, especially your brother.
Our hearts and prayers are with you.
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Me. Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Aug-31-05 12:35 AM
Response to Reply #15
20. May He & The Others Stay Safe
and return home soon.
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Tinoire Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Aug-31-05 02:07 AM
Response to Original message
23. Burn in hell. n/t
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HKTech Donating Member (31 posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Aug-31-05 02:17 AM
Response to Original message
24. I don't see how these guys could have supported * because
The motherf*cker didn't have a single success before the Iraq war.

* did everything wrong. Every prediction between the start of his presidency and the Iraq invasion were wrong. The only thing they could do well was win elections. And somehow idiots who think they're smart supported this invasion.

Didn't capture OBL, didn't do anything to stop 9/11, didn't keep a balanced budget, didn't promote job growth.
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swag Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Aug-31-05 08:06 AM
Response to Reply #24
26. Oh, but Bush would give power to those who would make true
the sweet dream of "Western Style Democracy" in the Middle East, and all the Islamic states would fall over just like a row of dominos. The PNAC dream. The "gee whiz" boy Tom Friedman's dream. Bush was the one, the facilitator of their grand and brilliant scheme.
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MadeinOhio Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Aug-31-05 06:47 AM
Response to Original message
25. I want to see him in prison. n/t
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swag Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Aug-31-05 08:15 AM
Response to Reply #25
27. I'd love to see some of that crew in prison, but the more I read about
Fukuyama, the more it seems that a mental institution would be more appropriate. His delusions seem particularly acute.
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MadeinOhio Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Aug-31-05 08:24 AM
Response to Reply #27
28. Same for all the neocons, they are all nuts....
Except for Cheney who's just Darth Sidious..
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Tin Man Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Aug-31-05 08:24 AM
Response to Original message
29. Holy Shit !!... PNACers retreating from Iraq advocacy ????
Fukuyama signed the following infamous PNAC letter advocating regime change in Iraq

http://www.newamericancentury.org/iraqclintonletter.htm

When the PNACers begin breaking ranks and retreating - you know the situation in Iraq has become untenable. Thanks for all you're visionary thinking, asshole...

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Mayberry Machiavelli Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Aug-31-05 08:27 AM
Response to Original message
30. Who actually READ 'The End of History'? Did it actually propose
that capitalist America had completely WON the ideological war and that history was in effect over, and that there would be some eternal future with American hegemony and all other countries signing on to our system of economics and mode of government, and all this would be stable and self perpetuating forever? Is that what that title suggests?

If so, is dude coming out with any other books, like "What Was I Thinking?" :shrug:
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charlie Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Aug-31-05 08:38 AM
Response to Reply #30
34. No, not exactly
He didn't predict a perpetual American hegemony. He claimed that the eras of great ideological struggle were over. Western liberal free marketism had won, so pervasively that its philosophical underpinnings would never again be challenged, its rightness was as obvious as sunlight to the world.

Naturally, conservatives and neocons lapped it up like free beer.
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Taxloss Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Aug-31-05 08:38 AM
Response to Reply #30
35. I read it. It described not the triumph of liberal democratic capitalism,
as embodied, according to Fukuyama, by America. But his premise WAS deeply flawed and roundly mocked by historians (although the book is worth a read, all the same). He has since distanced himself from it; I've long considered that he clung to PNAC like a comfort blanket after history showed it was alive and well and not running according to his preferences.
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Peace Patriot Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Aug-31-05 01:31 PM
Response to Reply #35
43. Yup, that was before Hugo Chavez came to power in elections that were
monitored by hundreds of international election monitoring groups, including the Carter Center, all of whom declared his landslide victories to be honest and aboveboard. He had proposed the outrageous notion that some of the country's resources ought to benefit the vast poor Venezuelan majority. What an idea! ("Dictator! Dictator! He's a dictator!" I heard Alan Colmes squawking on Faux News the other day.)

It's not history that is seeing its "end times"--it's predatory capitalism, which NEEDED the terrifying example of worker communes stretching across a third of the globe, in order to keep it in some kind of balance with the desires of the sovereign peoples of the western democracies, and with the limits of their natural and human resources. Without that menacing precedent of the poor seizing the means of production and spreading the wealth around, capitalism has gone right off the deep end--just as they did in the 1910-1929 period, when the super-rich used to hold "Beggars' Balls" at the Waldorf Astoria, where they all came dressed up like tramps and homeless, and feasted the night away under the glittering chandeliers.

The rich are nuts. That's a fact. And THEIR history is over. Now begins the history of the integration of these ideas--freedom, healthy business and trade, and fairness. And with this will come world consensus on the peaceful resolution of disputes and on saving our poor, battered planet.

The Fukuyama think-tankers were never anything more than window dressing for the war profiteers, in my view. There have always been plenty of intellectual whores around who will clothe the rich, the greedy and the bloodthirsty in ideas--when P.R. is needed for looting and killing others.

But I think that the world has learned quite a bit about the powermongers (in all economic systems) and is pushing forward, here and there, in fits and starts--but with tremendous underground momentum--toward more creative, peaceful, and compassionate forms of politics, government and economics. We are the last to learn, we whose forebears inspired the world with democratic ideals. (Read Ho Chi Minh's letters to our government--you'll be surprised at what they contain!)

The end of the bad history--of exploitation and war. The beginning of a better history--when the world cried out for peace and justice, and the peoples of the world began to ask, truly for the first time, in one thunderous voice, "Why not?"

The Fukuyama's will be left in the dust. Hot air. Old story.



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MADem Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Aug-31-05 09:38 AM
Response to Reply #30
39. Here we have it, good for a laugh
http://www.wesjones.com/eoh.htm

Go on and jump that shark, Frankie!
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Orrin_73 Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Aug-31-05 08:30 AM
Response to Original message
32. He will be speaking in my school
next week.
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SmokingJacket Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Aug-31-05 08:30 AM
Response to Original message
33. Why are they publishing anything by that fool?
Proved himself to have no clue. Maybe he should shut his piehole.
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moodforaday Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Aug-31-05 12:02 PM
Response to Original message
41. That F*ck Fukuyama is to be regretted
"End of history", my ass. Ate crow, but thinks no less of himself. I don't know how abyone can listen to this jerk seriously.
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