KEY POINTS:
Two more unintended consequences of the Iraq war: the journalist Nick Cohen writes a provocative book indicting former friends on the British left who opposed it. In a mirror image, Francis Fukuyama's provocative book indicts former friends on the right who supported it. As Tony Blair observed in 2001, the kaleidoscope has been shaken.
Fukuyama achieved intellectual stardom as the author of The End of History, taken by many to mean that, with the death of communism, the triumph of liberal democracy was not only desirable but inevitable. Such an interpretation seems likely to have encouraged the neoconservatives to go charging into Iraq on the assumption that, when the smoke cleared, democracy would fill the gap. But in this volume of self-justification, Fukuyama insists that he has nothing to apologise for because his theory was misunderstood.
He pleads that The End of History was actually asserting a universal desire for modernisation, technology, healthcare, high living standards of which liberal democracy is a likely byproduct.
But plenty of cultural, economic and other contingent factors can get in the way. No idea, however powerful and seductive, is enough on its own.
The neocons imploded, he argues, not because they were neocons but because they forgot one of their own principles: to distrust ambitious social engineering projects, such as trying to act as midwife to Iraqi democracy. On how to get there he is somewhat vague. Fukuyama is readable, but some of his arguments smack of translating common sense into academese.
Nor does the book, based on a series of lectures he gave at Yale University in 2005, quite come together as a rounded polemic.
Reviewers of the hardback edition used words such as "devastating" and "brutal", but the tone is not as exciting as anger.
It is Fukuyama's defection from the neocons itself that is most damning.
* Published by Profile Books
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