[pnews-news] Why shouldn't I change my mind? - Los Angeles Times

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Why shouldn't I change my mind?

   A famed neoconservative switches sides on the Iraq war -- and all hell
   breaks loose.

   By Francis Fukuyama, Francis Fukuyama is a professor at the Johns
   Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and the author of
   "America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power and the Neoconservative
   Legacy."

   April 9, 2006

   SEVEN WEEKS AGO, I published my case against the Iraq war. I wrote
   that although I had originally advocated military intervention in
   Iraq, and had even signed a letter to that effect shortly after the
   9/11 attacks, I had since changed my mind.

   But apparently this kind of honest acknowledgment is verboten. In the
   weeks since my book came out, I've been challenged, attacked and
   vilified from both ends of the ideological spectrum. From the right,
   columnist Charles Krauthammer has accused me of being an opportunistic
   traitor to the neoconservative cause -- and a coward to boot. From the
   left, I've been told that I have "blood on my hands" for having
   initially favored toppling Saddam Hussein and that my "apology" won't
   be accepted.

   In our ever-more-polarized political debate, it appears that it is now
   wrong to ever change your mind, even if empirical evidence from the
   real world suggests you ought to. I find this a strange and disturbing
   conclusion.

   For the record, I did change my mind, but in the year preceding the
   war -- not after the invasion. In 2002, I told the London Times that
   "the use of military power to push [Iraqi democracy] forward is a big
   roll of the dice. We may not win on this one." On the first
   anniversary of 9/11, I argued in the Washington Post that we should
   invade Iraq only with approval from the U.N. Security Council, and in
   December of that year, I wrote a piece for the Wall Street Journal
   warning that the project of democratizing Iraq and the Mideast might
   come to look like empire and that it violated the conservative
   principle of prudence.

   But when my political shift occurred is not important: Even if it had
   come a year or two later, it would still not have represented a
   cowardly retreat or an apologia, but a realistic, intellectually
   honest willingness to face the new facts of the situation.

   In my view, no one should be required to apologize for having
   supported intervention in Iraq before the war. There were important
   competing moral goods on both sides of the argument, something that
   many on the left still refuse to recognize. The U.N. in 1999 declared
   that all nations have a positive "duty to protect, promote and
   implement" human rights, arguing in effect that the world's powerful
   countries are complicit in human rights abuses if they don't use their
   power to correct injustices. The debate over the war shouldn't have
   been whether it was morally right to topple Hussein (which it clearly
   was), but whether it was prudent to do so given the possible costs and
   potential consequences of intervention and whether it was legitimate
   for the U.S. to invade in the unilateral way that it did.

   It was perfectly honorable to agonize over the wisdom of the war, and
   in many ways admirable that people on the left, such as Christopher
   Hitchens, George Packer, Michael Ignatieff and Jacob Weisberg,
   supported intervention. That position was much easier to defend in
   early 2003, however, before we found absolutely no stocks of chemical
   or biological weapons and no evidence of an ongoing nuclear weapons
   program. (I know that many on the left believe that the prewar
   estimates about Hussein's weapons of mass destruction were all a
   deliberate fraud by the Bush administration, but if so, it was one in
   which the U.N. weapons inspectors and French intelligence were also
   complicit.) It was also easier to support the war before we knew the
   full dimensions of the vicious insurgency that would emerge and the
   ease with which the insurgents could disrupt the building of a
   democratic state.

   But in the years since then, it is the right that has failed to come
   to terms with these uncomfortable facts. The failure to find WMD and
   to make a quick transition to a stable democracy -- as well as the
   prisoner abuse and the inevitable bad press that emerges from any
   prolonged occupation -- have done enormous damage to America's
   credibility and standing in the world. These intangible costs have to
   be added to the balance sheet together with the huge direct human and
   monetary costs of the war.

   Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice recently admitted that the United
   States made numerous tactical errors in Iraq, but she insisted that
   the basic strategic decision to go to war was still as valid as ever
   because we foreclosed once and for all the possibility that Iraq would
   break out of sanctions and restart its WMD programs.

   But we now know a lot that throws that fundamental strategic rationale
   into question.

   The Iraq Survey Group and the U.S. military have released hundreds of
   pages of documents on Iraq's prewar WMD programs showing that, at
   times, Hussein believed he possessed biological weapons that didn't
   exist and that, at other times, he led his most senior commanders to
   believe he had WMD capabilities that he knew were entirely fictitious.
   His government was so corrupt, incompetent and compartmentalized that
   it is far from certain that he would have succeeded in building a a
   nuclear program even if sanctions had been lifted. Nor is it clear
   that a breakdown of the sanctions regime was inevitable, given an
   energized United States and the very different political climate that
   existed after 9/11.

   The logic of my prewar shift on invading Iraq has now been doubly
   confirmed. I believe that the neoconservative movement, with which I
   was associated, has become indelibly associated with a failed policy,
   and that unilateralism and coercive regime change cannot be the basis
   for an effective American foreign policy. I changed my mind as part of
   a necessary adjustment to reality.

   What has infuriated many people is President Bush's unwillingness to
   admit that he made any mistakes whatsoever in the whole Iraq
   adventure. On the other hand, critics who assert that they knew with
   certainty before the war that it would be a disaster are, for the most
   part, speaking with a retrospective wisdom to which they are not
   entitled.

   Many people have noted the ever-increasing polarization of American
   politics, reflected in news channels and talk shows that cater to
   narrowly ideological audiences, and in a House of Representatives that
   has redistricted itself into homogeneous constituencies in which few
   members have to appeal to voters with diverse opinions. This
   polarization has been vastly amplified by Iraq: Much of the left now
   considers the war not a tragic policy mistake but a deliberate
   criminal conspiracy, and the right attacks the patriotism of those who
   question the war.

   This kind of polarization affects a range of other complex issues as
   well: You can't be a good Republican if you think there may be
   something to global warming, or a good Democrat if you support school
   choice or private Social Security accounts. Political debate has
   become a spectator sport in which people root for their team and cheer
   when it scores points, without asking whether they chose the right
   side. Instead of trying to defend sharply polarized positions taken
   more than three years ago, it would be far better if people could
   actually take aboard new information and think about how their earlier
   commitments, honestly undertaken, actually jibe with reality -- even
   if this does on occasion require changing your mind.


 Copyright 2006 Los Angeles Times


Accolades to Professor Fukuyami for a courageous statement and for setting
the record straight. Left and right labels have really lost their efficacy
in this battle of ideas. The truth is what is important, not whether or
not one follows a specific "line of march" and comes down on one side or
another because this isn't a team sport and there are real people and real
event involved and folks are dying because of a dishonest and not
too bright, pro-corporatist president.
       Hank



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