Fukuyama's fabrication

By Aussiegirl

I never understood how Fukuyama could have made that breathtakingly ridiculous statement that history was at an end. At the time he made it ,I said that he was completely overlooking the problem of radical Islam. How could Fukuyama have thought he could get away with misrepresenting Krauthammer's speech this way? Obviously these deluded folks think everyone lives in their own version of reality.

Townhall.com :: Columns :: Fukuyama's fabrication by Charles Krauthammer - Mar 28, 2006

WASHINGTON -- It was, as the hero tells it, his Road to Damascus moment. There he is, in a hall of 1,500 people he has long considered to be his allies, hearing the speaker treat the Iraq War, nearing the end of its first year, as "a virtually unqualified success." He gasps as the audience enthusiastically applauds. Aghast to discover himself in a sea of comrades so deluded by ideology as to have lost touch with reality, he decides he can no longer be one of them.

And thus did Francis Fukuyama become the world's most celebrated ex-neoconservative, a well-timed metamorphosis that has brought him a piece of the fame that he once enjoyed 15 years ago as the man who declared, a mite prematurely, that history had ended.

A very nice story. It appears in the preface to Fukuyama's post-neocon coming out, "America at the Crossroads.'' Last Sunday it was repeated on the front page of The New York Times Book Review in Paul Berman's review.

I happen to know something about this story, as I was the speaker whose 2004 Irving Kristol lecture to the American Enterprise Institute Fukuyama has now brought to prominence. I can therefore testify that Fukuyama's claim that I attributed "virtually unqualified success'' to the war is a fabrication.

[...] Fukuyama now says that he had secretly opposed the Iraq War before it was launched. An unusual and convenient reticence, notes Irwin Stelzer, editor of "The Neocon Reader,'' for such an inveterate pamphleteer, letter writer and essayist. After public opinion had turned against the war, Fukuyama then courageously came out against it. He has every right to change his mind at his convenience. He has no right to change what I said.