Flailing Fukuyama

One can only hope that the truth brigade of the liberal blogosphere that so effectively curtailed the career of Ben Domenech will maintain their high standards of integrity in the pursuit of accuracy, and be among the first to call for the head of famous ex-neocon Francis Fukuyama.

Fukuyama's life-altering revelation that caused him to turn away from neoconservatism was supposedly triggered by a speech calling the Iraq war "a virtually unqualified success." It turns out Fukuyama's story was instead the unqualified fabrication, according to the man who gave the speech, Charles Krauthammer, who calls Fukuyama out:

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.

A convenient fabrication -- it gives him a foil and the story drama -- but a foolish one because it can be checked. The speech was given at the Washington Hilton before a full house, carried live on C-SPAN and then published by the American Enterprise Institute under its title "Democratic Realism: An American Foreign Policy for a Unipolar World." (It can be read at http://www.aei.org/publications/pubID.19912,filter.all/pub_detail.asp.) As indicated by the title, the speech was not about Iraq. It was a fairly theoretical critique of the four schools of American foreign policy: isolationism, liberal internationalism, realism and neoconservatism. The only successes I attributed to the Iraq war were two, and both self-evident: (1) that it had deposed Saddam Hussein and (2) that this had made other dictators think twice about the price of acquiring nuclear weapons, as evidenced by the fact that Moammar Gaddafi had turned over his secret nuclear program for dismantling just months after Hussein's fall (in fact, on the very week of Hussein's capture).

It's all right there in black and white pixels, with an easily followed link to a copy of the speech above. Fukuyama misrepresented the content of Krauthammer's speech as being something else, which certainly as vile as misrepresenting the content of the speech as his own.

I'm sure the intrepid truth squad of the far left - at Firedoglake, Media Matters, the Daily Kos, and others - will press Fukuyama for a full accounting for his transgressions with the same righteous fury they unleashed last week in their relentless pursuit of truth.

Seriously.

Any minute now.