Bookraft

What makes this review of Francis Fukuyama's At the Crossroads most interesting is as much what happened around it as well as the book review itself. First, the NYTimes published a link to Fukuyama's detailed commentary - a direct 6 page excerpt from the book. True this had been previously published by the NYTimes, but unlike most material in the NYTimes that is more than 3 weeks old, there was no charge to read this "dated" story. Talk about free promotion of ideas and viewpoints. Second, the review by Paul Berman got front webpage treatment, with a direct link for at least two days (I confess I failed to keep track, but Web access has been problematical)to the review. Finally, the NYTimes got more than mabe they bargained for in Paul Berman's review.

At the Crossroads traces the unseemly demise of the Neoconservative intellectual movement that supported the Iraq War and the US endeavours to establish democracies in the Mideast and other world areas as buffers against rogue and terroist states. In the process of doing so it has created a terrorist haven and magnet point in Iraq while allowing Afghanistan to become a virtual narco-state where Afghan warlords distribute 90% of Europe's opium and the ensuing profits among themselves and a cast of unseemly characters including al Qaeda, Taliban, other terrorist groups in neighboring countries and even a whisk off the top to the Pakistani Intelligence Service. Talk about out of the fire into the frying pan at the cost of 2300 US lifes, at least 15 times that number in Iraq and Afghanistan - and ten times that number again in US and Iraq/Afghanistan injured and wounded.

So it shuld not be a surprise that Berman finds the analysis by Francis Fukuyama a bit disnenguous, because Fukyama's own preceding book, End of History, provided the notions and succor for a substantial amount of neoconservative doctrine. As Berman puts it : "The neoconservatives, he suggests, are people who, having witnessed the collapse of Communism long ago, ought to look back on those gigantic events as a one-in-a-zillion lucky break, like winning the lottery. Instead, the neoconservatives, victims of their own success, came to believe that Communism's implosion reflected the deepest laws of history, which were operating in their own and America's favor — a formula for hubris. This is a shrewd observation, and might seem peculiar only because Fukuyama's own 'End of History' articulated the world's most eloquent argument for detecting within the collapse of Communism the deepest laws of history. He insists in his new book that 'The End of History' ought never to have led anyone to adopt such a view, but this makes me think only that Fukuyama is an utterly unreliable interpreter of his own writings."

However, on balance, Berman finds Fukuyama "pretty scathing" but raises a more gripping question:
"In my view, we are seeing the continuing strength of 20th-century-style ideologies right now — the ideologies that have motivated Baathists and the more radical Islamists to slaughter millions of their fellow Muslims in the last 25 years, together with a few thousand people who were not Muslims. Fukuyama is always worth reading, and his new book contains ideas that I hope the non-neoconservatives of America will adopt. But neither his old arguments nor his new ones offer much insight into this, the most important problem of all — the problem of murderous ideologies and how to combat them."
I quite agree with Berman. Since the Holocaust, the World has seen two more mini-Holocausts in Cambodia and Rwanda plus campaigns of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, Kosovo, and now Darfur with Israel/Palestine, Indonesia and the Phillipines at the tinder box stages. And most of these are not wars of land, famine and-or resource disputes; but rather of religion and ideology.

(c)JBSurveyer 2006