Fukuyama "Recants"

Or maybe he was misinterpreted. Either way, I love the opening parenthetical.

Fukuyama Spurns Bush, Says War in Iraq `Didn't Make Much Sense'

(The opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those of Bloomberg.)

By Matthew Lynn

March 16 (Bloomberg) -- The sound of people scuttling away from the war in Iraq has become deafening. Those who admit to supporting the invasion are getting as scarce on the ground as those who own up to voting for Richard Nixon.

Francis Fukuyama, the Johns Hopkins professor who wrote ``The End of History and the Last Man,'' joins the stampede in ``America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy'' (Yale, 226 pages, $25).

The book marks a startling denunciation, from a leading conservative theorist, of the neoconservative thinking that underpinned the Bush administration's decision to go to war. The title on the U.K. edition, ``After the Neocons'' (Profile, 12.99 pounds), tells the story. Fukuyama is jettisoning neoconservatism and saying, in essence: ``Don't blame me for the fiasco in Iraq. People misinterpreted my work.''

Misinterpreted, huh?

Well, after reading the rest of the article (a nice and snarky one, which kind of explains conservative Bloomberg's "Opinions expressed ..." disclaimer,) click on over to, curiously enough, Marxists.org for a few words in introduction to Fukuyama's original 2002 book which was a grown out of a 1989 essay in The National Interest periodical.

Other links where he discusses Neoconservativism here in 2004 and on Islam from last year.

By the way, if there was ever a more ridiculous proposition than "the end of history", I've yet to hear it. History won't end until our species is incapable of recording our own activities. Period. END of story.