The Coalition of the Willing is Wilting

There is news that one of the original members of Project for a New American Century is now saying that plan (PNAC) is a mess. That's great news to me and others who hope that sanity isn't another of the precious traits this country is willing to hand off. If even one member of PNAC is backpedaling then there is hope that others will do the same.

Why is it that we have to get information like this first from the foreign press? The Scotsman.com reports, Neoconservatism has failed the United States and needs to be replaced by a more realistic foreign policy agenda, according to Francis Fukuyama, one of its prime architects. in 1997, Fukuyama was a a signatory to the statement of Principles of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC).

Francis Fukuyama, who wrote the best-selling book The End of History and was a member of PNAC, the neoconservative project, now says that, both as a political symbol and a body of thought, it has "evolved into something I can no longer support". He says it should be discarded on to history's pile of discredited ideologies.

In his new book "America at the Crossroads", Mr Fukuyama says that PNAC "is now in shambles" and that its failure has demonstrated "the danger of good intentions carried to extremes".

Mr Fukuyama once supported regime change in Iraq. However, Mr Fukuyama now thinks the war in Iraq is the wrong sort of war, in the wrong place, at the wrong time. "The most basic misjudgment was an overestimation of the threat facing the United States from radical Islamism," he argues.
"Although the new and ominous possibility of undeterrable terrorists armed with weapons of mass destruction did indeed present itself, advocates of the war wrongly conflated this with the threat presented by Iraq and with the rogue state/proliferation problem more generally."

"By definition, outsiders can't 'impose' democracy on a country that doesn't want it; demand for democracy and reform must be domestic. Democracy promotion is therefore a long-term and opportunistic process that has to await the gradual ripening of political and economic conditions to be effective."

The gradual ripening of democracy in the US has taken more than 200 years, and although we don't have it all the way right, we fight for it every day. Why would we expect it to happen any sooner in Iraq, expecially when it wasn't homegrown reform?

Time magazine's Andrew Sullivan confesses his own regrets when he writes:

"Several conservatives and neoconservatives have begun to renounce the decision to topple Saddam Hussein three years ago. William F. Buckley Jr., as close to a conservative icon as America has, recently wrote that "one can't doubt that the American objective in Iraq has failed." George F. Will has been a moderate skeptic throughout. The specter of Iraq teetering closer to civil war and disintegration has forced a reckoning."

The coalition of the willing is wilting.