Fukuyama Responds to Krauthammer; 'Suite Française; Sven Birkerts - New York Times

Fukuyama Responds to Krauthammer; 'Suite Française; Sven Birkerts - New York Times: "The overheated tone of Charles Krauthammer's letter (April 16) about my book 'America at the Crossroads' suggests that he is in something of a panic that someone should hold him accountable for his advocacy of the Iraq war. He pretends that his 2004 speech at the American Enterprise Institute was an abstract, academic disquisition on international relations theory, unrelated to the momentous events swirling about at the time, and that he himself was expressing reservations about the war. This of course is nonsense; as everyone in the audience understood, he was trying to provide a theoretical justification for the Bush administration's foreign policy.

Despite the small qualifications he cites, the overall tone was highly triumphalist, and he failed to address any of the obvious setbacks the administration had suffered like the growing insurgency and missing weapons of mass destruction that undermined his strategy of 'democratic globalism.' If anyone thinks I am misrepresenting the speech, they are welcome to read the 7,000-word critique of it that I wrote in The National Interest in the summer of 2004.

My opposition to the war from early 2002 on was not a secret; had Krauthammer done a simple Lexis-Nexis search he would have found any number of things I wrote exp"