Charles Krauthammer is an elegant and clear headed essayist and thinker. Fukayama, on the other hand, has proven himself to be ... what shall we say ... totally wrong when he declared, in the book that made him famous, "The End of History."
It's also interesting when those who once stood by you switch sides when that becomes convenient. I find honest opponents far more honorable than those who switch sides and in doing so, leave a knife in your back.
That is why this article by Krauthammer on Fukuyama is so telling.
It was, as the hero tells it, his Road to Damascus moment. There he is, in a hall of 1,500 people he has long considered to be his allies, hearing the speaker treat the Iraq War, nearing the end of its first year, as "a virtually unqualified success." He gasps as the audience enthusiastically applauds. Aghast to discover himself in a sea of comrades so deluded by ideology as to have lost touch with reality, he decides he can no longer be one of them.
And thus did Francis Fukuyama become the world's most celebrated ex-neoconservative, a well-timed metamorphosis that has brought him a piece of the fame that he once enjoyed 15 years ago as the man who declared, a mite prematurely, that history had ended.
[snip]
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.
Read the whole thing, it's devastating. I will be surprised if Fukuyama survives this.
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