Except I'm not a neocon.

yeah, Sterling, you're more of a Stalinist already.

Andrew Sullivan capitulates under the sheer brilliance of the arguments. Is this a good place to add that I've been making all of them since before the war?

No your world view is something much much more deeply stupid than that. Also the neo cons had good intentions.

Wow, Frank Fuckyomama is an adherent to Eurofism. Incredible.

And Sullyvain effectively apologises for supporting the war:

"The correct response to this is not more triumphalism and spin, but a real sense of shame and sorrow that so many have died because of errors made by their superiors, and by intellectuals like me."

Good on him.

Keeping with the Soviet metaphor, it sounds like we are near something like that moment, the point just after the Wall fell, in which adherents of the failed ideology realised that it wasn't just an misapplication of socialist theory that had doomed the revolution, rather there was a fundamental problem with the theory itself, that it was utterly unworkable in practice, that the writings of Marx were just so much abrasive bogroll. And it didn't matter whether you were a Trot, Leninist, Bukharinite, Maoist or Stalinist. Similarly people like Jame and Matthew have suggested the war was a terribly good idea, incompetently carried through.

Now, after 30,000 to 40,000 pointless deaths, their god has deserted them. Jame, Matthew, I await your cringing abasement too. I don't see why I should make it easy for you.

Andrew Sullivan capitulates under the sheer brilliance of the arguments.

I'm sure Sullivan will uncapitulate next year.

No your world view is something much much more deeply stupid than that. Also the neo cons had good intentions.

My worldview is colored by an awareness of what side I'm on and where my loyalties properly rest. Intellectuals like Fukuyama engage in perpetual circle-jerks, but the essential truth of government - any government - is that it is an entity that exercises the privilege of telling people what to do, and what not to do. It uses force or the threat of force to accomplish this.

The U.S. Government is pursuing a dual course of killing our enemies (Al Qaeda, Taliban, etc.) and attempting to transform a region of the globe by mandating responsive states. Europeans carp about both goals and the means by which the U.S. is pursuing them, but the fact is that Europe has no serious alternative. Dialog and diplomacy have failed, and so we're left with the options of Clausewitz and Teddy Roosevelt.

No one knows if the U.S.-pushed transformation will work - but it's worth a try if it averts the larger and more destructive conflict that European appeasement would deliver.

I admire Paul Hamm for his competitive fortitude and will to persevere, but he didn't win the all-around title. NOTHING will ever change that. Even though he kept the gold medal, the truth is now out in the open. No amount of rationalization will change that now. It was up to him to do the ethical thing, as unfair as that was, and he let his country down.

I admire Paul Hamm for his competitive fortitude and will to persevere, but he didn't win the all-around title. NOTHING will ever change that. Even though he kept the gold medal, the truth is now out in the open. No amount of rationalization will change that now. It was up to him to do the ethical thing, as unfair as that was, and he let his country down.

Francis Fukuyama was terribly wrong with his "End of History" thesis - as it was commonly interpreted, anyway - and this piece seems more an effort to rehabilitate himself, via some deeply unhelpful comparisons to Marxism and Leninism, than an intelligent contribution to the debate on Middle Eastern shenanigans.

None of his assertions about Bush and "neocon naivety and failure to plan" are new nor are they backed up with any new facts or insights.

That someone like Andrew Sullivan uses it as an excuse to publicly repent and embrace Eurofism is neither here nor there. When you look at Sullivan's little list ot the three fatal errors he and the neocons made, they turn out to be fluff and nonsense, viz.:

(i) Overestimating competence of government. Really? That seems a profoundly unconservative error. And also not typically neocon, for what its worth..

(ii) Narcissism (ie not seeing how unpopular US power is) Really? Sullivan himself was a student in the mid80s so I don't for an instant believe him to have been blind to dislike of US power.

(iii) Not taking culture seriously enough. Really? Sullivan means the US didn't see how complex Iraq was. Maybe. But then it's just a repetition of the first error of government incompetence.

How anyone can be "bowled over by the brilliance of (Fuyakama's) arguments" beats me. The "brilliance of the Fukuyama brand", perhaps. To me, Fukuyma is merely compounding the foolishness of his most famous book with new unfounded and tendentious assertions. Poodles like Stefan and Sullivan are happy to gambol in his wake.

But Fukuyama's foolishness doesn't mean it is right to torture and that Gitmo is fine and dandy.

Building democracy and killing terrorists doesn't mean you have to go the full Sterling hog and abandon western democratic decencies along the way.

With that kind of call for public recanting, Eurof, you're allying yourself solidly with the Maoist tendency.

With that kind of call for public recanting, Eurof, you're allying yourself solidly with the Maoist tendency.

Hi, my name is maria Zuppello and I'm the first Italian reporter getting alone, with a small digital camera, without a crew to Antarctica.
I'm writing from New York where I'm working on a documentary about bioweapons with Danny Schechter. Former CNN and CBS producer Danny won 2 Emmy Awards and he's famous all around the world to be "the news dissector": every day he criticizes the American Media System.
I have been creating a blog about my experience with him
htttp://videojournalist.blogs.it
and he still has his own blog
www.mediachannel.org
You can write in Italian as well as in English
Keep in touch!
Maria