KRAUTHAMMER RESPONDS TO FUKUYAMA

From TimesWatch Tracker

Krauthammer Rebuts the NYT’s Newest Hero

Conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer has a withering response to author (and post-conservative) Francis Fukuyama, whose attack on Krauthammer is featured on the front page of the New York Times Book Review in an essay by liberal Paul Berman on Fukuyama’s new book, “America at the Crossroads.”

Berman’s review opens in huge type that fills the entire cover page, with Krauthammer’s name in the third line.

Krauthammer cries foul on Fukuyama and writes a sarcastic tribute for Tuesday’s Washington Post: “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."

A very nice story. It appears in the preface to Fukuyama's post-neocon coming out, ‘America at the Crossroads.’ On Sunday it was repeated on the front page of the New York Times Book Review in Paul Berman's review.

“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.”

Krauthammer moves in for the kill: “In that entire 6,000-word lecture, I said not a single word about the course or conduct of the Iraq war. My only reference to the outcome of the war came toward the end of the lecture. Far from calling it an unqualified success, virtual or otherwise, I said quite bluntly that ‘it may be a bridge too far. Realists have been warning against the hubris of thinking we can transform an alien culture because of some postulated natural and universal human will to freedom. And they may yet be right.’” Krauthammer includes links to the actual speech he gave.

Krauthammer concludes Fukuyama “has every right to change his mind at his convenience. He has no right to change what I said.”