Neocon architect says: 'Pull it down'

Scotsman.com News - International - Neocon architect says: 'Pull it down': "Mr Fukuyama once supported regime change in Iraq and was a signatory to a 1998 letter sent by the Project for a New American Century to the then president, Bill Clinton, urging the US to step up its efforts to remove Saddam Hussein from power. It was also signed by neoconservative intellectuals, such as Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan, and political figures Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and the current defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld.
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.'
Mr Fukuyama, one of the US's most influential public intellectuals, concludes that 'it seems very unlikely that history will judge either the intervention [in Iraq] itself or the ideas animating it kindly'.
Going further, he says the movements' advocates are Leninists who 'believed that history can be pushed along with the right application of power and will. Leninism was a tragedy in its Bolshevik version, and it has returned as farce when practised by the United States'."