Cover Story

A bittersweet birthday

Con Coughlin

18 March 2006

On 20 March, the Iraq conflict reaches its third anniversary. Con Coughlin defends the decision to invade, explores the impact of Blair on Bush’s second term — and reveals what Condoleezza Rice thinks of David Cameron

Which brings us on to Francis Fukuyama, Mr ‘End of History’ himself. Mr Fukuyama is a good friend of Paul Wolfowitz, the former US deputy defence secretary and the architect of America’s troubled administration of postwar Iraq, and has been closely associated with the neoconservatives.

Through his long-standing relationship with the neocons, most people safely assumed that Mr Fukuyama thoroughly endorsed the Wolfowitz vision of transforming Iraq from mediaeval despotism to a fully functioning Western-style democracy. Not so. Mr Fukuyama might have endorsed the neocon vision of promoting democracy and good governance in failed states, but he takes issue with the Bush doctrine of using pre-emptive war to achieve this.

Given the cult-like status Mr Fukuyama has acquired for his post-Cold War musings, his assault on one of the Bush administration’s central justifications for the war has intensified the general sense of beleaguerment now afflicting the White House. Under fire on a whole range of issues, from allowing the Dubai government to purchase half a dozen American ports to presiding over a record budget deficit, the President now has to contend with an unseemly squabble among his core supporters over the defining issue of his presidency.

But in his new thesis Mr Fukuyama himself appears to have misunderstood the fundamental reason that war was declared on Saddam in the first place. Operation Iraqi Freedom was not launched as part of a crusade to promote democracy and good governance, as some neocons would like us to believe. We went to war because of Saddam’s refusal, over a period of more than 12 years, to comply with a succession of United Nations resolutions that required the Iraqi regime to dismantle, and give a full account of, its weapons of mass destruction stockpiles which, under Saddam, it singularly failed to do.