Francis “End of History” Fukuyama had a piece in the New York Times Magazine yesterday entitled “After Neoconservatism,” which began with this shot across the bow:

As we approach the third anniversary of the onset of the Iraq war, it seems very unlikely that history will judge either the intervention itself or the ideas animating it kindly. By invading Iraq, the Bush administration created a self-fulfilling prophecy: Iraq has now replaced Afghanistan as a magnet, a training ground and an operational base for jihadist terrorists, with plenty of American targets to shoot at.

He goes on, in a nutshell, to argue that neoconservatism, whatever it might once have been, is dead, and besides that, he no longer supports it.

As one can imagine, bloggers immediately started burning up the keyboards. Right-wing Nuthouse, while disagreeing with some of Fukuyama’s prescriptions, says that the piece “takes Neoconservatives to the woodshed and delivers a beating from which they may not recover. The piece is a devastating critique of policies advanced by Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle … and others which include pre-emptive wars of self defense, promotion of human rights and democracy, a belief in the moral purposes of American foreign policy and of a kind of “benevolent hegemony” by America that could remake the world.”

But while Fukuyama sees Iraq as a disastrous morass and the reasons behind the invasion as discredited, not all bloggers feel the same way. James Joyner, sounding quite apologetic, writes this morning that, “It must be reiterated, since people continue to forget it, that the main missions — regime change and the enabling of an unfettered search for WMD — were wildly successful. The regime was changed in a matter of three weeks. The...

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