Debating the War in Iraq (Round 3)

Charles Krauthammer ["Fukuyama's Fantasy," op-ed, March 28] asserts that I turned against the war only after public opinion did. As a journalist, he might have done a Lexis-Nexis search on my name for the year 2002. He would have found an interview in the London Times in May in which I expressed pessimism about democratizing Iraq, an op-ed in The Post on the first anniversary of Sept. 11 in which I said that we should go to war only if we could get U.N. Security Council backing, and a piece in the Wall Street Journal in December in which I said intervention in Iraq may come to look like empire and that we weren't applying "the traditional conservative principle of prudence." Not once did I write a piece supporting the war.

Krauthammer seems to think I misrepresented his American Enterprise Institute speech of February 2004. That speech promoted what Krauthammer called "democratic globalism," that is, the use of American power to deal with terrorism, weapons of mass destruction and other threats, of which the Iraq war was the premier example. The talk failed to acknowledge any of the developments that undermined the credibility of democratic globalism, such as the mounting insurgency, the failure to find weapons of mass destruction or the hostile reaction of the outside world to the exercise of U.S. unipolarity. His speech clearly vindicated what the Bush administration had done in Iraq, and that is why the audience that night applauded him.

-- Francis Fukuyama

Washington

·

According to Charles Krauthammer, the root causes of Sept. 11 were "the cauldron of political oppression, religious intolerance and social ruin in the Arab-Islamic world -- oppression transmuted and deflected by regimes with no legitimacy into virulent, murderous anti-Americanism." If so, in addition to Afghanistan we should have attacked Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Pakistan -- not Iraq. After all, that's where the hijackers came from, that's where the madrassas operate, and, in the case of Pakistan, that's the illegitimate regime that cozied up to the Taliban and that probably harbors the Sept. 11 mastermind.

I've yet to hear a justification for the invasion of Iraq that had a sound factual basis or was otherwise logical. Perhaps this also explains Francis Fukuyama's confusion.

-- Arthur Buono

Boyce, Va.