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For incredibly thorough take-downs of the neo-conservative foreign policy nightmare that we're all living through, this weekend's posts over at Belgravia Dispatch and Unclaimed Territory are absolute must reads.

While Greg looks at the philosophical underpinnings of the war in Iraq, Glenn takes on the silly notion of "centrism" that is currently gripping the DC media.

For those of you pinning your hopes on the Baker-Hamilton Report, Glenn's column is a must read. An excerpt:

Seeking input from the neocons on how to solve the Iraq disaster would be like consulting the serial arsonist who started a deadly, raging fire on how to extinguish it. That actually might make sense if the arsonist were repentant and wanted to help reverse what he unleashed. But if the arsonist were proud of the fire he started and actually wanted to see it rage forever, even more strongly -- and, worse, if he were intent on starting whole new fires just like the one destroying everything and everyone in its path-- it would be the height of irrationality for those wanting to extinguish the fire to listen to what he has to say.

But more notable than the supposed exclusion of neocons (something that should be believed only once it is seen) is this claim about Washington-style balance and "centrism":

The panel was deliberately skewed toward a centrist course for Iraq, participants said. Organizers avoided experts with extreme views on either side of the Iraq war debate.

I'd really like to know what the excluded anti-war "extreme view" is that is the equivalent of the neonconservative desire for endless warfare in Iraq and beyond. The only plausible possibility would be the view that the U.S. ought to withdraw from Iraq, and do so sooner rather than later. What else could it be? Nobody, to my knowledge, is proposing that we cede American territory to the Iraqi insurgents, so withdrawal essentially defines the far end of the anti-war spectrum.

Is withdrawal -- whether incremental or total -- considered to be an "extreme view" that the Washington "centrists" have not only rejected but have excluded in advance even from consideration? That's what this article seems to suggest, and that would definitely be consistent with conventional Beltway wisdom -- that withdrawal is advocated only by the fringe radicals and far leftists (such as the individual whom Americans just knowingly installed as Speaker of the House).

There is nothing "centrist" about a Commission which decides in advance that it will not remove our troops from a war which is an unmitigated disaster and getting worse every day. It just goes without saying that if you invade and occupy a country and are achieving nothing good by staying, withdrawal must be one of the primary options considered when deciding what to do about the disaster.

Meanwhile, Greg provides extensive excerpts of Stephen Holmes' review of former neo-con-in-chief Francis Fukuyama's book After the Neocons. Greg provides longer excerpts with commentary, but for my money the key quote, only partly excerpted by Greg, is below:

One might have thought that this ‘remove the lid and out leaps democracy’ approach was too preposterous ever to have been taken seriously. But it is the position that Fukuyama, with some evidence, attributes to neo-cons in and around the administration. They assumed, he writes, that the only necessary precondition for the emergence and consolidation of democracy is the ‘amorphous longing for freedom’ which President Bush, that penetrating student of human nature, detects in ‘every mind and every soul’. Their sociology of democracy boils down to the universal and eternal human desire not to be oppressed. If this were democracy’s only precondition, then Iraq would have no trouble making a speedy transition from clan-based savagery and untrammelled despotism to civilised self-restraint and collective self-rule: sceptics who harped on the difficulty of creating a government that would be both coherent and representative in a multi-ethnic, multi-sectarian and tribally fragmented country, simply failed to appreciate the love of freedom in every human heart.

Cavalierly designed by mid-level bureaucrats who were both historically and theoretically illiterate, the administration’s half-baked plans backfired badly. This should have come as no surprise. And prospects for reform in the Middle East have not been improved by the perception that democratisation in the region, at least when promoted by the West, spells violent destabilisation, criminalisation and a collapse of minimally acceptable standards of living.

Neo-cons, Fukuyama implies, seldom do the hard work required to learn about the evolving political and social dynamics of specific societies. Instead, they over-personalise any ‘regime’ that they dream of destabilising, identifying it with a single reprehensible ruler who can, in principle, be taken out with a single airstrike. But here again they walk into a serious self-contradiction. One of their principal claims is that a bad regime will have long-lasting negative effects on the society it abuses. A cruel autocracy puts down ‘social roots’ and reshapes ‘informal habits’. Thus, ‘Saddam Hussein’s tyranny bred passivity and fatalism – not to mention vices of cruelty and violence.’ It is very likely, in other words, that Saddam unfitted the Iraqi people for democracy, for a time at least. This is a logical implication of the neo-cons’ theory of ‘regimes’, but not one they considered, presumably because it would have knocked the legs from under their idealistic case for war.

These fallacies and contradictions are not even the most egregious of those associated with the democratisation rationale; not when you consider that the basic justification for helping spread democracy in the Middle East flatly contradicts the claim that Islamic radicals are apocalyptic nihilists who love death and hate freedom. Al-Qaida is obviously not at war with the House of Saud and Mubarak because those regimes are democratic. Indeed, the observation that Islamic radicals hate tyranny, not freedom, is the central premise of the argument for promoting democracy.

In administration rhetoric, terrorism (a method for waging asymmetrical war) is routinely opposed to liberty (a principle for organising a modern society). The antithesis of liberty, however, is not terrorism but tyranny. So when the administration tries to place jihadism in the space vacated by Communism, turning it into the new global enemy of liberty, it confuses both itself and others.

Tacitly, the neo-con advocates of Middle Eastern democracy are siding with the young men who might be tempted to join terrorist conspiracies against their clientalistic, kleptocratic and non-democratic governments, which are officially allied with the US. Al-Qaida is less like the KGB than the KGB’s implacable foe, the Afghan mujahidin, ‘freedom fighters’ supported by Ronald Reagan, among others. Today’s neo-cons no longer want to imitate Reagan by helping resentful young Muslim men regain their dignity through violent insurgency. Instead, they want to give them an alternative path to dignity: namely, liberal democracy. But the basic reason for supporting frustrated Muslim youth, that they deserve American support in their noble search for liberation, is the same.

It is worth dwelling for a moment on this massive contradiction. Although obvious in a way, it is seldom discussed; Fukuyama doesn’t seem to notice it. The neo-cons defend two diametrically opposed propositions: that the jihadists hate freedom at the same time as hating their own lack of it. On the one hand, neo-cons assert that Islamic radicals hate American values, not American policies, and deny that America’s past behaviour has in any way provoked anti-American violence. On the other hand, they imply that the 9/11 plot was inspired and implemented by terrorists radicalised by Arab autocracies allied with or sponsored by the US. This suggests that 9/11-style terrorists hate American policies, not American values. They hate not the principles of American liberty but, rather, America’s unprincipled support for tyranny. To promote democracy in the Middle East is to imply that such hatred is in part justified.

The proposal to increase American security by such means logically presupposes that America’s problem is not terrorism but Islamic radicalism, initially turned militant and subsequently turned outward. Terrorism is not the enemy: it is a tactic that Islamic radicals have found exceptionally effective. To recognise that America’s fundamental problem is Islamic radicalism, and terrorism only a symptom, is to invite a political solution. Promoting democracy is just such a political solution. Although publicly invoked to support a military invasion, the goal of a democratic Middle East implies that terrorism must be stripped of its appeal by political reform precisely because it cannot be crushed by overwhelming military force. The radical incompatibility of this perspective with Bush’s overall counterterrorism policy should be self-evident.

And that is not all...

Not even nearly all. Read the full review. Its likely to do you more more good than reading the original work.