He urged the liberation of Iraq. Now he claims he had misgivings all along.

Apparently the Wall Street Journal is dubious of Fukuyama's sincerity.

Fukuyama's Pivot | WSJ

Bernard-Henri Levy dukes it out with Francis Fukuyama over American virtues and vices, neoconservatives, religion, the future of American muscular internationalism, and the role of intellectuals in a free society.

It Doesn't Stay in Vegas | The American Interest

ClaimID is a service that lets you manage your online identity.

Imagine that you are applying for a job. You know that your prospective employer is going to search for your name online, and since you're a rational person, that worries you. How will your employer know what online stuff is actually about you, and not about that other person who shares your name? And what if the good stuff about you online doesn't mention your full name, or uses a name you no longer go by (such as a maiden name)? How would your prospective employer ever find it? Why do you have to lose out in the eyes of that employer? And the worst part is there's no way for you to easily influence what search engines say about you.

Enter claimID. ClaimID is a service that lets you claim the information that is about you online. That information is then associated with your name, providing folks an easy way to see what is and isn't about you online. In doing so, you get to influence the search engines, and provide people more relevant information when they search for you. It's time to reclaim some power back from the search engines. ClaimID is about letting you have some say in what search engines say about you.

claimID.com - Manage your online identity

I would like to draw your attention to the Gold Star that I added to the Iraq article in the forthcoming issue of Foreign Affairs.

Further, I would observe that the findings of the Iraqi Perspectives Project, on which this article is based, rather strongly vindicate the people who argued (generally unsuccessfully at the time) for more HUMINT worldwide in the wake of 9/11.

Despite widespread and persistent (dogged, even, and eventually desperate) efforts to link Iraq to al Qaeda, apparently it never occurred to the Administration to work on better HUMINT in Iraq. It is hard to believe they made an effort on par with that against al Qaeda; based on post-war interviews of the military leadership and bureaucracy, it seems likely we could have turned enough of them to get a sense of the organization's hollowness. Even one might have been enough, depending on the source.

The Cold War may be history, but the Hall of Mirrors yet persists.

My favorite part of the article is about the flowery language:

Besides outright lying, there were further impediments to the flow of information within the regime. One was the requirement to embellish even the simplest message with praise for Saddam, as evidenced by the minister of defense's memo following a training exercise called Golden Falcon:

In reference to your Excellency's instructions regarding the large exercises at the Public Center, having strong faith in the only God of our hearts, and God's permanent support to the believers, the faithful, the steadfast, and with great love that we have for our great homeland and our Great Leader, our Great Leader has won God's favor and the love of his dear people in the day of the grand homage.

Your enthusiastic soldiers from our courageous armed forces have executed Golden Falcon Exercise number 11. In this exercise we have tested our readiness and confrontation plans against any who attempt to make impure the lands of civilization and the homeland of missions and prophets. This exercise is the widest and most successful in achieving the required results. Soldiers from the III and IV Corps have participated in this exercise.

There is no indication that the two corps actually conducted any significant exercise during this period.

This kind of bureaucratic embellishment extended to every level of military organization. While this type of flowery language is not unknown in the region, it was taken to such extremes in Iraq that it often replaced all substance in reports and orders.

Michiko Kakutani calls Fukuyama's new book "tough-minded and edifying."

In "America at the Crossroads," Mr. Fukuyama questions the assertion made by the prominent neoconservatives Mr. Kristol and Robert Kagan in their 2000 book "Present Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in American Foreign and Defense Policy" that other nations "find they have less to fear" from the daunting power of the United States because "American foreign policy is infused with an unusually high degree of morality." The problem with this doctrine of "benevolent hegemony," Mr. Fukuyama points out, is that "it is not sufficient that Americans believe in their own good intentions; non-Americans must be convinced of them as well."

That's where the General Memetics Corporation comes into the picture.

Fukuyama writes:

"Bureaucratic tribalism exists in all administrations, but it rose to poisonous levels in Bush's first term. Team loyalty trumped open-minded discussion, and was directly responsible for the administration's failure to plan adequately for the period after the end of active combat."

NYT Review of 'America at the Crossroads,' by Francis Fukuyama

In 1995, Steve Sillett received a Ph.D. in botany from Oregon State University, in Corvallis. Soon afterward, he took his present job, at Humboldt, and began to explore the old-growth redwood canopy.

No scientist had been there before.

The tallest redwoods were regarded as inaccessible towers, shrouded in foliage and almost impossible to climb, since the lowest branches on a redwood can be twenty-five stories above the ground. From the moment he entered redwood space, Steve Sillett began to see things that no one had imagined. The general opinion among biologists at the time -- this was just eight years ago -- was that the redwood canopy was a so-called "redwood desert" that contained not much more than the branches of redwood trees.

Instead, Sillett discovered a lost world above Northern California.

Gold Star.

Update: If you enjoyed this article and are looking for further reading, you may consider Forest Canopies: Second Edition.

Cimbing the Redwoods, by Richard Preston | The New Yorker

This album is just a big happy fun ball. Go Norah!

Amazon wrote:

One of the freshest country albums of the year comes not out of Nashville, but rather New York, from a sporadic band with the unlikely (and somewhat suggestive) moniker of the Little Willies.

Throughout, the record maintains the slightly inebriated, bar-band feel of a live club performance, especially on "Lou Reed," a very funny saga of a cow-tipping incident possibly involving the dark rocker.

This is an extraordinary record, not only for its musicianship, but for the infectious joy and exuberance of performers who remember just how fun it is to play music from the inside out.

It's probably better if you didn't expect it, but now that I've spoiled that aspect of it, you've got to check out "Lou Reed."

NB: The iTunes version of the album features two exclusive tracks.

The Little Willies

The review I'm linking here has mixed feelings about this album. I'll just say I was quite pleasantly surprised. On this album, often with only the sparest of acoustic instrumentation, he sounds like Cash on Unearthed. And for me, that's a good thing, as Martha would say.

Whatever happened to that maverick Nashville songwriter, and why don’t we hear gut-level honesty like that on country radio anymore?

Kris Kristofferson was, after all, one quarter of The Highwaymen; a country Mt. Rushmore, if you will, that included Willie Nelson, as well as the late Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings. Musicians have been known to dabble in acting now and again, it’s true, but Kristofferson immersed himself so fully into the thespian life, he almost completely abandoned his songwriting past—at least until now.

If you're sampling at your favorite site/store, try "Thank You for a Life" for starters. And while you're listening, consider how the visual element in music has been constrained by the shift from LPs to MP3s, and how the video iPod may eventually bring it back in a new and compelling way.

Kris Kristofferson: This Old Road

I previously mentioned that Francis Fukuyama had a new book on the way. A certain someone said they were looking forward to it. FYI, it's now on sale everywhere.

Francis Fukuyama’s criticism of the Iraq war put him at odds with neoconservative friends both within and outside the Bush administration. Here he explains how, in its decision to invade Iraq, the Bush administration failed in its stewardship of American foreign policy. First, the administration wrongly made preventive war the central tenet of its foreign policy. In addition, it badly misjudged the global reaction to its exercise of “benevolent hegemony.” And finally, it failed to appreciate the difficulties involved in large-scale social engineering, grossly underestimating the difficulties involved in establishing a successful democratic government in Iraq.

When I read that, I couldn't help but see it as yet another unfortunate missed opportunity for the General Memetics Corporation.

Fukuyama explores the contention by the Bush administration’s critics that it had a neoconservative agenda that dictated its foreign policy during the president’s first term. Providing a fascinating history of the varied strands of neoconservative thought since the 1930s, Fukuyama argues that the movement’s legacy is a complex one that can be interpreted quite differently than it was after the end of the Cold War. Analyzing the Bush administration’s miscalculations in responding to the post–September 11 challenge, Fukuyama proposes a new approach to American foreign policy through which such mistakes might be turned around—one in which the positive aspects of the neoconservative legacy are joined with a more realistic view of the way American power can be used around the world.

America at the Crossroads | Francis Fukuyama

A concise distillation and sober analysis of a veritable mountain of evidence about pre-war Iraq, based on official documents and recordings, eyewitness testimony, and other interviews.

A special, double-length article from the upcoming May/June issue of Foreign Affairs, presenting key excerpts from the recently declassified book-length report of the USJFCOM Iraqi Perspectives Project.

U.S. Joint Forces Command (USJFCOM) commissioned a comprehensive study of the inner workings and behavior of Saddam Hussein's regime based on previously inaccessible primary sources. Drawing on interviews with dozens of captured senior Iraqi military and political leaders and hundreds of thousands of official Iraqi documents (hundreds of them fully translated), this two-year project has changed our understanding of the war from the ground up. The study was partially declassified in late February; its key findings are presented here.

...

As far as can be determined from the interviews and records reviewed so far, there was no national plan to embark on a guerrilla war in the event of a military defeat. Nor did the regime appear to cobble together such a plan as its world crumbled around it. Buoyed by his earlier conviction that the Americans would never dare enter Baghdad, Saddam hoped to the very last minute that he could stay in power. And his military and civilian bureaucrats went through their daily routines until the very end.

Only slowly did Saddam and those around him finally seem to realize that they were suffering a catastrophic military defeat.

Update: Gold Star.

Saddam's Delusions: The View from the Inside