The late Edward Said weighs ideas and action; neocon Francis Fukuyama blasts Bush
Altered State

Edward Said probably believed too much about the power and role of the intellectual; but men like Francis Fukuyama show that even if an intellectual may lack the power to do good, he certainly doesn´t lack in the capability to muster his support for political adventures, which then may give legitimacy to these otherwise braindead ideas.

Fukuyama is one of those people who are ready to give their opinion in pretty much every matter and very often gets his facts wrong. Well, if he would be an ordinary man of the street, that would be his right, freedom of the speech and so on, but the problem is that when any a person of his standing opens his mouth and starts talking, lots of people believe that what he says must be true, because he wouldn´t be saying these things if they weren´t.

I loathe the very idea of "nation building". Nations are not build by other nations, they grow. The usual examples of "nation building" in the past and today are not, in my mind, conscious "nation building" as such; in most cases they are necessary action to keep a crumbling society to stand
and then slowly help it´s own people to mend it. Certainly new nation(s) would, given time, evolve on this society´s place, but much evil would have to come to be before that.

The celebrated cases of Germany and Japan after 1945 are not "nation building". The infrastructure and government of defeated nations were rebuild and the occupiers tried to adjust their governments and society in the process. Both were in the interest of the occupiers.

In Iraq an existing, if deeply flawed, society was destroyed, and ignorant bastards, blinded by ideology, then tried "nation building on the cheap", which came to resemble more, let´s say Bolshevik Russia after the revolution in 1917 than Germany or Japan after the Second World War. Existing society was destroyed by arms and by people driven by their ideology, which dictated that even working parts of the old regime should be taken down and destroyed.
No wonder that the neoconservatives are bastard ideological grandchildren of the great Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky(1879-1940).