Illegals To Americans: We Hate America

It’s hard to imagine that the schoolchildren who engaged in a pro-illegal immigration rally yesterday helped their cause much, except to harden the polarization already felt on both sides of the issue. While our politicians in Washington talked about how the illegals came to the US to enjoy the American dream, their actions speak much more towards the reconquista that, as Michelle Malkin has written, lies at the heart of the triumphalism that they now espouse. The Los Angeles area school districts allowed 22,000 students to protest border security and the enforcement of immigration law Monday, and it produced moments like this one:
upsidedown004.jpg
That is a Mexican flag over an upside-down American flag on the flagpole behind the students that raised them. Note the display of unbridled patriotism of these American students — for Mexico.
Of course, the schools themselves see it differently. They say that the Mexican flag doesn’t demonstrate disloyalty to the US, but rather allows the students to show “unity”:

But UC Irvine professor Frank Bean said the flag doesn’t signify loyalty to Mexico but rather loyalty to one another.
“They are saying, ‘We are together in fighting against these people who are trying to make felons out of us,’ ” said Bean, co-director of UC Irvine’s Center for Research on Immigration, Population and Public Policy.

No, Professor Bean, by flying American flags upside-down under the Mexican flag, they’re showing a loyalty to Mexico that overrides their loyalty to the US. And then they have the temerity to demand that we allow them to live here without following our laws governing entry into the US as well as continue to provide government services to them. In the meantime, people who come here legally and wish to stay wind up having to go home and reapply for permanent residency. Joe Gandelman has a guest poster from Britain who cannot avoid leaving the US after coming here legally and showing nothing but loyalty to his new home.
The rallies in Southern California only ripped the lid off of a well-known dynamic in the culture that mixes native guilt with radical illegal-immigrant activism to fuel the La Raza dream of Aztlan, the reconquest of the the Southwest and its return to Mexico or existence as a separate nation. This radical notion has been around since 1969 and plays a part in the fringe politics of the Southwest. However, the increasing sense of entitlement for illegals in the area has led this impulse out of the shadows and into the forefront of the amnesty movement by enabling people to argue that the illegals are returning to their own land and that the US lacks the sovereignty to declare otherwise.
If the illegals and their support groups think this will win over the American people, they are very much mistaken. If they think they can intimidate Congress into action with these demonstrations … that may be another thing entirely, I’m afraid.
CORRECTION: Changed a typo from “American” to “Mexican”; thanks to several CQ readers for pointing out the mistake.

Palestinians Celebrate Likud Collapse

At least one group of people got enthusiastic about the Israeli elections:

Several officials in Ramallah expressed satisfaction with the results of Tuesday’s election in Israel, especially the fact that the Likud Party had lost much of its power.
“We’re happy to see that [Binyamin] Netanyahu has suffered a humiliating defeat,” a top official told The Jerusalem Post. “We hope that Kadima and Labor will join forces to advance the peace process and end the conflict.”

Apart from their schadenfreude at the woes of Netanyahu, the Palestinians didn’t care who won the election, at least not publicly. Official after official quoted in the Jerusalem Post shrugged it off, claiming that all Israeli politicians are more alike than not. The officials, mostly Hamas but also PA president Mahmoud Abbas, warned Olmert about a unilateral implementation of his border plan, saying it would lead to chaos.
The Palestinians have the solution to that in their own hands. They need to live up to their existing agreements, recognize Israel’s right to exist, renounce their goal of its destruction, and then they will have provided the basic framework for bilateral or multilateral efforts to end the conflict. Their intransigence on these points — which effectively makes Israel itself a bargaining point for the Palestinians — is what forced Sharon to simply act on his own without consultations with Abbas on Gaza, and will force Olmert to do the same with the West Bank.
The Palestinians may think that the Likud collapse has provided them with a victory. In reality, it has made them irrelevant. Without a realistic partner in peace, Israel will set her own borders and close off the West Bank, economically and politically isolating the Palestinians. If that is the Palestinian vision for the future, they have made great strides towards that goal by electing Hamas, and I wish them well in their poverty.

Guess Who’s Back In Business With The Thugocracy?

Germany has opened an investigation into six companies that may have supplied Iran with technology vital to the mullahcracy’s development of nuclear arms, the New York Times reports today. They’re apparently not alone, as the Germans state that Russian companies acted as intermediaries for the transactions:

German prosecutors are investigating whether six German companies sold electronic equipment to a clandestine procurement network established to supply Iran with equipment for its nuclear development program.
A prosecutor in the state of Brandenberg, Benedikt Welfens, told German television on Monday that several million dollars’ worth of equipment that could be used for a nuclear program had been shipped from Germany to Iran, via a Russian company that operated in Berlin in 2003 and 2004.
“Its main business is the supply of Iran’s nuclear program,” Mr. Welfens said on the ARD television network. He said the parts included special cables, pumps and transformers, worth about $3.6 million.
The Web site of the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel on Tuesday quoted Mr. Welfens as saying that prosecutors suspected that one of the companies knew where the equipment had been headed, while the others may have mistakenly believed the equipment had been destined for Russia, for which no export restrictions apply.

If the German companies truly believed that they sold the equipment to the Russians as end users, it demonstrates a rather lackadaisical approach to the security of dual-use technology on the part of Germany. It seems likely that the German companies, and the German government, didn’t much care where their technology ended up as long as it brought in cash. This rationale sounds very familiar in any case; the Germans, Russians, and others got caught breaking the sanctions against Saddam by supplying Iraq with weapons and technology that got middled through Syria in a similar fashion.
But if this shows that Germany has been asleep at the switch, it demonstrates that Russia has been wide awake in its dealings with Iran. The transactions show that Russia has put a lot of effort into breaking the technology embargoes against Iran, all of which are designed to keep Iran from going nuclear — a goal which they profess to share. If that was truly the case, though, the Russians would not provide clandestine means of communication for that technology to reach Iran.
The Russians have decided to restart the Cold War and want to start building up a network of nuclear states in opposition to the US and the West. Vladimir Putin has supplied the worst dictators with technology and intelligence aimed directly against Western interests, including military intelligence to Saddam Hussein that, in the hands of a more competent military commander, could have made the invasion of Iraq much bloodier. Russia remained one of the regime’s biggest suppliers, sending weapons to Baghdad through 2002 despite the absolute UN Security Council ban on sales of military equipment of any sort. And now they’re doing the same thing with Iran.
We must not allow Russia to insinuate itself as a mediator in the Iranian nuclear standoff. Their interests lie in a nuclear Iran to keep the US and UK out of the region. They should be treated as an advocate for the enemy in this diplomatic effort, because they certainly have proven themselves no friend to the West.

A Virtual Wall Brings Virtual Amnesty

The Senate will begin debate tomorrow on the new immigration-reform plan voted out of the Judiciary Committee earlier today. The comprehensive bill will create another pathway to citizenship for illegal aliens twenty years after the last time the government thought that we had illegal immigration licked and waters down the stringent border security that the House demanded:

Under the Judiciary Committee bill, illegal immigrants who pay a $1,000 fine and back taxes would be able to apply for a three-year work visa, renewable for a second three-year period. In the fourth year of work, the visa holder could begin a five-year path toward citizenship. A second guest worker program would open up legal agriculture jobs to 1.5 million undocumented farm workers.
The measure would also add as many as 14,000 new border patrol agents by 2011 to the current force of 11,300 agents and would authorize a “virtual wall” of unmanned vehicles, cameras and sensors to monitor the U.S.-Mexico border.
Unlike the House bill, it would not make illegal immigrants and those who assist them into felons, nor would it authorize the construction of massive new walls along 700 miles of the southern border.

As I have written repeatedly over the past two years, we simply cannot throw out 12 million people overnight, so some sort of guest-worker program is inevitable, if for no other reason than to get an accurate accounting of the aliens in our nation. Either that, or we will have to herd people into concentration camps, a solution that will never pass political muster even if were remotely possible logistically. That program could form a basis of a comprehensive immigration “reform”, if properly written.
That being said, the bare minimum necessary for such a program to succeed is border security successful enough that it forces those who want to enter the US to do so through either legal immigration or the guest worker program. And that is precisely where the Senate bill fails, and fails miserably. Rather than build barricades along the border that will force illegals to easily-monitored crossing points, the Senate wants to build a “virtual” wall instead of the real thing. They make it sound very high-tech, and they back it up with a little more than double the current number of border-patrol agents, but in reality all they provide is cameras and sensors to note the passage of ever-more illegals across our border.
Without real security at the southern border, any guest-worker program will fail. Why should the illegals register and cough up so much of their pay when they can easily cross over and keep everything they earn?
Immigration stalwarts might hope that the House approach will prevail in the joint conference committee that will reconcile the two bills, but that hope appears fading at best:

House Majority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) said that he hopes the Senate will pass what he called “a responsible border security bill,” but he indicated he is willing to rethink the House approach. After meeting with ranchers and law enforcement officers on the U.S.-Mexican border, Boehner said those living on the frontier did not believe the House-passed border wall would work.
“If the people on the border don’t believe that the wall will have the effect that people here think, then we ought to reconsider it,” he said.

The Israeli wall works pretty darned well — so well that their entire national-security policy relies on it for protection against the terrorists that want to destroy their country. Such a border barrier would relieve the agents of the necessity of being everywhere at once, and they could instead form rapid-response to attempted incursions before they actually succeed instead of tracking illegals once they’ve crossed the border. It appears that Congress has not learned from the Israeli experience at all.
Recent demonstrations in Los Angeles and elsewhere seems to have rattled the Republican majority, but they have taken the wrong lessons from these spectacles. The message given by the massive demonstration is that when the government fails to take action in enforcing its own laws and securing its borders, those who break the law start believing they have an entitlement to continue doing so. And why not? They learned that lesson in the amnesty program of the mid-1980s, when the Reagan administration and the Democratic Congress decided that offering those already here an easy path to citizenship would somehow deter further illegal immigration. They also promised strict border enforcement, but somehow Congress never really got around to implementing it. Twenty years later, we’re talking about giving a free pass to the next generation of illegals.
One definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Congress appears ready to establish itself as the 109th Asylum, with its fantasy walls and their insistence on granting amnesty while pretending it doesn’t exist … again.

Democrats Finally Agree On National-Security Message: Invade Pakistan

The Democrats plan to announce their new national-security strategy for the 2006 election tomorrow, but Liz Sidoti at the AP reports that advance word has already leaked on the broad strokes. The message? Get tough on Osama while retreating in the face of his friends:

Congressional Democrats promise to “eliminate” Osama bin Laden and ensure a “responsible redeployment of U.S. forces” from Iraq in 2006 in an election-year national security policy statement.
In the position paper to be announced Wednesday, Democrats say they will double the number of special forces and add more spies, which they suggest will increase the chances of finding al-Qaida’s elusive leader. They do not set a deadline for when all of the 132,000 American troops now in Iraq should be withdrawn.
“We’re uniting behind a national security agenda that is tough and smart and will provide the real security
George Bush has promised but failed to deliver,” Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said in remarks prepared for delivery Wednesday.

Let’s get this straight. The Democrats want to retreat against al-Qaeda forces assembled in Iraq in order to invade Pakistan, which is where Osama is most likely spending his time. They want to run away from the operational forces of AQ in a fashion that will remind all of them of Somalia, Beirut, and Teheran — proving Osama right about American tenacity. Going after Osama is a terrific goal, but unless they have a better plan than to flood Pakistan with special-forces teams and spies that Pervez Musharraf will consider an act of war, then this policy is doomed to failure.
Once again, the Democrats will run on slogans instead of real strategy and tactics. They shrewdly selected Osama as a focal point, reminding the country that after over four years, the Bush administration hasn’t captured the terrorist leader. Without a doubt, that has to rankle Americans; it rankles me. However, the Bush administration has isolated the AQ leadership and forced it back into Pakistan, as well as killed off or captured most of the operational leadership in the organization. We removed Saddam Hussein and transformed the geography of Southwest Asia, cutting off the terrorist lines of communication across the Middle East. The US forced the Islamofascists to engage our military on their turf instead of our civilians on ours.
What do the Democrats propose in its place? Disengagement from the only place where we can bring our military force to bear on Islamofascist terrorists, and another ignominious retreat just as we have to show strength in the region to back down the Iranian mullahcracy. The Democrats want to implement the Murtha plan, a strategy that will pull all our forces back to Kuwait, just in case they’re needed to support the Iraqi security forces we will be abandoning to the terrorists we swore to fight. And when they are needed, what do we have to do? Redeploy in force across what will now be even more hostile territory after stripping ourselves of all the intelligence and recon we have while we’re in place now.
Slogans and Osama-baiting may well work for the Democrats, but in the end we will still wind up fighting the same people we fight now. Instead of fighting them in Samarra and Tal Afar, we will fight them in San Francisco and Washington, DC. We may well fight them in Pakistan, as well as the nuclear-armed Pakistanis, if we openly invade their territory to chase Osama bin Laden. That’s not a plan for victory; it’s an incoherent fantasy.

Israelis Vote For Sharon’s Strategy

The shadow of Ariel Sharon hung over the election today in Israel which saw his Kadima party win its first contest, putting Ehud Olmert in charge and making Sharon’s strategy of unilateral border establishment ascendant. In an election that drew an unsually low voter turnout, the ailing former leader’s former party found itself struggling to keep from finishing fourth:

ISRAEL’S Prime Minister-elect last night offered to restart negotiations with the Palestinians, after exit polls showed his centrist Kadima party set to form the next government.
In a late-night victory speech Ehud Olmert spoke of a new chapter in Israel’s history, offering peace to its enemies and uniting internal divisions.
Just four months after the party was formed by Ariel Sharon – to whom Mr Olmert paid fulsome tribute – Kadima was predicted to win 28 seats after votes were counted in 50 per cent of polling stations, according to Israel Channel 10 Televison.
The centre-left Labour party came second, winning 20 seats, leaving Mr Olmert the possibility of heading a centre-left coalition with more than half of the Israeli parliament’s 120 seats.
In a major blow for Binyamin Netanyahu, the former prime minister and anointed heir to Mr Sharon until last year, his divided and bickering Likud Party was reduced to a right wing parliamentary rump, predicted to win just 12 seats.

Both the electoral results and the relatively low turnout (around 63%, which in the US would be a record) shows that the Israelis have given up on the hardliner approach to stand their ground wherever Israelis live. With the security wall showing a significant dampening effect on terrorist attacks, they apparently have decided that they want no part of the territories any longer. The nation has explicitly decided to abandon most of the settlements, a development that as recently as two years ago would have been almost unthinkable. Binyamin Netanyahu did not foresee the exhaustion of the Israelis, but Sharon did — and he may have saved the Israeli center in politics as a result.
So what now? Olmert says he would rather negotiate for the ultimate decisions on borders and settlements, even parting with more Israeli land if necessary to find common ground with their enemy. Unfortunately, they claim far too much common ground for that to be practical. If Mahmoud Abbas could not sell a partition of Jerusalem, the lunatics of Hamas certainly won’t — and that’s assuming that Olmert would offer it.
For the first time in years, though, Israel has finally found a way to simply disengage and leave the Palestinians to themselves. It will cost them in the short run, as the IDF will have to re-enact the evictions we saw in Gaza again and again as Israel pulls itself behind their wall. Hamas and the PA will threaten the Israelis, but the fact is that the IDF has built a strong defensive border, and further attacks on it will only force the Israelis to close it even tighter. That may impact the Israeli economy, but it will devastate the Palestinians, just as we see already in Gaza.
The Israelis have chosen a practical but painful strategy that gives them the best chance for their own survival as a democracy and a Jewish state. The lower turnout underscores the grim decision that faces their country, but the result confirms the wisdom and brilliance of the first of the hard-liners who dared to imagine another path to security.

This Should Keep The Beltway Press In A Dither

White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card will resign today, according to the AP:

White House chief of staff Andy Card has resigned and will be replaced by budget director Josh Bolten, an administration official said Tuesday, in a White House shake up that comes amid declining poll standings for President Bush.
The move comes as Bush has been buffeted by increasing criticism of the drawn-out war in
Iraq and as fellow Republicans have suggested pointedly that the president bring in new aides with fresh ideas and new energy.
Card came to Bush recently and suggested that he should step down from the job that he has held from the first day of Bush’s presidency, said the administration official.

After a flurry of stories generated by the gaggle questioned why Bush hadn’t shuffled the deck, a Card finally drops out. That should keep the reporters busy talking about something that matters little to any of the issues, a familiar position for most of them anyway. I find it amusing that the press corps can’t fathom why Bush would want stability in his senior staff, and at the same time provide shelter for Helen Thomas, who has been around the White House so long she can remember when the British burnt it.
The CoS is a demanding job, and by all accounts Card acquitted himself well in the role. He should be commended for his service and Bush should be commended for his loyalty. It would have been the easiest thing in the world to toss out a few staffers every election cycle to deflect criticism, warranted or not, of Bush’s performance.
UPDATE: George Stephanopoulos seems enamored of Card’s replacement, Josh Bolten:

It’s hard to imagine a man more qualified for the job of WH Chief of Staff than Josh Bolten. He grew up in Washington, started out at the Reagan State Department and followed that up with work in the first Bush White House, the Senate, and a stint at Goldman Sachs in London. He’s about as nice and smart a man as you’ll ever meet, with strong support on the WH staff and Capitol Hill, and he’s got a playful side (expect to hear more about Harley Davidsons and Bo Derek!). Most important perhaps to the President, he’s been with W from the very beginning of his Presidential campaign.

Harleys and Bo Derek? Who knew how easy it was to keep the White House press corps happy?

The Untrue Always Disappoint, E.J.

E.J. Dionne makes a discovery that has echoes going back into antiquity — that someone willing to betray their old friends are damned likely to betray their new friends as well. The press has conducted a love affair with John McCain for the past few years, dubbing him a “maverick” while McCain adopts a posture du jour to ensure as much camera time as possible. The center-left punditry cheered McCain when he kneecapped his own party’s majority in the Senate and created an unprecedented star chamber to approve judicial nominees. They feted him while he played footsie with the notion of joining John Kerry’s ticket as his running mate, denying his interest while defending Kerry publicly. And they adored McCain when he granted them a monopoly on political debate in the final 60 days of any federal election.
John McCain was their kind of guy … at least until John McCain discovered that Democrats don’t usually win Republican primaries, except in New York and Washington DC. Now that McCain has become a born-again Republican, however, the word “maverick” seems to have lost its luster:

McCain the Maverick fought for campaign finance reform, took global warming seriously, opposed Bush’s tax cuts and spoke out against torture.
Those positions bred mistrust in McCain’s own party, even though he was always a staunch supporter of overthrowing Saddam Hussein, a firm opponent of pork-barrel spending, an abortion foe and an advocate of private accounts carved out of Social Security.
McCain’s problem is that political parties rarely nominate mavericks, and McCain has decided the only way he’ll ever be president is as the Republican nominee. So today he cares very much about what hurts him or helps him in his own party.

The trouble with McCain the Maverick is that he never existed. McCain has spent his entire political career as McCain the Center of the Universe, mostly adopting positions that get him as much air time as possible. It comes as no surprise that he now wants to suck up to the Bush contingent in the GOP, which E.J. inaccurately considers the more conservative faction. The Bush contingent happens to have the party’s best organizers at the moment. McCain needs them for his own organization as well as to keep them out of the hands of his rivals, especially Mitt Romney, who stole a march on McCain’s Arizona base last night. Mormons have political strength in Arizona and Romney may be the only candidate who can really hurt McCain at home.
The problem with McCain isn’t that he is a maverick or a conservative, but that McCain can’t be trusted to be either. He began his Senate campaign by getting into bed with Charles Keating, and then to wash away that scandal, decided to become more Catholic than the Pope on campaign ethics and fundraising reform. He helped pass the most flagrant restrictions on political speech since the turn of the last century. After three successive GOP campaigns to gain a solid majority in the Senate to confirm conservative judicial appointees, he instead formed the Gang of 14, with himself as the titular head, effectively supplanting his own leadership on judicial appointments. As Dionne notes, he has opposed the tax cuts that Republicans promised in every election for the past six years. He has demonstrated repeatedly that he offers little reliability — but as long as he betrayed the GOP, the press loved him.
Now that he is betraying his earlier betrayals, Dionne eloquently verbalizes the disappointment that his admirers feel. All I can say to E.J. is that unfaithfulness is rarely a singular event. When one dates the town flirt, one should not be surprised to find his affections fleeting and meaningless.

Honoring 1979

Yesterday, Canadian PM Stephen Harper thanked the United States for our efforts to free two Canadians held captive in Iraq for four months by kidnappers and terrorists. Harper did what the hostages’ own organization could not bring itself to do — graciously recognize the risk and the skill of the British and American special-forces troops that had saved the lives of their friends:

Prime Minister Stephen Harper has phoned U.S. President George W. Bush to thank the United States for helping rescue two Canadian hostages in Iraq last week.
White House spokesman Frederick Jones says the phone call lasted about 20 minutes. …
The hostage crisis ended Friday with the release of James Loney, 41, a member of the Christian Peacemaker Teams, and along with fellow Canadian Harmeet Sooden, 33, formerly of Montreal. They were kidnapped off the streets of Baghdad on Nov. 26. Mr. Loney returned to Canada on Sunday. Mr. Sooden now lives in New Zealand.

Harper shows a lot of class and skill in his opening months at the helm in Ottawa, and this is yet another example. However, this American would be remiss is he did not remind readers that we certainly owed Canada in this case. n 1979, when Iranian “students” sacked our embassy in Teheran, they held dozens of Americans captive for 444 days, finally releasing them on the day Ronald Reagan was inaugurated into office. A handful managed to escape in the chaos of the first hours of the attack, however, and they made their way to the Canadian Embassy.
It may seem a small thing now, with the passage of time, but the Canadians had no reason to believe that the Iranians would not attack them next in any event, and certainly giving sanctuary to Americans would have sent the mobs screaming towards their gates. Regardless of the risk, they quietly sheltered the Americans while they scrambled to provide false travel papers identifying them as Canadians. They eventually brought them home to the US.
Their embassy risked their lives to get our people out of a war zone. The Canadians acted courageously in the face of Islamicist mob rule to protect and rescue Americans. I’m delighted that we had the opportunity to finally return the gesture in kind, and so we can say to Mr. Harper and all of Canada that we remember 1979. We will never forget it.

The Fukuyama Two-Step

Francis Fukuyama has made headlines once again for abandoning the neoconservativism that he once espoused. His change of heart came, he says, when he attended a speech two years ago that treated the Iraq War as an unqualified success, and realized that he had nothing in common with this movement. Interestingly, it’s taken him a while to come public with this information — say, just about the time that public support for the war has ebbed — and he does so just as his new book is being released.
Of course, Fukuyama has every right to change his mind, as well as be stunningly and laughably wrong, such as when he insisted that we had come to the “end of history” fifteen years ago. What he lacks is an honest rendition of why he changed his mind, as Charles Krauthammer (the man who spoke at that fateful event in 2004) insists that he never said the Iraq war was an “unqualified success”, and that the speech wasn’t even about the war:

It was, as the hero tells it, his Road to Damascus moment. There he is, in a hall of 1,500 people he has long considered to be his allies, hearing the speaker treat the Iraq war, nearing the end of its first year, as “a virtually unqualified success.” He gasps as the audience enthusiastically applauds. Aghast to discover himself in a sea of comrades so deluded by ideology as to have lost touch with reality, he decides he can no longer be one of them.
And thus did Francis Fukuyama become the world’s most celebrated ex-neoconservative, a well-timed metamorphosis that has brought him a piece of the fame that he once enjoyed 15 years ago as the man who declared, a mite prematurely, that history had ended.
A very nice story. It appears in the preface to Fukuyama’s post-neocon coming out, “America at the Crossroads.” On Sunday it was repeated on the front page of the New York Times Book Review in Paul Berman’s review.
I happen to know something about this story, as I was the speaker whose 2004 Irving Kristol lecture to the American Enterprise Institute Fukuyama has now brought to prominence. I can therefore testify that Fukuyama’s claim that I attributed “virtually unqualified success” to the war is a fabrication.

Ever since this nugget of information appeared in the New York Times’ book review of Fukuyama’s new book, people have pulled a similar citation in the New Yorker out as a demonstration of the sorry state of the war. One of the resident liberals here at CQ did so last night for the thread on the latest “revelation” that the US and UK had decided to end the twelve-year quagmire on Iraq in 2003, one way or another. For some reason, Fukuyama has suddenly developed unassailable credibility with the left.
Krauthammer dismantles Fukuyama’s credibility in one article, complete with a link to the original speech. Since it aired on CSPAN and has long been published at the American Enterprise Institute, Fukuyama’s assertion can easily be checked. Try checking the references for Iraq and success, separately or together, and one will find that Fukuyama has made this story up out of whole cloth. As Krauthammer says, the speech discusses what he sees as four schools of thought for foreign policy. He winds up supporting “democratic realism”, a meld between Wilsonianism and muscular engagement that treats the UN as only one avenue for democratizing the world, and a minor one at that.
It’s a fascinating speech and an excellent look at our varying efforts in foreign policy and a defense of the current direction of the administration. Krauthammer makes the case that we have tried the other schools and have achieved no lasting stability and have increased the capacity for violence by turning a blind eye to despots like Saddam. He also argues that the existence of WMD in a post-Cold War era requires pre-emptive action, as mutually-assured destruction means nothing to suicidal and/or asymmetrical foes such as Saddam or al-Qaeda. But what Krauthammer most assuredly did not argue was that the Iraq War was an unqualified success, or even speak much about the war at all.
What I find fascinating about Fukuyama’s folly is that history has proven him right in his initial stance. Using another link provided by Monkyboy, let’s review what the neocons said in early 1998, shortly before Bill Clinton and Congress made regime change our national policy:

The policy of “containment” of Saddam Hussein has been steadily eroding over the past several months. As recent events have demonstrated, we can no longer depend on our partners in the Gulf War coalition to continue to uphold the sanctions or to punish Saddam when he blocks or evades UN inspections. Our ability to ensure that Saddam Hussein is not producing weapons of mass destruction, therefore, has substantially diminished. Even if full inspections were eventually to resume, which now seems highly unlikely, experience has shown that it is difficult if not impossible to monitor Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons production. The lengthy period during which the inspectors will have been unable to enter many Iraqi facilities has made it even less likely that they will be able to uncover all of Saddam’s secrets. As a result, in the not-too-distant future we will be unable to determine with any reasonable level of confidence whether Iraq does or does not possess such weapons.
Such uncertainty will, by itself, have a seriously destabilizing effect on the entire Middle East. It hardly needs to be added that if Saddam does acquire the capability to deliver weapons of mass destruction, as he is almost certain to do if we continue along the present course, the safety of American troops in the region, of our friends and allies like Israel and the moderate Arab states, and a significant portion of the world’s supply of oil will all be put at hazard. As you have rightly declared, Mr. President, the security of the world in the first part of the 21st century will be determined largely by how we handle this threat.

Now, after the fall of Baghdad, we know that our UN “partners” France and Russia busily enriched themselves by Saddam’s bribery. We know that the UN put billions into Saddam’s pockets while the humanitarian aid the money ostensibly provided never existed. The Russians provided military intelligence to Saddam as well as materiel even while American troops approached Baghdad. Far from being “contained”, Saddam felt convinced he could ride the sanctions out and restart his WMD programs, a conclusion that Charles Duelfer reached in his final report and which new intelligence bears out.
Containment had failed; Fukuyama and the other signers were right. One can argue about tactics and timing, but the need to remove Saddam from power was obvious in 1998, and obvious in a bipartisan way, and 9/11 showed we could not afford to wait for him to die and his sons to take over. Saddam had played footsie with AQ and other terrorist groups too long to ignore the threat and to wait until they attacked again.
So why change his mind now? Only Fukuyama knows that. One thing is certain: the fairy tale he shared with his readers isn’t the reason, and until he makes a better accounting of himself, I’d say that Fukuyama’s reached the end of his history as a credible voice on foreign affairs.
UPDATE: Tom Maguire tallies up the scorecard and comes up with a closer game, but still says Fukuyama and the Times have some ‘splaining to do.