Francis Fukuyama Trips Flux Capacitor

Nothing frustrates more than seeing someone, not only come to a realization that he ought to have arrived at years ago, but seeing the realization accompanied by wonderment, pride, and even accolades.

Francis Fukuyama has given us just such an event: in the Wall Street Journal, in article reproduced in slighty different form on the American Interest website (http://the-american-interest.com/contd/?p=605), Fukuyama announces to the world that the U.S. loses the hearts and minds of the world's poor to extremist organizations because a) the extremists provide social services and the U.S. doesn't and b) because, when the U.S. does try to provide such services, it screws up, having lost its know-how since the Reagan administartion gutted domestic service programs.

Over on bloggingheadsTV, Robert Wright hails Fukuyama's insight with his mightiest hyperbole: "Frank's potentially world-saving op-ed" (http://bloggingheads.tv/video.php?id=199&cid=996).

Wright should have praised Fukuyama instead for his discovery of time travel. Look at the startling revelation Fukuyama affords us: "Organizations like Hezbollah and Hamas do not merely lobby the government to provide social services; they run schools and clinics directly." That's why they--and Chavez in Venezuela and the Muslim Brotherhood, etc.--win elections, Francis reveals.

If only we had known! Perhaps something could have been done! But it takes years to figure out something as complex as the idea that giving people medicine, education, blankets, clean water, and the like tends to endear them to you. Fukuyama himself no doubt had to focus much study on, for example, the following passage from an Agence France Press article hidden from public view in the year 1996: "In the Shiite southern suburbs of Beirut, home to Hezbollah's political, medical and social services, the movement is still active after a series of helicopter attacks on its buildings and the homes of Hezbollah leaders."

"Social services"--what could it mean? Well; a body could wait a year for another clue from Indigo Publications' Intelligence Newsletter: the paper reported that Iran would be increasing Hezbollah's funding from 80 to 100 million dollars, which "will enable Hezbollah to lay on additional welfare and social services, improving its posture vis a vis its "brother-enemies," Nabih Berri's Amal movement."

Again, these maddeningly mysterious words: welfare? social? services?

It would take four years for the Toronto Star to break the story:

In this shabby, Shiite Muslim suburb of Beirut, and in many similar neighbourhoods, the organization best known in the West for indiscriminately raining rockets on settlements in northern Israel [Hezbollah] is the primary source of drinking water, high-quality television programming and a broad range of social services.

Drinking water, eh? Maybe there's something to that...

Fortunately, now, six years after that groundbreaking report, Fukuyama's Rand Corporation-enhanced noodle has found the key: hospitals, schools, food--this crap works. People seem to like it--and, even better, we can produce this stuff, too. Or, at least, we used to be able to.

What takes Fukuyama's insight even further over the top is that it doesn't merely ignore the fact that even the mainstream media has known about this for years; no; his piece seems to suggest that the extremists themselves hardly recognize the reason for their own efficacy. The U.S. has only to offer its own programs in a sort of competitive market of social services, and liberal democracy will win the day.

It's as if he's gone back in time to 1985, to get in on the market that Hezbollah was then establishing. As if it weren't already far, far too late to merely compete for the poor's affections. As if just a little more pressure on the accelerator of that Delorean would save, as Robert Wright suggests, not just democracy in the West, but the whole world, Marty.