You have to love all the attention being paid to apostate neoconservative Francis Fukuyama. No doubt many neoconservatives, such as Richard Perle, are looking at the first four letters in Fukuyama’s name and thinking: “Exactly!”

So Mr. Fuku has a piece in today’s Wall Street Journal that rips to shreds the Bush administration’s obsession with what it calls democracy in the Middle East. It’s a piece that is full of all of the sorts of woolly-minded arguments that real conservatives make, but still, it has some good points.

Fuku wants to separate fighting Islamist terrorists from promoting democracy, and he notes that the war in Iraq has not exactly created a promised land that other inhabitants of the Middle East want to get to:

Many would-be opponents of regimes in places like Syria and Iran now say they’d prefer the status quo to the situation the Iraqis are in. …To put it mildly the Iraq war has not increased the prestige of the U.S. and American ideas like liberal democracy in the Middle East.