Digby, clipped from Glenn Greenwald's blog, with some insightful points, I think.

Neoconservative author Francis Fukuyama felt that with the fall of our last great opponent at the end of the Cold War (see Pax Americana), American men were doomed to fail to live up to the Western-Frontier-era ideal of masculinity. In other words, peace is for wussies. This idea worried him so much that he wrote an entire book on the subject — The End of History and the Last Man — which was held by an important few warmongers in Washington to be the perfect moral prescription to find new enemies with which to wage continuous war.

True warmongers are called such, because they start wars... The Cold War was a term, there was no actual war happening between US and USSR, so it doesn't make much sense why the masculinity was there even though there was no war and now that there actually is a war - the masculinity is gone? Doesn't quite fit.

Au contraire, RS, the Cold War was, in Fukuyama's arguments, the Sine Qua Non of the defining, masculine fight for existence against the evil, mortal enemy of the Soviet Union. Unfortunately for you, the conservative establishment agreed with him; the book was a huge best-seller, it was lauded in conservative think-tanks, and Fukuyama shot to superstardom as one of America's top intellectuals.

(Sometimes I feel from your responses you sometimes don't read anything besides the clip titles and comments and miss the real content. Meh.)

Sometimes you're right But just because 'conservative establishment' agrees with the guy, doesn't mean I will. I don't tug the one side blindly, like some here do... that's what the old brain is for.

I liked "Why we fight".