March 16 (Bloomberg) -- The sound of people scuttling away from the war in Iraq has become deafening. Those who admit to supporting the invasion are getting as scarce on the ground as those who own up to voting for Richard Nixon.

Francis Fukuyama, the Johns Hopkins professor who wrote ``The End of History and the Last Man,'' joins the stampede in ``America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy'' (Yale, 226 pages, $25).

The book marks a startling denunciation, from a leading conservative theorist, of the neoconservative thinking that underpinned the Bush administration's decision to go to war. The title on the U.K. edition, ``After the Neocons'' (Profile, 12.99 pounds), tells the story. Fukuyama is jettisoning neoconservatism and saying, in essence: ``Don't blame me for the fiasco in Iraq. People misinterpreted my work.''

Fukuyama once took a hard line on Iraq, signing a 1998 letter that urged U.S. President Bill Clinton to use America's diplomatic, political and military might to remove Saddam Hussein from power. He changed his mind, he says, when he took part in a post-9/11 study on the U.S. strategy for combating terrorism.

``It was at this point that I finally decided the war didn't make much sense,'' he writes.

Iraqi Switzerland

Fukuyama is a scrupulously fair scholar. He doesn't shy from stating the case against himself. ``The End of History,'' after all, was an influential neoconservative text. The 1992 bestseller argued that democratic liberal capitalism was the best social and economic system and that all countries would eventually adopt it.

Steadfast defense of that system won the Cold War. So what's wrong, asked Bush administration neocons, with invading Iraq and creating a Switzerland with palm trees along the Tigris? Wouldn't it be just another step on the march toward history's end?

No, says Fukuyama. Many people think ``The End of History'' argues that ``there is a universal hunger for liberty in all people that will inevitably lead them to liberal democracy and that we are living in the midst of an accelerating, transnational movement in favor of liberal democracy,'' he says. ``This is a misreading of the argument.''

What he actually said, Fukuyama explains, was that people want to ``live in a modern society.'' Though modernization will lead to liberal democracy in the end, the path will be a crooked one, he says. You can't get there in a straight line.

`Leninist' Bush

Neocons in the Bush administration bent his theories to their own purposes, embarking on what political scientist Ken Jowitt calls a ``Leninist'' foreign policy designed to drive history in a certain direction.

``I did not like the original version of Leninism,'' Fukuyama notes acidly, ``and was skeptical when the Bush administration turned Leninist.''

You don't win friends in the Republican Party by comparing President George W. Bush to the Bolshevik with the pointy beard. Yet the comparison is valid. Unlike Marx, who believed that the global adoption of communism was inevitable, Lenin insisted on helping it along, with massive violence if necessary. Similarly, Fukuyama believes liberal democracy is inevitable, while Bush's neocons seek to promote it with tanks.

The difference between the two positions may sound academic. Far from it. A gulf separates them, with important consequences.

Fewer Black Hawks

Consider some arguments on the political left in the early 20th century: You had Bolshevism, giving history a shove, which led to the horrors of Stalinism and the Soviet Union. You also had European social democracy, which led to countries such as Sweden. From small theoretical differences big chasms can grow.

In places, Fukuyama's conclusion that other neocons misunderstood their own creed sounds too convenient. That said, the professor has undertaken an important task.

Fukuyama doesn't want the mission of spreading democracy to be buried, like a corpse in the Baghdad rubble, in this one military misadventure. He calls for a gentler form of fostering democracy abroad, one that goes easier on the Black Hawks.

Unfortunately for Fukuyama, many of his natural ideological allies don't recognize how much damage the Iraq war has done to their cause. The job of rescuing American conservatism from the Iraqi disaster promises to be a long, difficult slog.

To contact the writer of this story: Matthew Lynn in London at matthewlynn@bloomberg.net .