"Alan Johnson: You recently reviewed Francis Fukuyama's new book, America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power and the Neoconservative Legacy. I found it an excellent book in many ways, but I did feel there was an element of that going on. Islamism seemed to disappear from view…

Paul Berman: …ideas disappeared from view! That's also true of The End of History. Fukuyama wants to talk about structures – economic structures, social structures, psychological structures. He systematically neglects the independent role of ideas. I think he is typical of many modern thinkers. We have a real problem. Bush thinks that force, inadequately deployed, plus advertising in a kind of Madison Avenue spirit, is enough. On the other hand Bush's opponents seem to agree with him that there is nothing to argue about. Bush's critics are not talking about movements animated by ideas either."
http://www.democratiya.com/interview.asp?issueid=5
[linked from http://michaeltotten.com/]

Some more if you like:
"Alan Johnson: Joshua Micah Marshall argued that you 'inflate the threat of Islamist violence—and particularly its intellectual stakes—to levels beyond what they merit and to force them into a template of an earlier era'.. The charge is that you seek to 'lay the template of fascism and anti-fascist commitment onto the current reality of fanatical Islamic terrorism and Arab nationalist authoritarianism' and that this distorts. In his view, while the existential threat of a terror network getting a WMD is real enough, Islamism is 'hardly the kind of ideological or political threat that great totalitarianisms posed a half a century ago'. You offer, he claims, a dangerous grandiosity and 'the distorting prism of our grandparents' world'. How do you respond?

Paul Berman: The threat from the radical Islamists is different from the threat from Nazis and Communists, yes. And it's obviously the case that Ahmadinejad's fantasy that the whole world will convert to Islam has a singularly unconvincing quality. But we face terrorism of a nihilist kind, different to anything we have faced before. Brezhnev was never going to launch a nuclear war out of destructive zeal (though perhaps we delude ourselves in thinking that the cold war had to end in the peaceful way that it did end). Look, if you got up tomorrow morning and learnt that a gigantic bomb had destroyed a major capital in the western world you would not be surprised. You would be horrified but you would not be surprised. Now, if we all know that millions of people could be killed tomorrow then we make a big mistake in thinking we are not facing an existential threat. Some may respond by saying 'well, there is no desire to kill millions of people'. But there is such a desire. We know the goal of the 1993 Trade Center bombing was to topple the buildings over on their side, and, by setting off a domino effect, to kill 250,000 people. They admitted that. What's standing between that kind of intention and mass killing, apart from our security systems, is just the failure thus far of those who hold the intention to come up with a clever-enough idea to achieve it. It seems to me we can't bank on that lack of imagination for long."

There is much more to read, so check it out.