Commentary magazine’s managing editor, Gary Rosen, in the introduction to an anthology he edited called “The Right War? The Conservative Debate on Iraq” (Cambridge University Press), notes that, amid attention given to liberal unhappiness over the Bush Doctrine, what has been often overlooked is “the extent to which it has divided the right as well.”

An hour-long program last week addressed these divisions, as a panel convened at the Council on Foreign Relations, where Johns Hopkins University professor Francis Fukuyama joined Mr. Rosen and Weekly Standard editor William Kristol. The moderator was Alliance Capital Management vice chairman Roger Hertog, an owner of The New York Sun.

Mr. Fukuyama was asked first whether bringing democracy to the Middle East made sense and was doable, and whether deposing Saddam Hussein was the right first step in this direction. “Well, that’s easy,” he said, “No, no, and no.” Asked to elaborate, he did: “This was an extraordinarily ambitious social engineering project undertaken in a part of the world that we frankly didn’t really understand terribly well.”

Mr. Kristol opened by saying, “Bush didn’t just wake up one day and decide to democratize the Middle East.” But “9/11 happened, and the president made the fundamental judgment, which I agree with, that the status quo was unacceptable.”

Mr. Kristol said the status quo had produced an increasing amount of extremism, terrorism, and anti-Americanism, “including a radicalization of the Muslims of Europe that is not trivially unrelated to the Saudi export of Wahabi Islam and the funding of that in European capitals from the Middle East.” He summed up President Bush’s view as follows: “You could not imagine going into the 21st century just letting things go as they were going in the Middle East.”

Mr. Fukuyama countered by saying there were “two distinct threats”: Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. “We launched a pre-emptive war aiming at the wrong target.”

Mr. Kristol said he was moderately optimistic, predicting, “We are going to end up with a reasonable outcome in Iraq.” He said, “We’re going to end up, I believe, with a pluralist, more or less democratic, non-weapons-of-mass-destruction-developing, non-terrorist sponsoring state in Iraq, which has already had healthy consequences else where in the Middle East.”

Mr. Fukuyama did not share this view. He said Iraq was at best going to “limp along as an extremely weak state,” the kind that would provide a base or haven for terrorism.

During the question-and-answer session, James Traub from the New York Times Magazine asked Mr. Kristol if his positive scenario really would happen, given evidence that an increasing portion of the American public seems to want to withdraw troops and that an increasing number of Iraqis seem to not want us there.

Mr. Kristol replied that rapid withdrawal of American troops would be disastrous. And he disagreed with part of the question: “I don’t think more Iraqis want us to go,” he said, adding that 80% of Iraqis basically want us to stay and win.

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MOMENTS WITH MILLER Rutgers University professor Colin McGinn spoke last week with author and director Jonathan Miller at a program hosted by Columbia University’s Heyman Center for the Humanities. Discussing atheism, Mr. Miller said his recent three-part BBC series on disbelief is unlikely to be aired in America: “PBS will simply not consider it.”

One show Americans can see is his film version of Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” starring Kevin Spacey. In that production, which was made in the 1980s, Mr. Miller used overlapping dialogue to cut about one-and-a-half-hours off the production time. Speaking generally about “Long Day’s Journey,” he added to audience laughter, “People have confused its title with its running time.”

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OVERHEARD Interior designer Jamie Drake said his next project, which will be completed in fall 2006, will be decorating a duplex apartment in Paris’s 16th arrondissement. The Knickerbocker caught up with him as he was signing copies of his book “New American Glamour” (Bulfinch) at a reception celebrating Lenox Hill Neighborhood House’s 18th annual holiday bazaar.

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SPEAKING OF CELEBRATION Allen Salken hosted a recent signing at Barnes and Noble of his book “Festivus: The Holiday for the Rest of Us” (Warner Books), about a nondenominational holiday popularized by an episode on the television show “Seinfeld.” The holiday features an aluminum pole for decoration, an airing of grievances among friends and family, and is followed by feats of strength, including pinning the head of the family to the ground.

Jerry Stiller, who played Frank Costanza on “Seinfeld,” made a guest appearance at the signing. His wife, comedian Anne Meara, joked, “What am I doing here? I thought I was being taken out to dinner.”

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LIGHTS OUT At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Ricky Jay gave a lecture Tuesday on magicians and spiritual mediums. The audience laughed when he recounted artist George Cruickshank’s view that the most obvious reason to doubt the existence of ghosts was that they came to us fully dressed.