STEYN, MARK
Na edição de 30 de Agosto da Spectator, Mark Steyn escreve:
”Iraq certainly has difficulties, beginning with an insufficient electrical capacity for its needs. The Americans have certainly made mistakes, not least in things they’re supposed to do well: their Iraqi media activities are pathetic. But the only way the US can lose is if the media sufficiently rattle the American people that they elect Howard Dean. That aside, there are merely degrees of victory. The barest minimum victory has already been won: Saddam is gone, his entire leadership is dead or in US custody, his sons have been killed, stuffed, mounted and embalmed by the same guy who did Al Gore’s make-up in the 2000 presidential debate. Even if America handed over to the UN now, Iraq’s next dictator would come to power in the shadow of the cautionary tale of his predecessor: catch our eye and you’re dead.
The next degree of victory has also been achieved: the war on terror has been repatriated. 2001: Islamists kill Americans in New York and Washington. 2003: Americans kill Islamists in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The next notch up is also certain: if the US concluded they couldn’t get a free democratic republic up and running in Iraq, they could settle for the least objectionable authoritarian and establish a critical military base in the western desert that would seriously limit Syria’s room for manoeuvre.
If these definitions of victory sound too stunted, it’s only because the Bush administration has by choice taken a gamble on a much longer shot: the belief that it is in the long-term security interests of the United States that a region with no culture of liberty undergo a profound transformation. If they pull it off, that will be the greatest victory of all, with the most benefits. If they don’t, it’s Iraq’s loss, not Washington’s. Either way, that question is never going to be settled in four months. And nobody ever said it was.”

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