O Intermitente<br> (So long, farewell, auf weidersehen, good-bye)

O Intermitente
(So long, farewell, auf weidersehen, good-bye)

quinta-feira, novembro 06, 2003

Encarar a Realidade

Um dos colunistas do Arab News, perante as evidências, alterou a sua posição quanto à intervenção no Iraque.

One need offer no apology for saying that the supreme virtue of this war is that Saddam Hussein was gotten rid of. Period. The very man who had established arguably the closest approximation of a genuine fascist state in the Arab world, that sustained itself on fear, repression, genocide, cult of personality and wanton murder - a state whose law was that those who rule are the law.

One doesn't become a revisionist in a vacuum. I pore over material from various media sources about the mass graves unearthed all over Iraq, particularly those discovered in uncounted pits in the south, where Saddam had crushed a rebellion there in 1991 with genocidal ferocity, and I turn away in nauseated disbelief. Then there's the UN Special Rapporteur's September 2001 report about the execution of 4,000 prisoners at Abu Ghraib?s prison in 1984, and 3,000 others at the Mahjar prison between 1993 and 1998. And you ask how a regime could become so monstrous, so whisked clean of human decency.

(...)

[T]he US may, just may, end up doing in Iraq what it did in war-ravaged European countries under the Marshall Plan. And if it doesn't, well, what would Iraqis have lost other than the ritual terror of life under a dictator who had splintered their society into raw fragments of fear, hysteria and self-denial - a man who insisted that third graders learn songs whose lyrics lauded him with lines such as "when he passes near, the roses celebrate".

No, I don't believe that by going to war, America had dark designs on Iraq?s oil or pursued an equally dark conspiracy to "help Israel". I believe that the US, perhaps willy-nilly, will end up helping Iraqis regain their human sanity, their social composure and the national will to rebuild their devastated nation.

And no, it's not too early to adopt a revisionist view of the US war in Iraq, or too late for a columnist to say he was wrong all along.

posted by Miguel Noronha 11:58 da manhã

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"A society that does not recognize that each individual has values of his own which he is entitled to follow can have no respect for the dignity of the individual and cannot really know freedom."
F.A.Hayek

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