LUIS FOIX ESCRIBE sobre la jubilación de Bill Emmott, el director de The Economist (si no estáis registrados, en su blog tiene una versión casi idéntica):

Dice Emmott en su despedida que muchos lectores se escandalizarán pero que la defensa de la guerra de Iraq en sus editoriales estaba bien fundamentada. Y que no tiene por qué revisar la posición del semanario antes de marzo del 2003. Otra cosa es, dice, que el desarrollo de la invasión y guerra de Iraq hayan sido un auténtico desastre para los iraquíes, para Oriente Medio, para Estados Unidos y Gran Bretaña y para el mundo. Entre las opciones malas y las opciones peores, a veces hay que optar por las malas, dice.

Y esto es lo que realmente escribió Emmott:

1993 was also the year of the first attempt by al-Qaeda to blow up the World Trade Centre in New York, a failure that was followed by murderous successes in East Africa, Yemen and elsewhere, culminating in the atrocity of September 11th 2001. The West left Afghanistan alone in the misery of its sovereignty, which provided a home for Osama bin Laden and his training camps. Meanwhile it dealt with the legacy of the first Gulf war against Saddam Hussein by trying to use sanctions and no-fly zones to contain him, and UN inspectors to police his weapons ambitions. That process led to alarming discoveries, to bombing raids that killed Iraqi civilians, to the deaths of perhaps half a million Iraqi children, to the maintenance of America's air bases in Saudi Arabia, to a deterioration of the West's reputation in the Muslim world—and to Saddam and his sons remaining comfortably in power.

All of which is the background to the most controversial decision of this editorship: the decision to support the American-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003. Our reasoning began with the fact that the status quo was terrible: doing nothing, whether about Iraq or about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, was itself a deadly decision. It went on to the risk that Saddam still had a stock of weapons of mass destruction that if left in power he might wish to use or to sell. In the light of September 11th and the dismal results from 13 years of sanctions, we argued that wishful thinking about Saddam would be reckless. The West should invade, remove him from power, and throw its considerable resources behind the rebuilding of a free Iraq.

The ensuing three years, I hardly need to say, have seen a debacle. His WMDs turned out to be a bluff, fooling even his own generals. Elections have been held, a constitution has been written, but no government is in place. Institutions remain in tatters. Whether or not a civil war is under way is largely a semantic issue. Dozens of Iraqis are dying every day, killed by other Iraqis. So does this prove our decision wrong, just as the good outcome in ex-Yugoslavia put our “stumbling” warning in the shade?

This will outrage some readers, but I still think the decision was correct—based on the situation at that time, which is all it could have been based on. The risk of leaving Saddam in power was too high. Outside intervention in other countries' affairs is difficult, practically, legally and morally. It should be done only in exceptional circumstances, and backed by exceptional efforts. Iraq qualified on the former. George Bush let us—and America—down on the latter. So, however, did other rich countries: whatever they thought of the invasion, they had a powerful interest in sorting out the aftermath. Most shirked it.

The only argument against our decision that seems to me to have force is that a paper whose scepticism about government drips from every issue should have been sceptical about Mr Bush's government and its ability to do things properly in Iraq. This is correct: we should have been, and we were. But when the choice is between bad options and worse ones, a choice must still be made. Great enterprises can fail—but they fail twice over if they take away our moral courage and prevent us from rising to the next challenge.

Ahora decidme si lo que escribe Foix es una representación veraz de esto.