Autor: William Kristol

Los retos que estos eventos plantean son representativos de aquellos a los que todas las naciones civilizadas se enfrentan. No son tan complicados. Para abordarlos no hace falta una extraordinaria delicadeza de pensamiento o la exquisita elevación del alma. Basta con el sentido común y el valor.

Los retos que estos eventos plantean son representativos de aquellos a los que todas las naciones civilizadas se enfrentan. No son tan complicados. Para abordarlos no hace falta una extraordinaria delicadeza de pensamiento o la exquisita elevación del alma. Basta con el sentido común y el valor.

Last week, a group of tribal leaders in Salah-ad-Din, the mostly Sunni province due north of Baghdad, agreed to work with the Iraqi government and U.S. forces against al Qaeda. Then al Qaeda destroyed the two remaining minarets of the al-Askariya mosque in Samarra, a city in the province. Coincidence? Perhaps.

The war over the war in Washington is quiet for the moment. Congress has finally appropriated funds for America's warriors without setting a deadline for their defeat. Now the president can turn his undivided attention to fighting the enemies who are attacking our soldiers.

Albert Wohlstetter, better than al-most any other American strategic thinker, understood Slobodan Mil-osevic, the Serbian dictator who died at The Hague where he was on trial for genocide. Writing in the Wall Street Journal in 1995, Wohl-stetter drew a direct line between Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and the Balkan butcher: 'The successful coalition in the Gulf War . . . left in place a Ba'ath dictatorship . . . .That told Slobodan Milosevic, who is not a slow learner, that the West would be even less likely . . . to stop his own overt use of the Yugoslav Fed-eral Army to create a Greater Serbia purged of non-Serbs.'

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton has returned from her visit to Iraq with a bold (if not entirely new) recommendation: Congress should vote to cap the number of U.S. forces the president can deploy to Iraq.

To say that this is not a new idea is an understatement. Donald Rumsfeld and top military officials have from the beginning of the occupation three years ago aimed to do precisely what the Baker-Hamilton group now recommends. In 2003, the Pentagon set a goal of reducing the forces from 130,000 to 30,000 by the end of the year, handing responsibility for Iraq to the newly formed Iraqi army.

El realismo en política exterior está en auge estos días, nos dicen. De ser cierto, sería alentador, porque nuestra política exterior tiene por fuerza que ser realista. Pero lo que hoy se presenta como «realismo» tiene muy poco que ver con la realidad.

Before coming to Washington, Abizaid had spent several days in Iraq, consulting with the military commanders on the ground. Considering the importance of this testimony and the effort Abizaid made to prepare for it, it is unfortunate that he offered an inadequate proposal for change in response to the deteriorating situation in Iraq.

El presidente tiene dos años para dar un vuelco a las cosas y dejar al próximo presidente un Irak viable. Debería ser obvio que 'mantener el curso' es la receta del fracaso. Lo mismo que las estrategias de salida políticamente encaminadas. Al presidente le queda la elección: abandonar, o hacer lo que sea necesario para tener éxito.