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Fazendo a recensão do State of Denial, o novo livro de Bob Woodward sobre os Americanos no Iraque, escreve Jonathan Sumption na edição de hoje de The Spectator:

What Woodward does convey extremely well is a political community in which major foreign policy decisions are made in light of purely American considerations, with remarkably little information about the rest of the world. The problem about the invasion of Iraq is that it was conceived by men who knew no history but their own, and not much of that. The lesson is that to dominate a distant country you need a profound understanding of its past. To know whether it is worth dominating, you need a fund of vicarious experience which only history can supply. In the age of jets and telephones, the only worth-while reason for having a professional diplomatic service is that it contains people who know about these things. But, of course, you have to listen to them.