174) What if?: uma pequena guerra nuclear no Oriente Médio?

Niall Ferguson é um historiador britânico, atualmente em Harvard (assim como o Brasil exporta futebolistas, um dos principais itens de exportação da Grã-Bretanha são historiadores, e os EUA são importadores de cérebros de todo o resto do planeta).
Ele coordenou o livro Virtual History, um dos melhores exemplos do gênero "what if?" que se conhece.
No artigo abaixo, que não é exatamente de história virtual, mas de especulação antecipatória, ele imagina o cenário de uma possível guerra de aniquilamento recíproco entre o Irã e Israel, levando os EUA de roldão no caldeirão do Iraque...

The Daily Telegraph(January 15, 2006)
"The origins of the Great War of 2007 - and how it could have been prevented"
Niall Ferguson

Are we living through the origins of the next world war? Certainly, it is easy to imagine how a future historian might deal with the next phase of events in the Middle East:

With every passing year after the turn of the century, the instability of the Gulf region grew. By the beginning of 2006, nearly all the combustible ingredients for a conflict - far bigger in its scale and scope than the wars of 1991 or 2003 - were in place.
(...)
The devastating nuclear exchange of August 2007 represented not only the failure of diplomacy, it marked the end of the oil age. Some even said it marked the twilight of the West. Certainly, that was one way of interpreting the subsequent spread of the conflict as Iraq's Shi'ite population overran the remaining American bases in their country and the Chinese threatened to intervene on the side of Teheran.
Yet the historian is bound to ask whether or not the true significance of the 2007-2011 war was to vindicate the Bush administration's original principle of pre-emption. For, if that principle had been adhered to in 2006, Iran's nuclear bid might have been thwarted at minimal cost. And the Great Gulf War might never have happened.

Niall Ferguson is Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University.

Leiam a íntegra neste link.

O jornal O Estado de São Paulo publicou esse artigo em versão traduzida na edição de 19 de janeiro de 2006.