Madam, - It is time for all those lefties who were wrong to 'fess up, admit their errors and ship out to Steyn's Re-education Camp, where humble pie will to doled out to all. Or so Mark Steyn would have it (Opinion, March 7th).
But who really got it wrong? The ones who said a ramshackle dictatorship like Iraq was an immediate threat to the West? The ones who said there would be a square in Iraq in 2004 named after George W. Bush? The ones who forecast that cheering Iraqis would greet an invasion? Who proclaimed "mission accomplished" about five years too soon (at a minimum)?
And who is getting it wrong now, when a couple of demonstrations in Lebanon are hyped up as the dawn of a new era? Who is fooling themselves when Afghanistan is proclaimed as a "new democracy" on the strength of a single flawed election and then let slip back quietly into the hands of drug-dealing warlords?
Should we not be suspicious that Walid Jumblatt, the Lebanese Druze leader, suddenly sounds pro-American when that same man ferociously opposed American troops in the country during the Reagan era? Is it not likely that Middle Eastern leaders such as Gadafy have learned the wrong lesson form Saddam's fall, and have decided to enlist in "Freedom's March" only to strengthen their own positions? - Yours, etc.,
TOBY JOYCE, Balreask Manor, Navan, Co Meath.