Was Barack Obama, then just an Illinois state senator, wrong back in 2002 when he thought that an invasion of Iraq would only “fan the flames of the Middle East and encourage the worst, rather than the best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of Al-Qaida”? Did vice-president Richard Cheney see things more clearly when he promised that US troops would be “welcomed as liberators”? Yet now it is Cheney who dares to accuse Obama of being a traitor and a fool in Iraq, (...)

The current national borders of the Middle East, as redrawn almost a century ago after the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, have been a fiction for decades. And no one knows what new state shapes may emerge.

President Cristina Kirchner must stand down later this year, yet the approach she and her late husband sustained for a decade may outlive their personal supervision.