G'day all, Well, it's clearly been decided that the decisive rump of us don't require itemised evidence before our polities enter a war. It also seems that the UN has been well and truly been put in its place; America has a convenient complex of bilateral arrangements in place now, and the ever problematic Security Council is unlikely to be invited back to relevance any time soon. Everything has gone, and is going, swimmingly for bold Unca Sam (and his smirking head prefect at Westminster) - the opportunity has been grasped, and the hegemon dominates more directly than ever before. Of course, nothing's for free; and this campaign had better go well, or be presented as going well, as the authors and henchmen in this adventure are there to be identified and held accountable (across a range of electorates, election schedules, economic vulnerabilities and cultural commitments to Anglo-Saxons). No UN to kick around any more, and no UN to ameliorate any tensions that might pop up as this 'war' against a methodology starts producing real body parts, expenses, uncertainty in real places - and then there are those inevitable little questions about 'exit strategies' still to come ...
I'm staying up to listen to The Prefect, as I want to know what a declaration of war in the absence of an actual enemy sounds like. Then another fifty points off the Fed rate a couple of hours after that, in the hope that just because negative real rates didn't do a thing in Japan for years doesn't mean it won't spontaneously create profitability and investment opportunities in America ... and then what? Oh, Blair's on - a moving human interest angle followed by a familiar war-to-end-all-wars refrain ... heh, heh, he's saying 'the fundamentals of the British, US and European economies are strong', now. Is there no end to the man's cheek? And now proof, er, evidence, er, suspicions, er, apparently we're to be in no doubt it's ObL. Well, that's alright, then. Oh, and as we know the Taliban are bad, we 'should seek to destroy' them - no proof of culpability, then - still they 'didn't respond to the ultimatum' and they're 'every bit as guilty' Still, they didn't respond to the ultimatum. Well, that's alright, then. 'We will do all we humanly can to avoid civilian casualties, *but* ... there is no point of understanding ... no compromise is possible'. And, inevitably, hitching one's wagon to an amorphous focusless war, with an impossible stated objective (to end terrorism), is framed as the only alternative to complete inaction. Not quite a declaration of war, but as penultimate as it gets, I thought, and all Afghanistan is in the crosshairs. As there are rumours that ObL is now hiding in Kabul, that 'proportionate and targeted' bit might be a tad problematic. Don't know what I'd do, either, mind, but, all the same, I'd like to know what I was doing before I did it ... Cheers, Rob.
