G'day all,
Item: From yesterday's Lehrer panelwank: "If we're gonna do this right ...
aircraft, a naval presence, and ground troops ... we're not talking surgical
strikes ... 10 000 bin Laden terrorists in 50 countries ... ".
Item: NATO, for the first time in its history, invokes a collective defence
clause to support the United States, offering Washington automatic military
support on grounds that a strike on one alliance member was an attack on them
all.
Item: Koizumi's deputy press secretary Tsutomu Himeno tells us, "In the
conversation, the Prime Minister is expected to express thatJapan, as an
allied country, will support President Bush's stance to resolutely fight
against terrorism".
Item: The European Union: "We will spare no effort to help identify, bring to
justice and punish
those responsible," EU foreign ministers said in a strongly worded statement
after an emergency meeting in Brussels.
Item: Vladimir Putin, who has an internationally unpopular war to fight in
Chechnya, and is suddenly said to suspect bin Laden sits behind the
nationalists, urges the world to go to war against terrorism.
Item: A story is going around that Rumsfeld has had a video distributed to US
military units around the world, in which he tells his breathless audience
that they're about to become a new generation of war heroes.
Is it just me, or are we all about to embark on a murderous adventure, that
will make the ghastly bodycount in New York look like an aperitif in a
thimble; that will split the Middle East apart at the seams, that will induce
civil war in Turkey (and maybe Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordon), and that will
create martyrs by the thousand and mujihadeen children by the planeload?
Cheers,
Rob.
