> But is getting those poor grunts torn apart for their imperialist masters' > folly a
defensible cause for the left?
Complex and surreal though all this seems, I think the issue for the left really is as simple as you make it out to be, yoldas. We're anti-war, not anti-grunt. Simple. And to come down on the grunts (disproportionately poor and coloured, no doubt) is not only morally dodgy but is to make a rod for our backs, both now and down the track. If a mission's target is not to go in and get al-Qa'ida terrorists (it's already easy to forget that this is the purported point of all this), it is dishonestly to risk lives for hidden reasons. If such missions are unforeseeable, the 'war' itself is dishonestly to destroy lives for hidden reasons. Indeed, now that dams and electricity infrastructure are being pasted, we're approximating war crime magnitudes.
> Bear in mind that world opinion has swung sharply against this war and that
> the US is alone (except for Israel, which is not a party) from now on.
Don't forget poor li'l lapdoggie Oz! We've stuck our oar in big-time (as a proportion of our defence capacity, anyway), we've done it unconditionally and for the duration, we've done it without positing any agenda of our own, and today we were all declared subject to Jihad by the Taliban.
> Why not just stick to a morally unambiguous and simple opposition to this
> imperialist war when you have the whole world on your side?
Absolutely. America has few natural allies in this nonsense (upon which, no doubt, the WTC murderers had precisely reckoned - although elite Anglo Saxon solidarity is not to be underestimated, I suppose), and we should not forget how precarious was the anti-Yugoslav alliance, when it became clear that everyone but Milo and his goons was taking the heat.
As for the dams and electricity plants;. this always happens with these protracted air bombardments - the targets run out, and new ones have to be conjured to give the appearance of an ongoing strategy while the brass just fret and hope. Already it's basic public infrastructure. And with Afghanisatan's harsh winter but weeks away, Washington is flirting with mass murder, an international PR nightmare, and, quite possibly, gale-force blowback.
Did anyone else hear that Northern Alliance soldier chatting to his Taliban pal by radio during today's bombing? Laughing he was - as the bombs exploded around his ears - and his sworn enemy laughing warmly with him. If the Anglos do go in mob-handed, they'd better give the impression of winning very quickly indeed, or they'll find every rifle in Afghanistan pointed at them.
And if it turns out that ObL has indeed been dead since the sixteenth, well, I've no idea how Washington is gonna talk itself out of that one ... has anyone seen even a skerrick on that rumour in mainstream Western media? I haven't.
Cheers, Rob.
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