[No, and it gets worse the more you ponder the implications of our military action. This is from Jonathan Freedland's column in the Guardian:]
... this war is truly a no-war situation. To capture and put Bin Laden on trial would be to create a focus for Islamist anger, and to further inflate his legend. Killing him would create a martyr whose death would have to be gruesomely avenged. Alive he would carry on wreaking murderous havoc. Every option is a victory for him and defeat for us.
And so even I, who hold no brief for knee-jerk anti-Americanism or knee-jerk pacifism, am left feeling deeply ambivalent about this war. I wonder if it will pass the basic, Blairite test - what's best is what works - or if it is about to make a grievous problem even worse. I worry that we may have played directly into Bin Laden's hands, following a script he's been dreaming up these last five years - inadvertently proving that America and Islam are locked in an epic clash of civilisations after all. I wonder if it would have been smarter to have taken out the men of the al-Qaida network one by one, quietly and in the dead of night, rather than giving Osama bin Laden this spectacular war he craves.
I wonder if he is not celebrating in that cave of his - celebrating the war he has already won.
[See http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,5673,566754,00.html]
Carl
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