> I claim there is no large green frog with purple eyes singing Mozart
> operas in the middle of the room.
That's because it's not a frog. It's a Eurolizard the size of Deutsche Bank, humming Beethoven's "Ode to Joy", wearing an ATTAC T-shirt the size of Elvis.
This just isn't Kosovo Part II, this is really Oklahoma City Part II, an attack by a bunch of Far Right thugs on the world. The evidence that al-Qaeda perpetrated S11 is credible -- lots of details are emerging in the normally reliable EU press about money-laundering, meetings with al-Qaeda agents, etc. They seem to have used the EU as a neutral staging-ground, on the (correct) theory that the EU police don't necessarily talk to the US police, but they left a lot of fingerprints in the process.
As for solutions: in the short-term, there has to be a UN operation to restore some semblance of sanity to Afghanistan, the flow of weapons into the region has to be stopped, there has to be a negotiated settlement with the saner members of the Taliban, and those peacekeepers are going to have to pack heat in order to ferret out al-Qaeda (this is basically what the EU foreign ministers recently agreed to, incidentally). The closest parallel I can think of is Vietnam's intervention in Cambodia to stamp out the Khmer Rouge.
-- Dennis