The USA has indeed got itself into such a difficult hole, with such impossible demands unless the other side is willing to negotiate, fast oncoming winter, and every day likely to report more civilian casualties or refugees, in such a fashion as to recruit ten more recurits for Al Quaida in the middle east, that there must have been a calculation. The USA's tactical position is so obviously bad that it is to its advantage to acknowledge this in passing, tilt its hand openly, and signal *indirectly* a willingness for negotiations.
Meanwhile there is a lot of background activity. The King has said he requires peacekeepers under the UN (not immediately available but if the CIA can have an extra billion to assassinate bin Laden, an extra billion for this could be cheap at the price). Jack Straw is saying that while Britain is prepared to send in the SAS, it wants to concentrate on a settlement in which the UN will figure prominently.
For the sake of the emerging Empire as well as for the sake of US imperialism, there needs to be a negotiated peace rapidly. It would also be in the interests of the working people of the world. The only section that would not benefit from a negotiated peace, even one that merely transferred him to a neutral country, would be bin Laden, because his aims are based on an idealist reaction to global capitalism and involve the seizure of power in countries like Saudi Arabia and Egypt, through excitatory terrorist methods.
So Powell who was a cautious imperialist non-interventionist in Yugoslavia prior to the disastrous Srebrenca massacre, is a progressive non-interventionist in today's conjuncture, and has shrewdly, in passing, but of course quite deliberately, tilted his hand to the opposition.
This in the context of a language for consensus creating in the emerging Empire: it is also "in Pakistan's interests" to have a short war.
The next week may mark an intensification of the antagonisms, but the real agenda is about peace negotiations.
Chris Burford
London