re: nambucca/us and australia will eventually lose
I don't see the invasion of Afghanistan as pre-emption, it was reaction. I guess we are talking shades of grey here lrj when comparing Afghanistan with Iraq but I think there is a distinction between the two. Who is to say that the precedents the US is setting here are not going to be abused by a less benign superpower in the future?
As Richard Butler said the other day: "this is a critical moment in international politics. This has now become not about Saddam and his weapons but a major conflict between George Bush's America, which says, as he did in his press conference and his American Enterprise speech, ‘We can go anywhere, any time, change any government, do whatever we like because we are the superpower’, back to an age before the United Nations where might is right, on the one hand, and on the other hand, the concept of international law, consultation, principle, a charter of the United Nations which actually says ‘Thou shalt not invade’. That is what is really happening here."
