Hell's teeth - so many interesting and thought-provoking comments here, and I really can't stay online long enough to get my teeth into the discussion properly. ('Course, last time I said that I was still typing at 4am...)

First - Gar, on the whole I think I'm glad I "no longer speak for you". You speak for yourself very well, and I'm starting to feel a bit jumpy about the sense of there being groupthinkishness. So it's all good. Just send them home, you say? (I should add [and you probably did understand I meant this, but afterwards I wondered about whether I'd been clear] that in saying that loss of face was an issue here that impinged upon viability of actions, I didn't mean to say that loss of face was something I gave much of a damn about. But I do think - perhaps mistakenly - that it's very important to the people who are making the decisions about the war. Both loss of face on the world stage, and loss of face to one's own voters. And that's why I can't see them backing down. But you make a compelling argument, and I would like to believe that it could happen the way you outline.)

You know, as I'm typing right now I feel a bit like my intellect is sitting down with its arms folded saying "Nuh-uh, don't ask me, I'm not playing any more" and my emotions are ruling the roost. So this isn't me with my Logic hat on one way or another right now - but, yeah, I feel pretty soul-sick about it all. I feel pretty much "the hell with it - bring the troops back!", even though I realise that we've stirred up a hornet's nest and I don't know whether bringing troops back would worsen matters. I can see how it might. (Not being sarcastic or whatever - I honestly don't feel that I'm so very knowledgable about this, and every course of action I can think of seems rife with problems.) But, just now, I do feel "the hell with it. Just stop." For I am GutReaction!Fay just now.

Seven women and children shot and two injured when they didn't stop at a check point. And I feel terrible for the US soldiers, who must have been nervous as hell about suicide bombers and all that, and who clearly were trying to get the vehicle to slow down without resorting to shooting the people. But then you think about the woman driving 12 women and kids, and you think about mums and aunties and people you know, and imagine how they might have reacted, maybe not all that rationally, to the foreign invaders with guns who were shouting orders at them. Maybe she was bloody-minded about it, maybe she was petrified, maybe she just didn't understand. We'll never know, most likely. And there are going to be more incidents like this, aren't there? It just makes me feel heart sick.

I read an interview with a 26 year old soldier today - a Welsh lass, who's a graduate of Leeds University. She was saying how much she loves being in the army - how it's an exciting and honourable profession. And that kind of twisted in my gut, because I respect her courage, and honour is a word which isn't used often enough in the world, I think. But it's something that I think is important. Not just in the big showy ways, but every day. And I just don't see the way these men and women are dutifully killing and dying right now as being all that honourable. As an example - I'm so bloody angry about Corporal Matty Hull, who died when his tank was fired upon by a US A-10 Thunderbolt Tankbuster, that I don't think I can post rationally about it. There were far too many "friendly fire" incidents in the last Gulf War. We've had over a decade to sort out a way to identify our own side, to make sure that the Americans can identify the Brits and vice versa. At present, they are relying on sticky tape and good luck, as far as I can gather. And it isn't working. One of the lads who managed to get out of the tank said he could see the pilot, and presumably the pilot could see him, but the guy kept on firing. "He had absolutely no regard for human life. I believe he was a cowboy. He was just out for a jolly." And I'm trying to step back and see the other guy's point of view, but I'm just so bloody angry that it can happen, and that it continues to happen. And not just that - a week ago two RAF helicopters collided and six people died. Stupidly. Needlessly.

Anyway, I'm taking a little step back from this. As I said, I'm not feeling up to rational and constructive debate on it just now - I'm more Venting!Fay. But, Moonlit, thank you for your posts, which have been extremely thought-provoking also.

Incidentally, Jeff, you're a doll. IJS.

I started it once, loved it, but had to take it back to the library unfinished because it was on hold for someone else. There's a prequel that's just come out, I think called Beneath a Silent Moon, which my library unfortunately isn't stocking yet.

How to feel really, really ignorant:

[link]

Historically sovereignty of a nation is bestowed upon and symbolically dwells within the person of the monarch -constitutional or not Zoe Finch "All Ogle, No Cash -- It's Not Just Annoying, It's Un-American" Mar 31, 2003 1:44:09 pm EST

Yea. but in the case of England the bestowal in the gift of parliament and people.

It could be revoked by them (John Locke's Second Treatise on Government)

and It had been been so from before time immemorial

The best English rulers understood this. The Stuarts with their Divine Right of Kings schtick didn't.

If one was so inclined (and I might be so) one could argue that The Glorious Revolution was restoring the Saxon Monarchy which had been usurped by the Frenchman William the Bastard from the recently elected king Eadgar Ætheling in 1066.

[topic?; uh "Well, maybe that's how they do things in *Britain*, they've got that royal family and all kinds of problems, but here at Sunnydale nobody leaves campus while school's in session. Are we clear?"]

FayJay - no I'm glad you clarified that; I actually had misunderstood you in the way you feared. I'm sure you were clear, and I simply did not understand you properly.

How to feel really, really ignorant:

Well, I only exchanged Mali and Niger, but I have to confess I guessed wildly on all of the -stans and on which one was Armenia and which one Azerbaijan. So, pretty good.

I realise that we've stirred up a hornet's nest and I don't know whether bringing troops back would worsen matters.

William Raspberry had a column today about when to end the debate on the war. He quotes someone who has an interesting view on the "Hornets nest."

Marshall's piece disturbs in a quite different way. His thesis, in a nutshell, is that far from ignoring the things some of us fear will result from our venture in Iraq -- radicalization of the Arab world, new waves of terrorism, transformation of the conflict into a species of religious warfare -- the administration's hawks are actually counting on such an outcome.

"In their view," he writes, "invasion of Iraq was not merely, or even primarily, about getting rid of Saddam Hussein. Nor was it really about weapons of mass destruction, though their elimination [would be] an important benefit. Rather, the administration sees the invasion as only the first move in a wider effort to reorder the power structure of the entire Middle East."

Not because they are hopelessly monomaniacal but because they see it as essential to an effective war on terrorism.

He then goes on to talk about theories about the roots of terrorism and says that.

On the other hand, the administration's plan, says Marshall, is "to use U.S. military force, or the threat of it, to reform or topple virtually every regime in the region, from foes like Syria to friends like Egypt, on the theory that it is the undemocratic nature of these regimes that ultimately breeds terrorism."

He says that he thinks that this is probably dangerously wrong, but to stop debating it means that we are accepting a continuous incrimental resturcturing of the region through force.

He boils it down to this.

Marshall likens the strategy to whacking a hornet's nest in order to get the hornets out in the open and force a showdown. You can have a spirited debate over whether such a strategy ought to be supported.

"The problem," he says, "is that once it's just us and the hornets, we really won't have any choice."

I embarrassed myself beyond belief. Africa? What Africa? Oh, you mean that entire continent full of countries which are not Egypt?

Me too, Betsy. I am deeply ashamed.

I had an atlas phase when I was a kid. Some of it's stuck. (So really you can't blame me for the stans, because when I was a kid they were all part of the Big Red Blob.)