..."the decision on how to respond to a violent attack's a difficult one isn't it - kick arses and risk, as you quite rightly say, fuelling the spark of revolution, or negotiate "...

Kicking the arses of people who had nothing whatever to do with the violent attack doesn't really make a lot of sense; and deciding not to do that shouldn't really have involved a very difficult decision.

It is possible that things in Iraq will end up with a freer society, and that all the dead civilians killed in the process will have died to achieve something good. Though it could well end up with a society that is even more repressive in some ways. "The wheel's still in spin..."

But so far as Al Qaida is concerned, the Iraq war has been a complete success - it's put them in a far stronger position than they were before, both in Iraq and elsewhere.

And even Afghanistan doesn't bear too much inspection. Some Al Qaida training and conference facilities have been destroyed, and some volunteers and allies killed or imprisoned - but large numbers of trained and indoctrinated members have been distributed to places where they can be much more effective and can pass on their training and indoctrination to a greatly increased number of potential recruits.

As for Afghanistan itself, outside Kabul the country appears to be in the hands of people who are every bit as repressive as the Taliban, but with an added element of corruption; and the production and export of hard drugs has sky-rocketed.

If Bin Laden isn't delighted at the way things have worked out so far, he must be a remarkably hard man to please. And if in the USA one of the effects is to get Bush elected in November, that'll be the cherry on the cake. "Four more years of things going our way will be guaranteed", that's what he'll be thinking.