Anyone care to tot up how many countries America has bombed since WW2? I'll have a stab at it, if no-one else comes back with the answer.

No wonder the US favours an anarchic world order in which each nation recognises no authority higher than its own. Why throw your weight into building up international values and institutions, if your country is the strongest?

The only problem is that the strongest nation is suddenly looking impotent and vulnerable. Maybe that inclusive approach might have had something to be said for it after all.

Anyway, 53 and co, I suggest you wallow in that B52 carpet bombing while you can, cos who knows, the Taliban might take it the way the Viet Cong did. Or maybe you've managed to expunge the memory of gunships being tipped off a US carrier, to accommodate those who lucky enough to flee the Saigon embassy, while hundreds of America's South Vietnamese allies were shamefully abandoned to the enemy?

Just be sure your water supplies, subway systems, power stations, fresh air, etc, etc, are ALL under armed guard, from now till kingdom come... And even then, it might not be smart to sleep easy at night.

The Pentagon is claiming to have dropped 3,000 bombs so far - from million-dollar missiles that wander off course and hit Red Cross stores, to cluster bombs that will kill children for years to come. All dropped by the richest nation on to one of the poorest - and regardless of the misery it is bringing to people who have good reason to hate the Taliban more than you do, 53.

I'm not sure whether all this comes under the heading of "proportionate," even allowing for the Pentagon's difficulty with truth. (Remember their claims to have shot down four times more Iraqi scuds than Iraqi had in the first place? Turned out they've got no evidence that they ever hit one.) But I don't mean to spoil your happiness, 53. I'm just glad you're no way representative of the Americans I know.

The joke/tragedy is, of course, that this marvellously "proportionate" respose simply won't work. And if it did, you wouldn't know, because no two people who support the whole fiasco can agree on what the aims are.

Meanwhile, the American economy has failed to get the hoped-for soft landing, and looks like crashing to earth with a bang (according to first assessment of end-October figures); and the administration is at last beginning to realise what a colossal target the whole place has become, for all the new enemies it is doing its best to create.

Not sure how this war plays with those like Spaw, who thought the solution might lie in a response just a tad more "surgical" than we're seeing. Maybe it's time they realised that what we are seeing is about as surgical as war gets.