http://www.observer.co.uk/comment/story/0,6903,582102,00.html

The historian Mary Beard says: 'However tactfully you dress it up, the United States had it coming', while Terry Eagleton doesn't think we should fight alongside 'a one-party state', by which he means not Afghanistan but the United States.

American writer Alice Walker (who may well win the gold medal for fatuity) doesn't want to kill bin Laden, but wonders if he couldn't be reminded 'of all the good, non-violent things he has done? Further, what would happen to him if he could be brought to understand the preciousness of the lives he has destroyed? I believe the only punishment that works is love'. Two days ago, Abdul Haq approached the Taliban, if not with love, then with an offer of peace, and ended up on the end of a rope

-philw