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Robin, Thank god for your Brit po message. I just don't understand the Brits on the list just now. That we won't affect the Iraq question one whit makes no difference. The international law issue seems to me very complicated, because the US and Britain will have had their international lawyers go over the UN texts and international charters with a fine toothcomb to create their justifications. In my reading of it they do in fact have a very tenuous justification, one open to argument in a court of law, which stems from the entailments of the justifications assembled through the UN in 1991. But I'm not a lawyer -- really, I don't know a thing about what UN Security Council measures really entail or what precise relation power politics has to obtaining legal sanction for an action via the UN. When the US and Britain stated that there would now be unannounced strikes if the inspectors' report went against Iraq, there were few protests from anyone. Now they have acted pre-emptively -- just as planned, just as announced, and after backing down from previous warnings There is no international court of law capable of hearing the question in time. People should have tackled this right a month or two back. That they didn't (we're all so stupid, actually), is why a unilateral interpretation of the law became so easy. To Tim Love, I will reply that if he is pro-war I should (given Hussein's apparent possession of potentially dangerous germ warfare, which might, say, result in the deaths of thousands of Kurds one day, to say nothing of other nations' populations)... I should respect his opinion and respond without a hint of personal attack. (A problem, of course, is that information about Hussein's killer chemicals comes from US sources, in the main. Another problem is the possession of weapons of mass slaughter by the major powers, which reduces their right to police the world, stripping mass weapons from disfavoured nations. But if I say that I do not want to let Iraq off the hook, not in the very least. I, of course, do not have an answer to these problems). But if fear of expressing a perhaps unpopular opinion is making Tim not wish to have this discussion, I would remind the list that I raised this in the first place specifically in relation to poetry; so it is relevant. Not to say human. Best Doug %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%