'So, Tell Us, What Are Two Nice Lefty Writers Like You Doing In A War Like This?'

The answer is, well, a long story. Really. Almost 10,000 words long. It's up at Dooney's Cafe.

It began as Why Are We In Afghanistan? and it ends that way, too, but it took on the form of something along the lines of a Socratic Dialogue. This was especially suitable to the disposition of my old comrade Stan Persky, whose inclinations to the Socratic method are well known. And besides, he teaches this sort of thing.

But it's also because we both found that an inquiry into this question would require more than just an enumeration of the straightforward answers that have led both us to declare ourselves partisans on this front, so we proceed to an elucidation of our answers to the question, Why Should We Be In Afghanistan? From there, we go on to what we both make of the trajectory that led the main ranks of the left, specifically the "left" in Canada, to make what United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon properly calls "a misjudgment of historic proportions."

And we allow ourselves the presumption of looking forward to brighter mornings as well.