The back of a New York taxi is a fair place to consider the coming war. Shut in a yellow metal box where there is no room for the usual human extensions such as legs and knees, tossed from side to side, bounced over manholes, potholes and dead rats, while the driver leans on the horn as if it had a magic power to dispel drivers and pedestrians, you reflect on how a nation that can't devise an efficient taxi or Tarmac its streets beyond the standard of a regional city in the developing world, can believe this: "We're approaching the point where we can tell the SA-10 that its target is a Maytag washer and not a missile site, and put it in the rinse cycle instead of the firing cycle." The speaker was General John P Jumper, the Air Force chief of staff, an earnest evangelist of the fairy-tale notion of "clean war".