Sometimes I think my life is ruled by synchronicity (think Koestler, not Sting).

First, Bill Whittle does his lyrical piece on “Courage“.

Then it turns out that Tenacious G and the boys haven’t seen the Branagh ‘Henry V‘, so we jump it to the head of the Netflix queue, and it shows up in the mail. We watched it the other night, and it was still wonderful (Yes, Bacchus, I’m still supporting Branagh’s erotic reward). My boys loved it as well; Littlest Guy, who is six, wanted to watch it again the next day, and spent the time after bath and before bed wandering the house in his blue PJ’s-with-rocket-ships-and-feet and a stern look, declaiming “No King of England if not King of France.” I love my sons and they are wonderful, but they are a bit…odd, sometimes. Somehow that line over all the others had caught him, and he and I had a long discussion in which I explained that Henry wanted to be King of France, and that he was willing to risk losing England to get it.

Then, as a part of a possible venture I may do with an old friend, we had a long ‘strategy’ talk, in which one issue that we tried to address is our differing appetite for risk; he’s been incredibly (deservedly) successful, and as a consequence has capital he wants to preserve, while I’m trying to get to the point of having some capital to worry about losing.

And I had one of my frequent “aha!” moments, and I realized that the issue of courage is really inseparable from the issue of risk, and that we have, I believe some issues with risk in this society, and I think that those issues are of vital importance today.

– They are important to our self-understanding as people;
– They are important to understanding what is happing to our economy;
– They are important to our politics;
– Many of the social issues we face in America today center around different understandings of risk;
– And finally, our struggles over decisions about Iraq have much to do with our differing perceptions and reactions to risk.

This is going to be longer than I have time to do all at once, and doubtless than you have the patience to read in one sitting, so I will be putting up a stream of posts over the next few days (I’ll try and do one a day).

Here’s the outline:

1. Introduction (this one);
2. Risk in Business;
3. Risk and Recklessness in Society;
4. Risk in Politics;
5. Iraq and Risk.
6. Wrapup (and hopefully response to interesting comments)

Let me open with some comments.

For most of my adult life, I’ve been someone with a high tolerance for risk.

I’ve taken professional risks.

I’ve taken risks in relationships.

I’ve participated in risky sports; rock- and mountain-climbing, sailboat ocean racing, motorcycle sport riding and racing.

But I work hard to manage the risks that I take. While I’ve had some (spectacular) professional failures, the downside has been for the most part managed. The people whose relationships I’ve become serious about have stuck with me. And in my hobbies, I’ve worked hard to embody the best techniques and use the best tools to ensure my safety.

As a good example, when I ride my motorcycle, I wear protective gear from Aerostich, Z Leathers, Boehn, Shoei, Daytona, and Held. I’ve been to the best training I can find. I’m conscious and methodical about the risks take, and about the exposure to damage that those risks imply.

My pursuit of martial arts…including the shooting arts and other weapons arts…is in no small part aimed at managing my risk.

So I think about risk quite a bit. I don’t see myself as foolish (think of a helmetless rider on a 160mph motorcycle wearing a t-short, shorts, and Vans sneakers), I think of myself who is conscious of risk and who tries hard to manage it to acceptable levels.

I can’t imagine not taking risks. Not only would I would have missed some of the best experiences of my life, but I can’t imagine looking at risks as ‘black or white’ rather that examining their subtleties and looking at them as objectively as I know how. To me, that is real safety. Ignoring risks, or shying away from them, isn’t.

What I see in many people is a simple shying away from risk. I see it ly, as people are unwilling to open themselves to relationships for fear of being hurt – and then soak in the pain of their loneliness. I see it in business where people in organizations won’t take the risk of speaking out, even when silence imposes greater long-term risks on their organization and so their job. I see it in people’s lives, as we increasingly try and mummy ourselves in increasing layers of padding designed to keep us from the sharp corners of the world.

I followed a van today; the signs on it explained that it was the ‘Babyproofing Man’. So we hire someone to put plastic caps on the sharp corners of our homes, and try and raise our children in cocoons where risk can be managed away.

It can’t be.

Our children are always at risk, and we can’t protect them everywhere and forever.

What we can do is to teach them to think clearly about risk, and learn to control it themselves.

There’s a telling little scene in the book and movie ‘Black Hawk Down’, in which one of the Delta operators at Mogadishu is dressed down by a regular Army NCO for not having ‘safed’ his weapon. The operator looks at the NCO and wags his index finger in his face.

“This is my safety.”

Consider this my finger wagging in your face, asking what you see as your safety.

…to be continued.

Part I is here
This is Part II
This is Part III
Parts IV > VI aren’t written yet.

Trent has extended his argument; I’m interspersing some comments below, and will reply with a longer post in the next day or so; I have an appointment with a William Hill Cabernet…

Please compare this from Collin May:

Now to France.
…
My point is that Jacques Chirac cast himself as the defender of Republican values, but Republican values have never found an exact fit with the French nation. Indeed, these values are now often diverging from the French nation itself and seeking something of a new home, a home that could be the new Europe. In other words, the French nation is splitting from the universal values it was supposed to incarnate, a split that began more or less with the end of its empire and the colonial wars following World War II. This is the great difference between events of September 11 and those of April 21. The attack on Republican values came from inside France, from people claiming to defend the French nation, whereas the US was attacked by a foreign intruder.

The implication is that the United States retains its national integrity in the face of foreign attack, while France is losing, even actively terminating, its national existence in favor of the European Union. French patriotism is committing suicide, while American patriotism is flowering.

AL: Yes, France is trying hard to leverage it’s national power by tying Europe together into a bureaucratic suprastate – which France believes it will effectively control. Part of where our views diverge on this is that you seem to be saying that Republican (in the classical, rather than GOP sense) nationalism is key to the ‘moral foundation’ of French national politics. I don’t see that as the case, because unlike us in the U.S., the French see themselves as a true ‘people’. Their national standing is relatively independent of the political structure they live under…they would be a nation regardless, bound by language, tradition, and culture.

[Check out Vinod Valopillil’s take on this (via Instapundit)]
—-
N.B for the complete, updated history of this discussion arranged by date, see “Fight Night: The Dance In France“)
—-

Yet the Chirac government still behaves as though the only thing that matters is preventing Saddam from being overthrown by the Americans.

If it isn’t money that is motivating the French government and it isn’t power in the EU, then what is it driving them to oppose the USA on Iraq?

The answer isn’t physical, it is existential.

French elites abandoned religion for nationalism after the French revolution. Then they abandoned nationalism for multi-cultural, EU style, transnational progressivism. Now that has failed as well and they are as lost as the Wahhabbis in the modern world. The elites that govern France are using their power to hurt and cause pain.

AL: Sorry, but while the EU certainly has it’s problems (and I’ll argue is doomed for a variety of reasons and a Bad Thing for others) it is a bit of a reach to claim that it has failed. It is clearly a crisis point, in which either the new constitution will be adopted … or not, and the risk of dissolution is (fortunately) high. But the french elites (along with the German, Belgian, Dutch, and British elites) remain firmly committed to a supranational entity.

As I said before and restate now:

“People who have chosen the path of damnation are easily known. They seek power above all things. They choose what will immediately benefit them over choices that take longer but reward more. And they use what power they have to hurt others, because inflicting pain is the only pleasure they have that will reach past the aching wound where their soul used to be.

AL: Trent, here’s where I just scratch my head in confusion. How do you get from A to B? From the attempts by the French cadres d’administration to solidify their power to their taking on pain and evil as their and political objectives? I’m just baffled; help me out here.

The France has had a “value neutral” foreign policy since before it was a real nation. This has even extended to modern times and includes issues of nuclear proliferation. Here is a link from the National Review and a snip from the Moscow Times (with a hat tip to The Diffident Spectator) :

In April 1975, Hussein visited Moscow to ask for Soviet help to build a full reactor to make nuclear weapons. Although Russia agreed to supply Iraq with staggering amounts of conventional weapons, it balked at helping Baghdad go nuclear. In September 1975, Hussein went to Paris to meet politicians with far fewer scruples than Soviet Communists. The French prime minister at the time, Jacques Chirac, signed an agreement to sell Hussein a reactor and arms-grade uranium.

If Chirac and other French politicians had had their way, Hussein could have made tens of nuclear bombs by 1990. The war to liberate Kuwait would never have taken place or would have turned into an all-out nuclear confrontation between Iraq, Israel and the United States. The tragedy was avoided when in 1979 Israeli agents near Toulon destroyed two French-built reactors en route to Iraq. In 1981, the Israelis bombed to debris the French replacement reactor in Iraq before it could be made operational.

Maybe France and Germany are so loyally trying to save Hussein because they want to cover up their long-time cooperation in helping to build weapons of mass destruction? Is the treachery of the past feeding more treachery today?

AL: Go read the history of the French ‘Force de Frappe’, and the effort they (and the U.K.) put into having an independent nuclear deterrent. They believe that this is a good thing because it restrains the superpowers, whose allies they did not feel themselves to be. Again, not ‘evil treachery’ because they never gave us fealty to breach.

America during the majority of the Cold War was no different than France in its foreign policy. There were many dictators who were supported by the USA while they muttered the magic words “I’m an anti-Communist.” The Nixon-Ford years, where Henry Kissinger reigned supreme in foreign policy, was the high point of a “valueless national interest” foreign policy over a “morality informed” foreign policy.

The American public and many American elites rejected this approach. First Jimmy Carter, with his concern for human rights, and Ronald Reagan, with his “Evil Empire” speech defining the Soviet Union, returned a moral dimension to American foreign policy for 12 years.

Now both these leaders made grave moral errors that helped to set up the Islamofascist WMD threat we face today, for all their “moral posturing.” Jimmy Carter did not respond forcefully to the hostage taking of the American embassy in Iran. While Reagan did both the “bug-out boogie” from Beirut after the bombing there and looked the other way while Pakistan got the nuclear bomb.

AL: I’m starting to get your point, but think you’re mistaken on the facts. Reagan defined his moral compass by their alignment for or against the USSR; hence our support of the mujads in Afghanistan. Carter, with his politically-correct emphasis on ‘human rights as long as they don’t really damage our interests’ was arguably one of the worst Presidents as far as foreign policy that we’ve seen. Iran would stand as an excellent example of his masterful handing of the difficult dismount that one must do when trying to move from a repressive dictatorship to a less-repressive dictatorship. BTW, I’ll point out that it is truism (I need to do some homework and try and validate this) that most revolutions happen when repression is eased.

Yet the return of “valueless national interest” after Reagan arguably made things worse. Just look at G.H.W. Bush with his post-Gulf War deference to Saudi and Gulf State interests in keeping Iraq intact and the work his people did to keep a Serb dominated Yugoslavia intact to preserve “stability.” You also have Clinton’s serial mistakes with the Mogadishu “”Bug-out,” the post-African Embassy attack cruise missile bombing of Ossama plus an aspirin factory as well as the non-reaction to the USS Cole attack coming from that same narrow view of national interest that treated terrorism as a law enforcement issue apart from middle eastern foreign policy.

The bottom line is the valueless indulgence of national interest with Arab oil states lead directly to 9/11/2001 attack. In so many words, a valueless pursuit of national interest enables evil. This is why all the people around Dubya, as William Kristol put it, are Reaganites now. As he said in a column:

As President Bush said in his State of the Union address, “America’s purpose is more than to follow a process–it is to achieve a result.” The result the president had in mind was “the end of terrible threats to the civilized world.” Reagan ended one such threat, with the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Now, as the president explained, we face a different kind of threat–“a world of chaos and constant alarm,” where “outlaw regimes” sponsor terrorism and acquire and trade in horrific weapons, the better to threaten their neighbors and intimidate their people. The nature of the regime is crucial, rather than some alleged underlying, geographically or economically or culturally determined “national interest.” The priority of the political order implies a morally informed American foreign policy. Thus, a brutal tyranny like Saddam’s is evil, Bush said, or else “evil has no meaning”–and Bush intends to liberate the people of Iraq from their regime. As President Bush said to the people of Iraq, “Your enemy is not surrounding your country–your enemy is ruling your country.”

Now, it is true that regimes don’t exist apart from the various material interests and geographical and historical characteristics of nations. So “morality in foreign policy” is always limited. Necessity has its claims. And the freedom and security of one’s own nation come first. But our freedom and security turn out to be inextricably linked to the character of regimes elsewhere in the world.

It mattered that the Soviet Union was an “evil empire.” It matters that North Korea has, as the president said, an “oppressive regime ruling] a people living in fear and starvation.”

AL: ‘Political order’ means many things. On one hand, we can emphasize the ‘political’ and talk about liberty and due process; on the other we can talk about ‘order’ and emphasize the rule of power. I think we face a difficult but not impossible task; it will require that we recognize that our interests are not everyone’s, and allow for legitimate conflicts. Our history has been informed by an idealistic attachment to our values, except when our interests are challenged. I’m not an “All Americal Foreign Policy is Evil” fella, but neither do I look at our history in Latin America, Asia (not just Vietnam) or Africa as ‘enlightened by high moral purpose’.

I have said before that the French are acting as if the fall of Iraq would be a regime changing event. Steve Den Beste has speculated that it was for reasons of WMD proliferation. I don’t think so anymore.

There is a mortal threat to the French regime, but it isn’t from American hard power or anything in the Iraqi archives America will capture. It is from the soft power of American example, not from a “moral foreign policy,” but the example success from the rotation of political elites within a Nation-State. That is a mortal threat to France and the EU transnational progressives alike.

The whole point of the EU is to isolate the political elites from the will of the democratic, nationalist, masses. The success of America points out that the EU experiment’s isolation and inbreeding of Euro-elites is what is destroying Europe as a viable alternative to the American model.

AL: Again, I think you’re right re:the superiority of the American model, but flat wrong when you suggest that the EU elites think they are doomed by it. They think they are powerful enough to stand up to it, hence the situation we’re in right now.

As it is with the Islamofascist, so it is with French elites, the existence of America is a grave threat to their identity that must be destroyed for them to live.

AL: Wild hyperbole. The EU simply insists on parity with the US; a party engendered by our willingness to bear the burden of defense costs for the Western world.

This brings us back to the French pursuit of “valueless national interest.” Lexington Green ran the following thought experiment (which his fellow contributors disagreed with here and here) on the assumption that Steven Den Beste was right about the French WMD connection to Iraq:

Let us take it a step farther. Let’s assume that the French and Germans have been actively assisting Iraq to acquire WMD, especially nuclear weapons. Why would they do this? First, of course, money. That has to be part of it. In the German case, I think it is probably the main part. But they are running huge risks just for money. There must be more. What?

At least in the case of the French, a plausible explanation would be a positive desire to see Iraq armed with WMD, and to assist it to acquire them. Why? Pure power politics. France sees itself in a zero-sum power struggle with America. But America is the Hyperpower. France is forced to dance to Washington’s tune. So, France is a non-status quo power, which wants to terminate American Unipolarity. But it cannot do so on its own. It simply lacks the size, economic power, military power, vitality, efficiency – everything which it would need for a direct challenge to the United States. There is no way for France to get into the same league as the United States. France has tried to build a European Union which would offset U.S. power, with itself as primus inter pares, but it is clear to everyone with half a brain that this project will never be a true challenger to the United States.

That leaves to France only the option of doing of things which positively harm the position of the United States. France cannot do this overtly, because the United States can crush French militarily if it came to it. Therefore, arming Saddam is a way to covertly harm the United States to the advantage of France. The French benefit from nuclear weapons proliferating, because this has the effect of neutralizing American conventional military power. The French benefit from Saddam becoming an unassailable regional power in the Persian Gulf, as a client and covert ally of France, because this makes them a major player in the region through their ties to Saddam, and damages American interests in the region. The French might even believe that they would benefit from the provision of nuclear weapons to terrorists, so long as they were used against the United States. A nuclear detonation in New York or Washington or Chicago or all three would severely damage the United States. Destruction on this scale would cause worldwide economic disruption. But it would also render the United States a much less formidable actor, far less able to make its influence felt abroad, since it would be absorbed with police activity and reconstruction at home. This would enhance the relative power of other states at the expense of the United States, including France. Complicity in the destruction of millions of American lives is a price the senior political leadership in France would probably be willing to pay to enhance France’s political position in the world, if it could get away with it, and if its own consequent economic losses were not unendurably severe.

So there you have it, whether you argue from valueless interest or existential evil, the result is the same. The French are hiding something they did with Iraq. The most likely explanation is they provided working nukes to Iraq.

AL: More wild hyperbole. Yes, the French want to harm US interests in order to advance their own. Yes, the French are less anxious about a multilateral nuclear standoff than we are; that’s a world in which they believe they can navigate very successfully, because their approach to foreign policy is so instrumental. But there’s a large gap from ‘turning a blind eye’ to delivering working nukes.

We will find out is this theory is true if Saddam uses one on advancing American troops before he goes down.

Or if Saddam has already smuggled one to Syria for Hezbolla to use in nuking Israel.

AL: If he had one, it’d have been used already. I doubt that a week will go by from the time he successfully builds one to either a public demonstration or an actual attack. What in his history suggests that he waits to exploit any advantage he may have? He acts in the moment, and has every time.

Trent, to me there’s a mixture of sensible and difficult to understand here; yes, France (along with Germany and Russia and several other states) is acting actively against our interests, but what’s new about that? Yes, they have a different model, one that aims for a supranational bureaucracy welding together what were once states into something they believe they can dominate, or at minimum be an equal within. They don’t have a problem with a constellation of nuclear-armed states holding each other hostage – to them that’ preferable to being dependent on one nuclear-armed state.

They have a very different vision of what the world ought to be. We ought to offer alternative visions, and use every tool we have (up to and including military force) to see that our vision wins out.

There’s a problem, though.

We’re a small minority of the people on the planet. We need to win converts faster than we make enemies, or we’ll eventually be faced with the decision to lose or to commit genocide.

A clear moral vision and a willingness to work within it is a part of what it will take to win converts to our side. But it’s going to have to be a flexible and inclusive vision, and I wonder, I really do, if the conservative Christian leadership who is in large part in control of the centers of power under GWB really have the ability to be flexible and inclusive.

It’s gonna be interesting…

A while ago, I played out a scenario in which:

One nice afternoon, I’m sitting here in my home office near the Palos Verdes peninsula when I notice a brilliant flash of light and some of my windows break.

The power goes out, the telephones, cell phones, and computers don’t work. My backup AM/SW/SSB radio in the garage doesn’t work, and I step onto my driveway and look toward San Pedro and see a dark mushroom cloud.

We’ll skip over the fact that all the electronics in the area are kaput because of EMP, and hypothesize a working TV or radio, which informs me that it appears that a small – 5KT – nuke has just exploded on a container ship in San Pedro harbor, along with another one in Red Hook, just across from Manhattan, and another one at the container yard in Seattle.

We’ll skip over the hundred thousand or so who have just died or will die at each site in the coming week, from burns and radiation poisoning, or from one of the diseases or a lack of medical attention caused by the collapse of the public health system.

My family and I are not in immediate danger, because I’m maybe 10 miles from the blast center, and shielded by the mass of Palos Verdes hill, and the prevailing winds are onshore, meaning they blow the radioactive dust inland and away from me, but the next few days are pretty chaotic.

Well, the local paper just picked this up.

WHAT IF?

SCENARIO: Experts say the Port of Los Angeles is vulnerable to nuclear terrorism that would bring mass casualties to the area and send shock waves through the national economy. Here’s how it could unfold.

By Josh Grossberg
DAILY BREEZE

It’s a bright, clear morning in San Pedro.

A slight sea breeze blows inland and the sun glints off the Pacific. Cargo ships idle in the water, while cranes swing back and forth unloading packages. Workers driving across the Vincent Thomas Bridge pay no attention to the ship just passing beneath them.

Without warning, something hidden deep in the hull of the ship explodes. In less than a second, everything nearby is vaporized by temperatures hotter than the sun. The expanding fireball causes a shock wave of compressed air and winds strong enough to knock down or kill anything in its path. Miles away, the flash is bright enough to burn retinas. Windows shatter. Houses rock off their foundations.

The Breeze goes on to talk about some things you ought to do.

Best plan in a disaster is to have one
GUIDELINES: Considerations include food and water supplies, contacts, meeting places and sources of information.

By Josh Grossberg
DAILY BREEZE

Don’t panic.

During any catastrophe – man-made or natural – keep a clear head and plan ahead.

“People should not make any rash decisions,” said Brian Humphrey of the Los Angeles City Fire Department.

Humphrey urges everyone to keep a supply of food and water available, maintain an out-of-state contact for all family members to call in case local lines are not working, devise a second route home and develop alternate meeting places for loved ones.

And keep a working battery-powered radio nearby and know where the city’s two news radio stations are located on the AM dial – KFWB at 980 and KNX at 1070. That’s where officials will instruct people what to do.

Yeah, I forgot about radios…gotta pick some up. Probably inexpensive AM/ FM/ SW/SSB’s.

Take this in two ways. First, it’s mainstream acknowledgement of some of the things that I’ve been worrying about, which boosts both my ego and my anxiety level a bit. Second, it plus into the second part of my original post:

Got the picture??

So here are some questions for all parties.

For the hawks: How strong is the temptation to nuke somebody – anybody – who might have had anything to do with this, regardless of whether it gets the people who really planned it?

For the doves: How long after this happens does the first column come out in the New York Times that suggests that nuking Iraq won’t bring back our dead or rebuild our economy, and that we should pull in, buckle down, and take care of our own?

See, I see two likely outcomes from an event like this, (which I ly don’t believe would be all that hard to pull off).

One is that we go berserk, and turn the Middle East into a plain of glass.

The other is that we surrender our role as leader of the world, the economic and security benefits that come with that, and attempt to retreat into a Fortress America.

As you can imagine, I see problems with both.

What do you see as the outcome of a scenario like that? And how does it influence your thoughts on what to do today?

Well, how does it?

Many of the folks I know have an abiding belief in survival; some of them become survivalists and center their lives around it, which has always struck me as kinda weird. But I find that I can often learn useful things from them, even if we may disagree about how central those useful things ought to be in one’s life. Put those useful things into a bag and have it at hand in case you need to ‘head for the hills’, and you have a “Bug Out Kit”.

There’s an interesting discussion to have about apocalyptic fantasies, and our bizarre attachment to them. I mentioned some of the issues over in a post on Armed Liberal [note: site is down]. It’s almost time for a longer discussion on it.

But today, let’s be practical and discuss what such a kit might consist of.

First, you’ve got to discuss purpose.

The hardier among us assume that they will be taking to the field as a guerilla army defending against the invading Red forces, or the newly oppressive U.S. government under President H. Clinton. They envision living on venison jerky and fresh-caught fish and carrying enough weapons to put together a light infantry platoon.

On the other extreme, some folks would just like to be able to get home in the event their car breaks down on the other side of town.

I’m somewhere in between. I live in Southern California, where we live on borrowed time – the earthquakes, riots, floods, or fires compete for the ‘Disaster of the Decade’ pageant, which we hold in Pasadena every Leap Year Day.

For me, it’s not a “Bug Out Kit”, it’s a “Get Home Kit”. It’s not unreasonable to assume that my SO or I may have to cover fifty miles to get home, and that having gotten home, we may be without water, power, or gas for several days to a week until the grown-ups can get their act together and take care of us.

And to this I’ll add the new layer of risk posed by a meaningful terrorist attack.

So the kits break into two parts: What we try and have with us, and what we have at home.

What we have with us is primarily designed to get us home. Because I have children, unless I can be convinced that my entire neighborhood is a giant smoking crater, or communicate with someone who has my children and is getting them somewhere safe, I’m heading home. End of subject.

This is a small, cheap day pack that we can leave in the car or at the office.

It contains:

Light hiking boots (hell, we own them, and why leave them in the closet where they just take up space?)
Socks (I’m likely to be wearing dress socks, and TG is likely to be wearing hose)
Pants and a sweatshirt
A poncho
Five or six Power Bars
Five or six GU Gel packs (food you squeeze)
Two bottles of water, and some water purification tablets
Two bandanas
A Leatherman multi-tool
A decent knife (Spyderco Delicia)
50′ of 4mm perlon cord
A locking carabiner
More first-aid stuff (pretty much what I carry in my motorcycle suit):
– 2 battle dressings
– 2 – 4 x 4 gauze pads
– 1 CPR shield
– 2 pairs nitrile gloves
– vial with core prescriptions
– bottle of aspirin
– Imodium
A spare pair of prescription glasses for each of us (what else do you do with old glasses?)
Two black heavy-duty trash bags
Tarp with eyelets in the corners
4 – 6″ zip ties
Scorpion Streamlight
2 spare lithium batteries

– and a partridge in a pear tree.

Basically, with this kit, I could – comfortably – cover 20 – 30 miles in a day on foot in pretty much any weather condition I’m likely to face here in SoCal, bivvy for the night, and have enough stuff to do it again another day.

We already owned everything in the kits, except the backpacks, leatherman, knife, carabiner, flashlight, and perlon cord. Total investment, maybe $150 each if you buy a good multi-tool.

At home, we have:

Water (5 extra 5 ga Sparkletts distilled water bottles; we use and rotate them when we change the water in the fish tank)
Food (a 20 ga ‘tupperware’ container full of canned and dried food, plus camping cooking gear, the car camping propane stove and a couple of propane cylinders)
First Aid (the big kit described here)
Tools (a Sears roller cabinet full)
A wonderbar (pry bar) in the bedroom closet, in case we have to pry open jammed doors
A shutoff wrench that fits the city water valve
A crescent wrench swedged onto a wire loop at the gas meter

If I were to add antiterrorism to the kit, I’d consider adding:

Potassium iodide (antiradiation)
Some high-end respirators (not gas masks, but the ones with fine carbon filters)
Four or five sheets of Visqueen (disposable painter’s tarp)
Five or ten rolls of duct tape
Some starter packs of a broad-spectrum antibiotic
A couple of Tyvek (disposable) overalls

I’m thinking about it…

JK Note: Don’t miss his Super First Aid Kit, either.

I just had the Valentines Dinner From Hell (not really, actually a wonderful dinner with my SO), and was confronted by bad dating habits (check out Armed Liberal for my comments and recommendations on middle-aged dating) as well as some points in opposition to the ‘Impending War on Iraq’ (we ought to just make that name official) that actually got me to think a bit, and I wanted to throw a few things out for consideration. The points are:

1) We can’t invade Iraq because we haven’t dealt with Al Qaeda; and
2) We can’t invade Iraq because we haven’t dealt with the Palestinian-Israeli conflicts.

Those are two of the more typical antiwar arguments that I hear from people who think more deeply about the subject than “war is bad”.

And last night I just realized that they are both flat wrong.

We can’t deal with Al Qaeda as long as there are states that control territory, the issuance of identification, and the import and export of weapons which actively support Al Qaeda or tacitly support them through inaction.

We can’t deal with the Palestinian’s unwillingness to make a final, binding, real, two-state deal with Israel as long as there are states that actively encourage Palestinian rage and violence with funds and weapons.

I’m thinking that both of these problems are essentially unsolvable as long as they are really ‘proxy’ conflicts with state actors.

What do you folks think?

(fixed spelling of ‘Al-Qaeda’ per Inkgrrl’s comment)

What I said:

I’ll suggest that morality and spirituality in politics is central and absolutely necessary, on one hand, and incredibly dangerous on the other. I’ll follow with the assertion that the genius of the American Foundation was that it both provided a sphere for a politics centered on moral and spiritual values, and that it explicitly denied morality and spiritual values a seat at the political table.

This was a brilliant bank shot which has led to the American genius of assimilation and to the cultural openness which has made us the dominant force in the world for over a hundred years.

Let’s go to some sources. Washington’s “Farewell Address” is best known for the ‘no foreign entanglements’ meme; there were other significant ones strung through it, including a vital point on religion:

Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism, who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens. The mere politician, equally with the pious man, ought to respect and to cherish them. A volume could not trace all their connections with private and public felicity. Let it simply be asked: Where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths which are the instruments of investigation in courts of justice ? And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.

Washington was not the only deeply religious Founder:

The Continental-Confederation Congress, a legislative body that governed the United States from 1774 to 1789, contained an extraordinary number of deeply religious men. The amount of energy that Congress invested in encouraging the practice of religion in the new nation exceeded that expended by any subsequent American national government. Although the Articles of Confederation did not officially authorize Congress to concern itself with religion, the citizenry did not object to such activities. This lack of objection suggests that both the legislators and the public considered it appropriate for the national government to promote a nondenominational, nonpolemical Christianity.

The Continental Congress asked for a “day of Humiliation, Fasting and Prayer” throughout the colonies. The Congress urged its fellow citizens to “confess and bewail our manifold sins and transgressions, and by a sincere repentance and amendment of life, appease his [God’s] righteous displeasure, and through the merits and mediation of Jesus Christ, obtain his pardon and forgiveness.”

Congress proclaimed days of fasting and of thanksgiving annually throughout the Revolutionary War. This proclamation by Congress set May 17, 1776, as a “day of Humiliation, Fasting and Prayer” throughout the colonies. Congress urges its fellow citizens to “confess and bewail our manifold sins and transgressions, and by a sincere repentance and amendment of life, appease his [God’s] righteous displeasure, and through the merits and mediation of Jesus Christ, obtain his pardon and forgiveness.” Massachusetts ordered a “suitable Number” of these proclamations to be printed so “that each of the religious Assemblies in this Colony, may be furnished with a Copy of the same” and added the motto “God Save This People” as a substitute for “God Save the King.”

But somehow, this piety did not translate into a political role for any Church.From Franklin:

OCTOBER 9, 1780

I am fully of your opinion respecting religious tests; but, though the people of Massachusetts have not in their new constitution kept quite clear of them, yet, if we consider what that people were one hundred years ago, we must allow they have gone great lengths in liberality of sentiment on religious subjects; and we may hope for greater degrees of perfection, when their constitution, some years hence, shall be revised. If Christian preachers had continued to teach as Christ and his Apostles did, without salaries, and as the Quakers now do, I imagine tests would never have existed; for I think they were invented, not so much to secure religion itself, as the emoluments of it. When a religion is good, I conceive that it will support itself; and, when it cannot support itself, and God does not take care to support it, so that its professors are obliged to call for the help of the civil power, it is a sign, I apprehend, of its being a bad one. . . .

Source of Information:

Excerpt of letter written by Benjamin Franklin to Dr. Richard Price, October 9, 1780. Works of Benjamin Franklin (Sparks ed.)

From Adams:

Writing in 1786, just before the federal Constitution was written, he took it as given that political constitutions were wholly secular enterprises free of godly involvement or inspiration. “The United States of America,” he wrote, marks “the first example of governments erected on the simple principles of nature.” The architects of American governments never “had interviews with the gods or were in any degree under the inspiration of Heaven.” Government, Adams insisted, is “contrived merely by the use of reason and the senses.” Adams’s view of constitution making is also caught up in the secular ideals of the Age of Reason. “Neither the people nor their conventions, committees, or subcommittees,” he wrote, “considered legislation in any other light than as ordinary arts and sciences, only more important… . The people were universally too enlightened to be imposed on by artifice. . . . [G]overnments thus founded on the natural authority of the people alone, without a pretense of miracle or mystery, and which are destined to spread over the northern part of that whole quarter of the globe, are a great point gained in favour of the rights of mankind.”

The Godless Constitution, The Case Against Religious Correctness. By Isaac Kramnick and R. Laurence Moore.

de Toqueville says:

Religion in America takes no direct part in the government of society, but it must nevertheless be regarded as the foremost of the political institutions of that country; for if it does not impart a taste for freedom, it facilitates the use of free institutions. Indeed, it is in this same point of view that the inhabitants of the United States themselves look upon religious belief. I do not know whether all the Americans have a sincere faith in their religion; for who can search the human heart? but I am certain that they hold it to be indispensable to the maintenance of republican institutions. This opinion is not peculiar to a class of citizens or to a party, but it belongs to the whole nation and to every rank of society.

Democracy in America, Volume I

And at the Constitutional Convention:

MONDAY AUGUST 20 1787, IN CONVENTION (Philadelphia)

Mr. PINKNEY submitted to the house, in order to be referred to the committee of detail, the following propositions—-

. . . No religious test or qualification shall ever be annexed to any oath of office under the authority of the U.S. These propositions were referred to the Committee of detain without debate or consideration of them, by the House.

Bicentennial Edition, Notes of the Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787, Reported by James Madison, With an introduction by Adrienne Koch.

There’s a great exhibit online at the Library of Congress:

When the Constitution was submitted to the American public, “many pious people” complained that the document had slighted God, for it contained “no recognition of his mercies to us . . . or even of his existence.” The Constitution was reticent about religion for two reasons: first, many delegates were committed federalists, who believed that the power to legislate on religion, if it existed at all, lay within the domain of the state, not the national, governments; second, the delegates believed that it would be a tactical mistake to introduce such a politically controversial issue as religion into the Constitution. The only “religious clause” in the document–the proscription of religious tests as qualifications for federal office in Article Six–was intended to defuse controversy by disarming potential critics who might claim religious discrimination in eligibility for public office.

That religion was not otherwise addressed in the Constitution did not make it an “irreligious” document any more than the Articles of Confederation was an “irreligious” document. The Constitution dealt with the church precisely as the Articles had, thereby maintaining, at the national level, the religious status quo. In neither document did the people yield any explicit power to act in the field of religion. But the absence of expressed powers did not prevent either the Continental-Confederation Congress or the Congress under the Constitution from sponsoring a program to support general, nonsectarian religion.

And in a paper by Derek H. Davis of Baylor:

As written at the Constitutional Convention in 1787, the Constitution gave little attention to religion. Its only reference to religion was the prohibition against religious tests for federal officeholders. This provision had a dual purpose – one principled, one practical. The principled aim was to preclude the possibility of any church-state union or the establishment of a state church, neither of which was possible if religion could not bar one’s service to his country. The provision ensured that the establishment models of the New England and other states would not frame the federal regime. The practical consideration was that even had the framers wanted to impose a religious test, given the diversity of belief in America, disagreements among Americans on what the test should be would stall ratification of the Constitution.

In 1787, within the whole of Western political culture, the secularity of the American Constitution was an isolated anomaly. Religious establishments reigned all over Europe, not just Great Britain. The U.S. Constitution, then, can rightly be viewed as the document that marked the real beginning of political modernity. Government was now to be mostly a human affair; God might lend a helping providential hand, but the formation, maintenance, and dissolution of governments rested with men, not with angels. Without a provision placing the nation under divine rule, it is little wonder that as the Constitution was presented to the states for ratification, disconcerted religious traditionalists, including many of Puritan persuasion, voiced their disapproval.

The specific criticism against the Constitution, voiced repeatedly, was that the document essentially ignored religion. Much of the criticism came from Puritanism’s strongholds, the states of New England. Many objected to the “no religious test,” but similar objections were made to the Constitution’s failure to acknowledge God in some specific way. For one Connecticut critic, it was “a sinful omission in the . . . Constitution, in not looking to God for direction, and of omitting the mention of the name of God.” The framers weathered these objections, but did agree to add an amendment that would make it clear that the free exercise rights of all Americans were in no way jeopardized by the Constitution. Thus, the First Amemdment provides: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. . . .” This language ensured religious freedom, principally by disabling government from “establishing” religion in ways that could interfere with Americans’ own religious beliefs.

(emphasis added)

So I hope you can begin to see how I can assert that, on one hand, religion and morality were deeply entwined in the daily lives of the Founders, and at the same time, how the explicit exclusion of an established religion or religious test for office in the Constitution was extraordinary and powerful.

Every time I go back to the source documents, I am in awe of the brilliance and wisdom of those who founded this Republic, and at the complex issues they resolved with several simle rules.

In contemporary life, we face issues – both institutional, forseen by many of the Founders, and social which I doubt they could forsee as the role and ordering power of a shared religion and shared values is diminished.

How we confront those issues will be central to our well-being over the next century.

It’s been a long weekend (joint birthday dinner with my brother and family, lots of kid stuff ranging from t-ball meeting for Littlest Guy to teaching Middle Guy how to do the brakes on his car (he’s not mechanical, but I figure he ought to know how they work).

And now a little time to write.

Rereading Trent’s comment and the entire message stream, it seems like there are three levels on which I want to respond. I’m not going to get to finish here and now, but what I want to do is set out the three levels on which we’re arguing, make my high-level case, and then as I have time to do it in more detail, dig deeper into at least one of the levels over the next few days.

So without further ado, here are the three levels:

1) . Trent writes:

You visibly itch when the subjects of morality and spirituality are brought up, just like most Democrats and Europeans.

That, BTW, is why most liberals, democrats and Europeans get on so well.

I’m gonna grit my teeth a bit on this one, Trent; actually you don’t know squat about my attitudes toward morality or spirituality, and the tone of brittle superiority sits kind of badly with me.

The dual-edged role of morality in politics is a complex one; and I’ll discuss my view of it more below in 3); but many liberals and Europeans don’t ‘itch’ when it’s brought up, they just differ from your standards, as I may.

2) Actual actions in France. Recent news (the new Franco/German proposal, for example) supports my suggestion that the true French goal is not only to block a U.S. invasion, but establish itself contra the U.S. as a player in the Middle East. Friedman’s much quoted column on replacing France with India as a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council includes the quote:

Throughout the cold war, France sought to differentiate itself by playing between the Soviet and American blocs. France could get away with this entertaining little game for two reasons: first, it knew that Uncle Sam, in the end, would always protect it from the Soviet bear. So France could tweak America’s beak, do business with Iraq and enjoy America’s military protection. And second, the cold war world was, we now realize, a much more stable place. Although it was divided between two nuclear superpowers, both were status quo powers in their own way. They represented different orders, but they both represented order.

…

And the whole French game on Iraq, spearheaded by its diplomacy-lite foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, lacks seriousness. Most of France’s energy is devoted to holding America back from acting alone, not holding Saddam Hussein’s feet to the fire to comply with the U.N.

The French position is utterly incoherent. The inspections have not worked yet, says Mr. de Villepin, because Saddam has not fully cooperated, and, therefore, we should triple the number of inspectors. But the inspections have failed not because of a shortage of inspectors. They have failed because of a shortage of compliance on Saddam’s part, as the French know. The way you get that compliance out of a thug like Saddam is not by tripling the inspectors, but by tripling the threat that if he does not comply he will be faced with a U.N.-approved war.

Mr. de Villepin also suggested that Saddam’s government pass “legislation to prohibit the manufacture of weapons of mass destruction.” (I am not making this up.) That proposal alone is a reminder of why, if America didn’t exist and Europe had to rely on France, most Europeans today would be speaking either German or Russian.

I also want to avoid a war – but not by letting Saddam off the hook, which would undermine the U.N., set back the winds of change in the Arab world and strengthen the World of Disorder. The only possible way to coerce Saddam into compliance – without a war – is for the whole world to line up shoulder-to-shoulder against his misbehavior, without any gaps. But France, as they say in kindergarten, does not play well with others. If you line up against Saddam you’re just one of the gang. If you hold out against America, you’re unique. “France, it seems, would rather be more important in a world of chaos than less important in a world of order,” says the foreign policy expert Michael Mandelbaum, author of “The Ideas That Conquered the World.”

…emphasis mine

The French are motivated by a different set of interests serving a different set of constituencies than we are and have. Their interests are often not only in opposition to ours – acutely and subtly – but defined by being in opposition to ours, and we need to take that into account as we try and manage our relationship with them.

All of Europe is showing the cracks of a shotgun wedding between liberal democracy and bureaucratic despotism. It doesn’t work well, as we should be thoughtful about their experience as we consider (hey, Hillary!!) walking down the same path.

Trent suggests:

You have a distinct point about French crime and the GSIGN, but it isn’t the point that you think you are making….
The difference between the crime America faced in the 1970’s and the crime France (and other European states too include Britain) faces today is that the criminals from the French “cities of darkness” hate the very concept of France and French culture in general.

American criminals in the 1970s were not a threat to America physically or existentially.

Trent, were we alive in the same 70’s and 80’s? The era of the SLA? Of the Crips and Bloods and Blackstone Rangers? The rise of black street gangs to a position of armed dominance of large portions of our cities? Did I miss the part where Monster Kody wrapped himself in a flag and declared his loyalty to American core values?

As I noted, crime in France (and England, and the Netherlands, and Italy, and to a lesser extent, Spain) is passing the point where it is tolerable to the average citizen, and the liberal-bureaucratic state is thrashing about for a solution, and hasn’t found one. At this point, I envision a massive crackdown, with widespread violations of civil liberties and massive deportations. I think it will start soon, and that we will have one or two seminal events…a Sari Ribicoff…to start the political ball rolling.

The French nationalist “God” had failed so the French elites adopted a new one, what is now referred to as Transnational Progressivism. They look to me to be about 3/4 of the way from nationalism to “full Tranzie.” That is why you keep seeing things like the unilateral Ivory Coast intervention popping up from time to time in French foreign policy.

At home, the French seem to have made the full transition to Tranzie. The repeated punishment of white Frenchmen for defending themselves of their women from Muslim criminals, while letting off said criminals, is a tool of social control. Conditioning Frenchmen to rely on the GSIGN, the government anything but themselves is not western.

Well, for much of Europe (as opposed to England and the U.S., the citizen has relied on the state for physical defense for quite some time. The American notion of self-reliant self-defense would be quite alien to a typical Frenchman, not because they have been ‘operant conditioned’ by some secret bureaucracy, but because their culture does not go back through the Magna Carta. Interesting choice of descriptive terms as well, Trent…’white Frenchmen’…Norman Frenchmen don’t think of themselves as ‘white’, they think of themselves as ‘French’. The African immigrants talk about ‘les blancs‘. But I’ll let you amplify your intention on that one…

3) The role of morality in politics. Look, this is a worthy subject for a major book or a PhD thesis, not just a blog post written after putting the Littlest Guy to bed and cleaning the kitchen. But I do want to stake out some ground here with the promise to try and come back and mine it a bit deeper later on.

I’ll suggest that morality and spirituality in politics is central and absolutely necessary, on one hand, and incredibly dangerous on the other. I’ll follow with the assertion that the genius of the American Foundation was that it both provided a sphere for a politics centered on moral and spiritual values, and that it explicitly denied morality and spiritual values a seat at the political table.

This was a brilliant bank shot which has led to the American genius of assimilation and to the cultural openness which has made us the dominant force in the world for over a hundred years.

For myself, I am immediately cautious when presented with a self-proclaimed ‘morally driven politics’. I look to the left and see Pol Pot and Lenin (I don’t believe Stalin was driven by any morality but greatness, but I do believe that Lenin was a True Believer), to the right I see the Spanish Inquisition. Each was so absolutely assured of the deep morality of their ends that any means would not only suffice but were required to attain them. More recently, I look at the young faces of the war protesters, driven by an absolute impulse to morality that seems to preclude any rational thought; their fantasies are echoed in the interviews I read with the mujdaeen.

I am more temporizing than they are, simultaneously more suspicious of human nature and more trusting of my fellows to find their own paths.

Walter McDougall, author of Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter With the World since 1776 had a great essay in the late 90’s on Religion in Diplomatic History. He says:

Finally, our notions of history are skewed by the tendency of Western intellectuals to think in dialectical terms. Thus, we set realism and idealism, or secularism and religion, against one another as if they were mutually exclusive. In fact, the most profound students of Christian moral theology from Thomas Aquinas to Niebuhr argued that whatever is “unrealistic” (hence contrary to natural law) cannot by definition be moral! Applied to statecraft, this means that to expect utopian results from diplomacy and war is inevitably to invite immoral consequences – whether the crusade in question is one of self-righteous knights or innocent children led like lambs to the slaughter. Courage borne of religious faith may expand the bounds of the possible, but politics, as Bismarck said, remains the art of the possible. A truly moral approach to statecraft, therefore, takes human nature as it is, respects limits, and acknowledges the contingency of all human creations. It is one that pursues and upholds international order, seeks peace but prepares in extremis to fight, practices proportionality of force, receives defeated enemies back into the fold, and is honest and realistic about one’s own ends and means. For there is no virtue in stupidity or dishonesty, however lofty one’s motives. As Winston Churchill observed, “The high belief in the perfection of man is appropriate in a man of the cloth but not in a prime minister.”

This line of thought suggests that the sort of reasonable, restrained balance of power system founded in Westphalia, promoted by philosophers such as Hugo Grotius, Samuel Pufendorf, and Immanuel Kant, and nurtured by such hard-headed diplomats as Talleyrand, Metternich, and Palmerston, was not the antithesis of a “Christian” politics, but rather the best possible expression of it, especially by contrast to the religious wars that preceded it and the even more vicious era of nationalist and ideological wars that followed. Anglican historian Herbert Butterfield made the point presciently in 1954 when he wrote, “It is better to say that you are fighting for Persian oil than to talk of a ‘war of righteousness’ when you really mean that you believe you have a right to the oil; for you would be conducting an altogether unjust war if for a single moment you believed anything less than this.”

I’ll let the last stand on it’s own, and promise to extend this and tie it to my vision of a ‘politics of emergence’ in the next day or so.

Trent?

N.B. For the full (and updated) history of this discussion, see “Fight Night: The Dance in France.”

I have detested the LA Weekly for a long time; before its corporate parent engaged in transparent Clear-Channel type muscle to force and bribe the smaller edgier New Times out of town.

To me the combination of unchallenged, thoughtless, doctrinaire, sanctimonious leftism with ads for vaginal ‘rejuvenation’, penis enlargement, jewelry, fashion, and the reviews latest, hippest trends typifies much of what pushes me away from the mainstream left that dominates Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco.

But I have jones for newsprint, and since Layne and company haven’t sent me my sample copy of the L.A. Examiner yet, I picked one up at dinner last night (confession: We went to a trendy Venice sushi bar and had a wonderful time, then walked around my old neighborhood and enjoyed urban life for a bit).

And damn if they didn’t have two excellent articles I want to push out to folks.

The first one is about a group of students and teachers who stood up to the LAUSD and actually tried to get Locke High to become a place of learning…

By March, the LSU had condensed their concerns to 10 demands. First on the list was “an immediate end to brutality toward students, including illegal searches and seizures, unlawful arrests, constant surveillance, and excessive use of force.” They demanded qualified teachers in every class, and that teachers stay awake and not talk on cell phones. They demanded books and materials, the hiring of additional counselors, more extracurricular activities and sports, a well-rounded curriculum. They demanded an end to standardized tests like the Stanford 9, which they considered racist, and to be informed of their right to opt out of taking such exams. They demanded more “positive social events” like dances, field trips and, tragically, vigils. They demanded access to the school’s budget to see how funds were being spent. In short, they demanded the right to have a voice in their education, and, more basically, they demanded an education. Before the semester ended, they would have to add an 11th demand: “The freedom to express injustice without retaliation toward teachers, students or parents.”

Go read the whole thing; there’s no clear victory, but the story is a thrilling one of adults and children standing up to a collapsing, despotic bureaucracy. There’s no clear victory, but there was a good fight, and it gives hope that there will be more.

The second is a review of a TV show called The Office; since we have no TV, I can’t testify to the quality of the review, but I had to pull a quote and show it to you:

Brent and Gareth find their jobs rewarding, but then they’re both severely deluded individuals. Tim (Martin Freeman), a moody sales rep so crushed with boredom it almost paralyzes him, and Dawn (Lucy Davis), the melancholy receptionist he’s in love with, are the “normal” characters, all too aware that they’re leading dead-end lives. One feels for them — who wants to work in a rinky-dink paper-supply company, after all, especially when you’re apt to get downsized for your pains? — but The Office is perhaps a little too eager to dismiss such work as meaningless, almost beneath contempt. (I, for one, use paper quite a lot, and am happy someone’s out there supplying it.) Ricky Gervais, who not only plays Brent but also co-writes and directs the show, told The New York Times recently that, minus the comedy, the show is about “missed opportunity” and “wasting your life.”

Well, yes, no doubt it is — at least when viewed from the giddy heights of television stardom. There are very few jobs that don’t amount to a waste of time, if you want to look at it that way, as the movie About Schmidt recently reminded us. (Who can forget Jack Nicholson watching the minute hand crawl toward 5 o’clock on his last day?) But would working for a paper supplier be a mistake if it paid $1 million a year and landed you two fast cars and a house in the country? Or are “creative,” “cultural” occupations, like working at the BBC, for instance, the only dignified ones left to us? There’s an unexamined snobbery in The Office that leaves a bad aftertaste. In fact, it can’t even be bothered to really show us what the jobs of the various characters amount to. We see them play pranks on each other, answer the phones and fiddle vaguely at their keyboards, but that’s about it.

Damn!! A writer at the LA Weekly extolling the value of bourgeois work…what will happen next? I can hardly wait.

If this keeps up, I guess I’ll have to adjust my own prejudices. I hate it when that happens, don’t you?

Trent and Joe have launched a discussion here about France and our relationship. Instapundit and Vodkapundit have weighed in as well.

In reading these, I kept getting a vague discomfort, kind of like the feeling you get when the moules you eat aren’t bad but aren’t really right either. First let me lay out some foundations.

I’m not an expert on France, French politics, or modern European international politics (I don’t think Trent, Joe, or the others are, either…that’s not a disqualification, just a comment on the limits of my and our knowledge and experience). I do have some direct experience; my first wife is French, and she and I traveled and stayed there frequently for ten years and lived there for a year a long time ago while I finished work on my Masters. Her late father was a general in the French Air Force (the real deal; he flew bombers from England during WWII, and served in Indochina and Algeria, as well as a tour as an attaché in Washington D.C.), and was on the board of one of the three largest French companies when I knew him.

My advisor in Berkeley also was a student of French history and economics, and even published a book, Modern Capitalist Planning: the French model on the subject.

I say this just to give some perspective to my opinions…I have no special knowledge; these opinions come from my memory of wide-ranging discussions with a number of interesting people, and the fact that I still read Le Monde occasionally.

First, I think that Trent and Steve are just flat wrong when they criticize France for not acting like an ally. They are right that France isn’t acting like an ally, but wrong to assume that it is or ever was.In my impression, the driving force behind French international politics is the simple desire to carve out a space where France…even as a second- or even third-class world power…can lead. And those areas are twofold: defining the bureaucracy that they hope will subsume national governments, and in dealing with Africa and the Middle East, where they feel that their ‘benign’ colonial history…to them their willingness to withdraw from Algeria and bring the pieds-noirs home counts as that…gives them special status as the ‘portal’ between these regions and the West.

We in the U.S. are cming to perceive a great conflict between Islamist forces and the West, while the French see the Islamists as people who can be dealt with, leader to leader, and see an great opportunity for France (and Europe) as becoming the gateway between the oil-rich Middle East and the West.

This is totally in line with French diplomatic history in which the major defining principle has been to define themselves against whoever is in power at the moment; first their peer power, Prussia, then England, then the United States. They have always been comfortable that with their ‘realism’ and diplomatic skills, they could reach some rapproachment with the other side, whether that was the Soviet Union, Libya, or now Iraq.

Our frustration with France comes from our (not unreasonable) assumption that a) since we keep bailing them out of military difficulties; b) we rebuilt their economy twice; and c) they lived under our military protection for twenty years, they would act as allies and assume that our interests were parallel, with small differences involving metric v. English measurement and whether we would sell Michelin or UniRoyal tires to various third-word accounts.

They don’t feel that way.

They loved DeGaulle for navigating between the force fields of the U.S. and the Soviet Union, and for developing the ’force de frappe’ which they felt ensured France’s military independence.

Trent argues that they are in the midst of a ‘moral collapse’ as state and corporate corruption combines with the increasingly ungovernable banlieues (50’s and 60’s suburbs largely occupied by African and Arab immigrants) and an elite that has lost its philosophical compass.

Let me suggest an alternative theory, which I believe better accounts for the facts.

France is a bureaucratic state, with both the government and private sector fully enmeshed in a dirigiste bureaucracy, with all of the problems which that may entail (see my own writing on the subject). The French have what would be, to many of us, a flexible morality that goes beyond the public acknowledgement of the Prime Minister’s mistresses and illegitimate children, and to the notion of ‘favors’ of various types, both political and corporate.

The political compass of the bureaucracy is not only their own individual advancement, but the institutional advancement of France, and the empowerment of France in a world dominated by larger and more powerful players. The EU would set this triumph in cement, as France joins hands with Germany and takes over Europe.

France has never cared about the U.N. or international process except as a forum in which it could maneuver to maintain its independence.

The French are vaguely amused at our ‘moralistic’ view of international affairs. They pride themselves on cold-eyed realism, and in fact can be astoundingly bloody-minded when it suits them (see the Rainbow Warrior, pretty much anything about the Algerian war). If the 9/11 attacks had happened in Paris and say, Toulouse, large parts of the Middle East would be smoking holes right now, U.N. mandate or no U.N. mandate.

France, like most of the cities in Europe, has for years had a crime rate that would stagger a politician in the U.S. Criminals recently robbed an armored car with a RPG; in the 70’s and 80’s, well-off families (like my in-laws) kept ‘beater’ cars in town, and luxury cars at their homes in the country. The locks on the doors of their Ave de la Gde Armee apartment … in the late 1970’s … put to shame the security systems I see on my friends’ in New York or Chicago.

It is increasing, and there are strong reactions to it … Le Pen as one example. First, the signals of social breakdown Trent discusses are not unique to France (see the recent decision by police in the U.K. not to investigate property crimes), and second, the ‘breakdown’ is highly unlikely to happen, because before it gets to that state, I predict that we will see an authoritarian crackdown that would make moderate Republican fans of ‘law and order’ blush. I believe that one reason that the French are more sanguine about this is that they are convinced that the GSIGN can and will deal with any domestic disorder before it becomes a true threat to the social order.

France is, to the best of their belief, pursuing a path that is in the best interests of France.

Now, I think they are wrong; I think they are wrong as they place their reliance in a bureaucratic legitimacy; wrong in their vision for Europe; and wrong in their approach to the issues posed by Islamist Arabs.

And I’m amused to taunt them as members of the “Axis of Weasels”.

But it’s a crucial mistake to pound the table and attribute their actions to impending moral and social collapse; it’s a mistake because it prevents us from dealing with them in a clear-eyed, rational, forceful yet respectful manner. They aren’t going anywhere. Our relationship with them is going to change; but in the next decades we will need all the temporary allies we can get, and we can hope that it will doubtless change again.

We’ve been talking about alternatives to the command-and-control style of massive institutions like NASA.

Here’s an alternative:

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) intends to conduct a race of autonomous ground vehicles (see “Technical Details” for a definition) from the vicinity of Los Angeles, CA to Las Vegas, NV in 2004. A cash prize will be awarded to the winner. The course will feature both on-road and off-road portions and will include extremely rugged, challenging terrain and obstacles. The purpose of the race is to stimulate interest in and encourage the accelerated development of autonomous ground vehicle technologies that could be used by the US military.
…
A $1,000,000 cash prize will be awarded to the eligible team fielding the vehicle that successfully completes the course with an elapsed time that is shorter than the elapsed time of all other race vehicles and is within a pre-set maximum time limit. The winning team will be officially recognized at the next DARPATech, a technical conference hosted by DARPA. The winning team will be invited to display the winning vehicle and present a paper detailing their design.

There will be no prizes for anything other than first place. If no vehicle completes the course within the time limit, no prize will be awarded.
…

Just a thought…