Falling Apart?

This just in:  Vancouver has been ranked fourth on the world’s list of least affordable cities.  This is well ahead of cities like Manhattan, San Francisco, London, Paris, and Hong Kong.  As most rational people know, the city’s thundering real estate market has been bolstered by rampant speculation and constant construction of new condominiums.. but salaries, and the city’s economic development, have not kept pace.

The survey quoted in the article cites research indicating that the cost of housing in Vancouver is massively disproportionate to median salaries earned by its residents, specifically when compared to other cities around the world.  The median house price in Vancouver as of the time of the survey is 8.4 times the median income — 8.4 years’ average income to purchase a house, compared to the average median in Canada: 3.5.

What this tells you is that the fundamentals that support high real-estate prices are simply not there in Vancouver.  People just don’t earn enough income to sustain this market at such lofty prices whereas in cities like New York and San Francisco, where real estate prices are indeed higher, median incomes are substantially higher and thus can support high prices.

Vancouver is plagued by a number of problems that keep the salaries of its citizens low:

1. Affordable commerical real estate is hard to come by in the city — leading in some cases to a perverse reverse-commute where urbanites must schlep out to the suburbs to their workplaces — but more importantly this discourages companies from locating here.
2. Most large cities with expensive downtown cores operate as financial centres — the aforementioned London, Hong Kong, and New York spring to mind.  Vancouver does not, except for our storied love affair with ponzi schemes.  Without the sustaining flow of capital through our city there is highly limited opportunity for local investment.
3. We’re still a bunch of tree-cutting, pickaxe-wielding hicks.  And BC’s resource industries, the bread and butter of Vancouver for more than 150 years, are weak thanks to everything from the US softwood lumber tarriffs to Kyoto to a number of key mining company collapses.  Our province has failed to diversify its economic base substantially away from resource businesses.
4. The advanced industries like software and aerospace that keep California sizzlin’ have failed to grow in scale in this city.  Investment in this area is weak, with very little private investment and weak government support (nearly all of the Venture Capital in Vancouver is government-derived).  We did however blow >$500 million on a handful of useless fast ferries, though.  Two notable exceptions are alternative energy and biotech.  For now, at least, they are humming along.
5. The film industry, which we in BC have courted for decades, is a fickle bride.  Since productions are built for each project and torn down when completed with little long-term planning, unfavourable economic winds mean that producers can pull up stakes and shoot in South Carolina, Mexico, or wherever they can cost-optimize.  In any case, the profits are retained in New York and LA… like a Mumbai call centre, we’re just an outsourcer.
6. Drugs, and by “drugs” I mean the cultivation and distribution of marijuana, constitutes probably the largest industry in BC and it flies completely under the regulatory / taxation radar.  Conservative estimates peg this at between $5Bn and $7Bn per year.  These people have a hard time getting mortgages.  They also tend to be undesireable tenants, since they tend to get arrested/shot at/sent into hiding — that is if they don’t blow up their penthouse with a meth lab.
7. Our transportation infrastructure is pathetic, particularly when compared with major metropolitan areas (of which Vancouver is now one) such as Boston, Montreal, Toronto, New York, London, Tokyo, and others.  If we wish to become a center of commerce then we need to be able to move people around better.  Skytrain is a laughing stock and the West Coast Express, which goes to a handful of proximate suburbs from the downtown core twice a day each way, doesn’t even merit comparison with the British Urban Railway system.  Our highways (such as they are) subject people to multi-hour commutes to travel 20km.  We have failed, failed, FAILED to build infrastructure and it will continue to haunt the city for decades to come.

For those of us in the technology industry, certainly during this housing price spike, Vancouver seems an illogical place to locate our startups or ply our trades in information technology.  While the average condo price can be as high as 2x-2.5x the price of a comparable condo in Toronto or Montreal, our salary variance is just 103.5% the national average, versus 104.2% for Toronto and 103.9% for Montreal (this according to the 2009 Robert Half Salary Guide for Technology Professionals).  While we spend more to live here in Lotus Land, we sure don’t make up for it in income.

Comparing Income to Housing Prices

So how high is too high?  Right now we are finding out.

If you were blindsided by the Vancouver Real Estate crash then you were clearly in a profound state of self-delusion.  Evidently that list of deluded fools includes our civic leaders who played russian roulette with the city’s finances, underwriting the now disastrous Olympic Village project in which the taxpayers stand to lose as much as $750 Million.  Still, even amid the free-falling values, Realtors and Developers are outright lying to you… inviting you to join in their deathmatch with catch phrases like “don’t wait too long” and “strong fundamentals“.  Where have we heard that before?  Oh right, it was John McCain, about the US Economy in September – days before it collapsed.  Oops.

UPDATE: In a passionate article, former mayor Sam Sullivan says the Olympic Village is not a clusterf*ck.

Speculators and developers will beg to differ (they’re invested in fostering positive vibes) but remember:  they’re betting with your money, not their own.  Condos down the street from ours were forced into liquidation at 40% off, and there have been stories of other developers dumping their inventory at similar price cuts.  This is the beginning of a trend, not a sign of the bottom, so if you’re foolishly lining up to jump in at this point, you get what you deserve.

Not until a software engineer making $60K-$70K per year can buy a 1-Bedroom apartment in the city will the fundamentals be aligned and the market be stabilized.  This means mortgage + maintenance of less than $1500 per month using the 30% rule.  On a 25-year mortgage that probably means this 1BR apartment has to be less than $200K.  If the research that started this article can be believed, we should expect an adjustment of as much as 60% across the board to bring Vancouver back to the Canadian mean.

So in other words, wait ’til the bottom really drops out, Vancouverites..

And then we can start figuring out why no one in this city (not even the property developers, after 2007) makes any real money.

September 21, 2003

Waiting For Spielberg By MATTHEW ROSE

Unlike most urban legends, the one about the Iranian exile stuck at the Paris airport for 15 years is true. Surrounded by a mountain of his possessions near the Paris Bye Bye lounge at Terminal 1 in Charles de Gaulle International Airport, Merhan Karimi Nasseri is still there after all these years — a celebrity homeless person.

Planted on the 1970’s red plastic bench he calls home, and surrounded by stacks of newspapers and magazines, Nasseri, also known as Alfred or ”Sir, Alfred” (title and comma appropriated from a mistake in a letter from British immigration), has organized his life’s belongings into a half-dozen Lufthansa cargo boxes, various suitcases and unused carry-on luggage. On a nearby coffee table spotted with aluminum ashtrays, Nasseri’s universe includes a pair of alarm clocks, an electric shaver, a hand mirror and a collection of press clippings and photographs to establish his present and his recent past. He seems both settled — and ready to go.

To the pilots, airport staff, fast-food merchants and millions who have passed through the terminal on their way to somewhere else, the 58-year-old Nasseri has become a postmodern icon — a traveler whom no one will claim. Little do they know that he is on his way to becoming a Hollywood icon, too. Inspired by Nasseri’s intriguing tale of lost identity, bureaucratic limbo and persistence, Steven Spielberg has bought the rights to his life story as the basis for the new Tom Hanks vehicle, ”The Terminal.”

”I realize I am famous,” Nasseri says in his soft, almost giggly voice, a gravelly mix of his native Persian, the airport French he’s picked up from the loudspeakers and the cigarettes he’s always smoking. As if to prove his fame, he pats a briefcase stuffed with his press clippings. ”I wasn’t interesting until I came here.”

Nasseri’s story is difficult to piece together. Over the years, he has claimed many things about his origins. At one time his mother was Swedish, another time English. Nasseri’s effectively reinvented himself in the Charles de Gaulle airport and denies these days that he’s Iranian, deflecting any conversation about his childhood in Tehran. (”He pretends he doesn’t speak Persian,” his longtime lawyer, Christian Bourguet, says. ”He was interviewed by Iranian journalists and made believe he didn’t understand.”) When we first met two years ago, he insisted that the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees was attempting to locate his parents in order to establish his identity. But a spokeswoman for the agency dismissed the assertion as ”pure folly.”

Early on in his saga, Nasseri maintained that he was expelled from his homeland for antigovernment activity in 1977. According to a number of reports, Nasseri protested against the regime of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlevi while a student in England, and when he returned to Iran, found himself imprisoned, and shortly thereafter exiled.

He bounced around Europe for a few years with temporary refugee papers, alighting finally in Belgium, where he was awarded official refugee status in 1981. He traveled to Britain and France without difficulty until 1988, when he landed at Charles de Gaulle airport after being denied entry into Britain, because, he contends, his passport and refugee certificate were stolen in a mugging on a Paris subway. Nasseri could not prove who he was, nor offer proof of his refugee status. So he moved into the Zone d’attente, a holding area for travelers without papers.

He stayed for days, then weeks — then months, then years. As his bizarre odyssey stretched on, Bourguet, the noted French human rights lawyer, took on the case, and the news media piled on. Articles appeared around the world, and Nasseri became the subject of three documentary films. (Oddly, apparently none of his friends or relatives have attempted to contact him.)

ike any number of Samuel Beckett characters, Nasseri has redefined the concept of waiting. But he remains busy, and during office hours when he’s not meeting filmmakers or members of the press, he collects McDonald’s soda tops and endlessly considers his situation in a sprawling, 1,000-plus-page diary that chronicles his journey to nowhere. These rambling handwritten notes recount his encounters with just about everyone he’s met, reporting faithfully everything from the details of his paper chase to some of the witty things he’s said (”I’m not Henry Kissinger”). Nasseri also asks most visitors to sign his journal.

An effete, balding man, Nasseri is well groomed (he washes daily in the men’s room and sends his donated Marks & Spencer clothes to the dry cleaners) with finely manicured fingernails. He smokes compulsively and is forever reaching for his pouch of Pall Mall rolling tobacco. At one point during our interview he coughs, adding with his characteristic sly humor, ”Maybe I caught SARS here in the airport.”

In an eerily Warholian relationship, Nasseri’s closest neighbors at the airport are a photo booth and a photocopy machine. Unlike most movie types, Nasseri does not have a cell phone, and he eats regularly at the McDonald’s in the food court 100 feet away. (”I like the fish,” he says.) The only green in his immediate environment is, ironically, the Sortie (Exit) sign.

In the Spielberg film, which begins shooting this month, Hanks is transformed into a refugee whose country disappears in a diplomatic wink of an eye. As chaos ravages his homeland, Hanks is rendered stateless, his passport turned into an eBay collectible. He’s grounded: a stranger in a strange New York airport. But Hanks is cured of his airport disease and soars to new heights (and, who knows, perhaps another Oscar), thanks to the Hollywood bombshell Catherine Zeta-Jones, who plays Hanks’s love interest, a flight attendant. Nasseri has had no such luck with the ladies and complains that there are no nightclubs in his airport. ”There’s no pleasure,” he says.

While Bourguet confirms that Spielberg’s company, DreamWorks, has in fact bought the rights to his client’s life story, Spielberg himself would not discuss ”The Terminal,” its plot nor Nasseri’s contract. Marvin Levy, a DreamWorks spokesman, confirms that a financial agreement was signed. However, he cautions, ”Mr. Nasseri’s story was an inspiration for the original treatment for ‘The Terminal.’ The film is not his story.”

Rumors of a $275,000 fee for the rights to Nasseri’s life story and certain consulting duties have circulated. ”It’s less than $1 million,” Bourguet says, adding that the money hasn’t changed the predicament of his client. ”While he became a bit richer, Alfred is extremely paranoid and confused.”

Certainly, Nasseri may well be one of the only people on the planet not to have seen a Spielberg production. Asked what he thinks of Hanks, Nasseri replies straight-faced, ”Is he Japanese?”

Regardless of whether Hanks manages to capture the refugee’s deadpan delivery, the Hollywood retelling of Nasseri’s odyssey will undoubtedly include a first-class ticket to the American dream.

Nasseri’s real-life ending, however, is still up in the air.

”Alfred himself will have trouble leaving the airport,” says Glen Luchford, a fashion photographer cum director whose 2001 mockumentary, ”Here to Where,” attempted just such a scenario, with the director, played by Paul Berczeller, failing to tempt Nasseri beyond the concrete gardens of Charles de Gaulle.

”Alfred has to accept that he’s free,” Luchford says sadly. ”But with freedom comes responsibility. He represents people’s worst fears — the idea they might be procrastinating all their lives and end up being rooted to the spot.”

asseri cannot be forcibly moved or repatriated. He is protected by a number of international refugee statutes. According to Bourguet, he is legally free to leave the airport. All Nasseri has to do is sign the identity papers the French provided him in 1999. But the papers identify him as Iranian and don’t recognize his adopted name of Sir, Alfred. And so he can’t — or won’t- sign them: a testament to either patience, or madness.

Nasseri is doubtful about attending the premiere of ”The Terminal,” although his face lights up at the prospect. ”I would probably have technical problems with my papers in Los Angeles,” he says, before adding that he’ll likely leave the airport ”in September or October.”

If he does decide to finally exit the departure lounge, Nasseri could go to any number of places in the world. He says Florida has invited him, and, yes, why not New York, when ”I take over DreamWorks”? (The company is based in California.) And what of the plastic red bench, which has served as his de facto home for the last 15 years and must by now be a collector’s item?

”I’ll take it to DreamWorks,” he says with a smile. ”And send it by FedEx .”

Matthew Rose is a writer and artist living in Paris.

Wireless and Web Buzz Again as Wifi Catches On Tue May 13, 4:09 PM

/By Christopher Noble/

PARIS (Reuters) – Landgrabbing and takeover frenzy are again dominating technology headlines as if the Internet bubble had never burst and giving old buzzwords a new lease of life.

At the center of it is WiFi, a technology that allows users of laptop computers and other gadgets to access the Internet without the usual struggle with wires and mismatched phone jacks.

France, late to the party, is now jumping aboard with a series of announcements in the last few days.

The race is on around the world to roll out WiFi access points known as “hotspots,” which for some entrepreneurs offer the prospect of turning mobile Internet access into revenue.

Each wireless (news <http://us.rd.yahoo.com/DailyNews/manual/*http://search.news.yahoo.com/search/news?p=%22wireless%22&c=&n &yn=c&c=news&cs=nw> – web sites <largest hotspot in France. A consortium of companies is now putting a WiFi network in the French capital’s subway stations and bus stops.

Veni, vidi, vici: how Latin lives on

Latin has survived the fall of empire, the rise of the vernacular and the incomprehension of generations of schoolchildren. In this exclusive online essay from the London Review of Books, Anthony Grafton charts the history of the language and its users from Descartes to Derek Jarman, and finds that reports of its death are greatly exaggerated

Thursday October 25, 2001

Latin, or the Empire of a Sign: From the 16th to the 20th Centuries by Françoise Waquet, translated by John Howe. Verso, 346 pp., £20, 19 July, 1 85984 615 7

Every spring at my university’s convocation, an undergraduate addresses the assembled students, parents and faculty in Latin. Parents receive a plain copy of the text, which few of them can read. Most of the students can’t read it either. But they receive a different, annotated version. Footnotes, always written in Latin – ‘hic ridete’; ‘hic plaudite’ – identify in-jokes and references to local and national events. By clapping, catcalling and laughing, the graduating seniors delude their parents – so local tradition has it – into believing that that their children have not only studied engineering, English or chemistry, but also learned Latin.

No one takes the ritual entirely seriously. This year’s speaker doffed his academic gown and mortarboard to reveal that he was wearing a toga and a laurel wreath. A previous one interrupted his speech to hold up a sign, in English, asking a female classmate to marry him. (She agreed.) But the Latin oration still matters. Like the Princeton campus’s splendid trees and hideous buildings, like This Side of Paradise and The Duke of Deception, it forms part of the hazy, glowing nimbus of traditions and practices that renders four years in central New Jersey worth the formidable current price of some $140,000.

In the 16th century, mastery of formal Latin was the price of entrance to schools and universities. Learned Europeans gloried in the wealth of Latin’s vocabulary – which Erasmus demonstrated, in his most popular textbook, by compiling a list of more than a hundred elegant ways to say “thank you for your letter”. They savoured the variety and distinctiveness of Latin styles, ancient and modern. Joseph Scaliger noted with amusement that his favourite pupil at the University of Leiden, Daniel Heinsius, would turn up “on some days drunk on Lipsius, on others drunk on Muret, and on others drunk on Erasmus, and would insist that all the rest are asses”.

They composed Senecan tragedies and Catullan love poems, Tacitean histories and Ciceronian dialogues, Plinian (Jr) letters and Plinian (Sr) treatises on every imaginable subject from astronomy to zoology. They even cracked Latin jokes. When a pedant irritated the poet Nicodemus Frischlin by addressing him with clumsy formality, “Tu, Frischline, vates,” he replied, without missing a Latin beat: “Tu mihi lambe nates.” The story delighted generations of schoolboys – who, in those happy days, did not need to be told that the great scholar had told his interlocutor to kiss his arse.

Latin, in short, played vital roles in the first modern age. From Prague to Peru, it served as the arena of literary artistry, the vehicle of scientific communication and the medium of common-room gossip. Individuals across Europe and beyond knew Latin as intimately, loved it as passionately and rolled it off the tongue as easily as they did their native languages.

Then, apparently, something happened. By the beginning of the 20th century, as AE Housman remarked more in anger than sorrow, even professional Latinists revealed on every page of their work that they lived “in an age which is out of touch with Latinity”. What trajectory did Latin follow between its heyday in the Renaissance and its slow death by a hundred bad conjectural emendations and a thousand cuts in curricula and budgets?

Traditional histories of modern Europe have treated Latin with some ambivalence. The humanists made the ability to write obedient pastiches of Cicero and Catullus the outward sign of inward cultural grace. They wished to re-create something like ancient literary culture, not that they would have put the task in those terms, and to revive a form of education based on grammar, rhetoric and poetry, history and moral philosophy, and designed to form an elite of generalists equipped to lead an active life in State or Church.

Petrarch and his followers challenged the supremacy of scholastic philosophy and theology. They forged a new Latinate public sphere in which the questions that mattered most could be accessibly and eloquently debated. Revolutionaries who looked backwards, they ended up not only reviving lost skills, but creating a new world: one in which the doctrines and teaching authority of the Church proved as vulnerable to challenge as the methods of the late medieval university. To that extent, the revival of classical Latin makes a logical beginning to the story of the modern age.

In the long term, however, the preservation of classical Latinity proved incompatible with the creation of a new intellectual world. Writers such as Alberti and Montaigne, though steeped in the classics, used French and Italian to discuss contemporary issues and reach a large public. The 16th-century Reformers were also fine Latinists – Luther gossiped with his pupils about his dream life and the apparitions of the devil as easily in Latin as in German. But they translated the Bible and the liturgy into German and French and English, and they insisted that the medieval Church had used Latin to keep the most precious religious truths inaccessible to ordinary lay people. Natural philosophers such as Galileo and Boyle argued that one could discuss the most recondite problems of astronomy and chemistry in Italian or English.

French replaced Latin as the common language of the citizens of the republic of letters. By the 18th century, even the greatest compendia of knowledge – Diderot’s Encyclopédie, for example – were usually written in French or other modern languages. Latin had lost its practical utility. Progress-minded Philosophes attacked its persistent use in universities and other erudite circles as one more relic of the Old Regime. No wonder, then, that active command of Latin declined so radically, to become all but extinct in recent centuries. The language that had served as the banner of modernity in the Renaissance had turned into a symbol for traditionalism and intellectual sclerosis.

In Latin, or the Empire of a Sign, Françoise Waquet tells a much more nuanced story. From the start, she emphasises that Latin was always as much a matter of ritual as of substance. True, the school, from the 16th century on, was “Latin country”. Boys were required to speak Latin in Renaissance classrooms, where spies, known as “foxes”, informed on those who slipped into the vernacular. Masters lectured in Latin on Latin texts, and the most successful pupils learned to produce Latin prose and verse on demand. But many boys, perhaps a majority, confronted with towering grammatical structures, typographical monkey-puzzle trees which they often had to memorise before they really understood that they were studying a foreign language, found their entrance to this country blocked, not facilitated, by the traditions of Latin pedagogy. When Winston Churchill began Latin, at the age of seven, he opened his grammar and found himself staring, bug-eyed, at the first declension, which his textbook exemplified but did not explain:

Mensa – a table Mensa – o table Mensam – a table Mensae – of a table Mensae – to or for a table Mensa – by, with or from a table

“What on earth did it mean?” he asked readers many years later. “Where was the sense in it? It seemed absolute rigmarole to me.” He had managed to memorise “the acrostic-looking task”, but enquired about the paradox that mensa could mean both “a table” and “o table”. The master explained that one would use the vocative mensa when ‘”addressing a table, in invoking a table”. And then seeing he was not carrying me with him: “You would use it in speaking to a table.” “But I never do,” Churchill protested, even more baffled – only to be threatened with severe punishment for his impertinence. This form of pedagogy – which established itself in the Renaissance and survived until relatively recent times – turned the Latin school into a labyrinth, whose centre many never reached.

Even schoolboys who managed to master Latin grammar read a very limited canon, which changed little over the centuries: Cicero, Terence, some poets and historians, usually pulled from their contexts and presented without any of the background information that could have made them come alive. Miguel de Unamuno, for example, found himself tormented by boredom as he and a friend translated their way, word by word, though the “intolerably dry” works of Nepos, Sallust and Caesar. Eventually, he became convinced that the Latin writers had first written down their thoughts straightforwardly, like the moderns, and then amused themselves by “dislocating the phrases, dissecting the sentences, scattering the words here and there with capricious abandon, simply to annoy us, the children of future generations”.

Thomas Hughes vividly revealed in Tom Brown’s Schooldays how Latin verses were composed, as boys desperately sewed shreds and patches drawn from the Gradus ad Parnassum into verses that could be scanned and more or less made sense. Even some great writers of Latin, the historian Jacques-Auguste de Thou for instance, could hardly speak the language: “It is said that some Germans and some Englishmen, having heard him speaking so badly at home, quaerebant Thuanum in Thuano” (“sought for de Thou in de Thou”).

Critics of classical education and classical scholars agreed on at least one point: they deplored the low levels attained in most classical schools. Educational reformers such as Jan Amos Comenius and Enlightenment thinkers such as Helv̩tius held that schools based on drudgery and dead languages could have no other results. The professionals, for their part, insisted Рgeneration after generation Рthat once upon a time, things had been better.

But this pan-European Golden Age was a myth – as Waquet shows by tracing nostalgic evocations of it back through time and by offering wonderful examples of classroom life. (The young Verlaine, trying to conjugate lego, found himself stumped when asked for the perfect, guessed legavi, and floundered – until a would-be helpful friend whispered: “lexi”. The master howled, and threw his keys and a Latin dictionary. Fortunately he missed. All this not in the barbarous 21st century but the disciplined and erudite 19th.)

Even periods of local brilliance in Latin writing did not always reflect superb teaching in schools and universities. When James Boswell showed Samuel Johnson his Latin thesis, the doctor shook his head at the many solecisms and remarked: “Ruddiman is dead, sir, Ruddiman is dead.” He knew that the high quality of the Latin dissertations previously submitted to the Society of Advocates in Edinburgh resulted not from extra-good schooling but from the corrections provided by the great Neo-Latin scholar and editor Thomas Ruddiman.

In Catholic countries, the Church provided the other forum where Latin was in constant active use. The medieval Church staunchly resisted efforts by Slavs, Waldensians, Lollards and others to translate the liturgy into vernacular languages. Sixteenth-century Protestant and Catholic reformers who demanded a vernacular Mass met with condemnation at the Council of Trent.

A particular form of Latin thus came, over time, to symbolise and embody the traditions and majesty of Catholicism – and was charged with deep meaning by many prelates and intellectuals. At Vatican II, John XXIII himself dwelt lovingly on the universality, antiquity and majesty of the Latin language, which Providence – so he argued – had led the Church to adopt. Catholics, then, were bombarded every Sunday with a form of Latin that came to be, in some ways, consubstantial with their religious beliefs, associated with them almost as tightly as Hebrew with Judaism.

Even in the centuries when priests performed the Mass in Latin alone, many of them had little or no idea what they were saying. Reformers complained that ignorant priests rattled off the words of the liturgy in absurdly corrupt forms. One friend of Erasmus, who notoriously reproved a priest for saying “Mumpsimus”, rather than “Sumpsimus”, received a revealingly dusty answer: the man had been doing it that way for twenty years and saw no reason to change his habits.

Seminary administrators complained in later centuries that few priests voluntarily studied a wide range of Latin authors, and fewer still could express complex thoughts effectively in Latin. As to the congregations, most of their members had only a general understanding of what the priest said and the choir sang. When the 15th-century humanist Leonardo Bruni wanted to demonstrate that ordinary Romans could not have understood the oratory of Cicero and the plays of Plautus and Terence in detail, he compared them to modern Italians at the Mass: “Men of distinction could understand an orator speaking in learned Latin very well, but bakers and trainers of gladiators and riff-raff of that sort understood the orator’s words as they now understand the liturgy of the Mass” – that is, “they understand, but they cannot speak that way themselves”.

Yet Latin pervaded the early modern world, and even the modern one, in multiple ways that Waquet carefully traces. Though vernacular books became more numerous than Latin ones in Paris by the 1570s, and English dominated the London booktrade, Latin retained pre-eminence in Italy and the Holy Roman Empire until deep in the 17th century. In every country, moreover, most scholars who wished to address a public not limited to their own kingdom continued for centuries to write in Latin.

Some of the most radical prophets of modernity – Descartes, Grotius and Newton – felt that they could address the deepest questions about nature and nature’s laws, Scripture and tradition, more proficiently in Latin than in their native languages. Into the 18th century, diplomats continued to study Latin, and often used it in negotiations (a number of monarchs, like Elizabeth I and Philip II, also spoke it accurately and well). For the old, teleological story, in which the vernaculars marched forward to a natural triumph, Waquet substitutes something much more complex: a dance, in which every forward movement was complemented by a backwards one, and which, she argues, took centuries to degenerate into a Totentanz.

Perfect command of the language of Catholic liturgy was reserved for clerical elites and a few highly-educated laymen. But Church Latin permeated local cultures and dialects. In the early 19th century, Tuscan dialects swarmed with strange beings such as Santo Ficè (formed from Latin sanctificetur). In Lucca, “Homo natus de muliere” (“man born of woman”), the opening phrase from a reading from the book of Job, became a proverb, “omo nato deve morire” (“man, who is born, must die”).

Nineteenth-century congregants in Britanny eagerly assented to the dies irae. Diêz means “difficult” in Breton, and they agreed: “all this is far from easy, we have every reason to repeat the word”. Creative misunderstandings like these gave the Latin Mass a participatory feeling, and helped ordinary Catholics make the set liturgy, in some part, their own. The mysterious, half-understood and wholly familiar Latin of the Church often had a charm, a magical quality, which translation would destroy after Vatican II, and Waquet evokes this brilliantly.

Latin, in other words, was not a single language, but a congeries of dialects, each of which flourished in a particular locale and played a particular role – a fact underlined by the unintentional comedies that took place every time scholars from more than one country tried to carry on a conversation in Latin. When the great Huguenot scholar Samuel Bochart asked permission to attend a public ceremony in Oxford in 1621, the MA to whom he addressed himself thought that he was begging.

Yet Latin fulfilled certain purposes almost everywhere in Europe. First and foremost, it made the gentleman (at least when it wasn’t being used to say “Will work for food”). In the Renaissance, to be sure, using too much Latin identified one as no gentleman, but a player. Castiglione and Montaigne distinguished sharply between the pedant, who clumsily spouted Latin tags at every opportunity, and the adroit, supple gentleman.

But over the next two hundred years, Latin inevitably lost its practical function. Modern textbooks, histories and reference works replaced ancient ones for most practical purposes, French became the international language of gentlemen, and schools made less and less effort to produce real fluency in their pupils. At exactly the same time, Waquet shows, Latin became a necessary accomplishment for anyone who aspired to gentility. Or at least the study of Latin became necessary – though few were expected to retain it in adulthood. “Do you think Sir John Crake, the master of the harriers, knows Latin?” – Tom Tulliver asks Philip Wakem in The Mill on the Floss. “He learned it as a boy, of course,” replies his more sophisticated friend, “But I daresay he’s forgotten it.”

In fact, the lack of practical utility made Latin all the more attractive, as a pure mark of distinction. It became the “chapeau bras” of high culture, as Benjamin Franklin astutely remarked – the hat that a man of fashion carried under his arm even though his wig made it superfluous. It survived the fall of the Ancien Régime to become the accomplishment of the 19th and early 20th-century bourgeoisie, who enjoyed, in the words of Louis MacNeice, “the privilege. . . of learning a language that is incontrovertibly dead” – as well as the privilege of seeing others excluded from learning it.

For practitioners of the learned professions, Latin served another set of purposes, some of them richly contradictory. It could mystify, and create authority, as it did for doctors, from Molière’s Sganarelle, whose fake Latin amazes his bourgeois patients (“Aye,” one remarks, “it’s all so proper, I can’t understand a word of it”), to the real ones who infested the Piazza Navona at Rome, hefting big books in Latin and Greek which they quoted to justify the useless nostrums they proposed. It did the same for civil lawyers – about whom Waquet could have said more – as their clients and their critics regularly protested. Yet Latin could also express what otherwise could not be expressed. A learned man could properly discuss obscene and sexual matters, so long as he did so in Latin.

Latin, in other words, had a double power: it could conceal or reveal. It prevented the supposedly vulnerable young person from reading such potentially corrupting texts as Isaac Vossius’s pioneering study of ancient brothels, or J.H. Meibom’s essay of 1639 on sexual masochism, or Gibbon’s discussions of the sexual proclivities of the Empress Theodora.

Yet it also made possible the production of the first modern literature on sexuality, as Waquet shows in fascinating detail, enabling a male cultural elite to say what “the prevailing norms would not allow to be stated in everyday language”. Indeed, Latin sometimes assumed an erotic or sexual flavour – especially when futile and obvious efforts at bowdlerism of school texts sent boys leaping into their paternal libraries to read, and never to forget, the full story of Catullus’ love life and Horace’s premature ejaculation.

This rich and cosmopolitan study of a universal language has its limitations. It is, first of all, a little provincial – or at least hexagonal. Waquet’s account of noble education fits French circumstances much better than English or German ones. In England and Germany – especially the mid-19th-century England of reformed universities and public schools – Greek played a greater role than Latin in conferring social distinction, and many developed a strikingly active command of it.

When one 19th century undergraduate read aloud his diary of a journey to Italy and mentioned the cost of a “painted beauty”, another stormed out of the room, contemptuously remarking, in Greek: “We are lovers of beauty without extravagance.” The others knew that he was quoting Pericles’ funeral oration, from Thucydides. Greek, however, passive or active, receives little attention here, since Waquet’s standpoint is that of the French schools, firmly embedded in a tradition of Latin rhetoric that goes back to the 16th century municipal and Jesuit colleges (which, incidentally, laid down the rule that no one could master Latin without Greek).

Though Waquet looks back to the lost world of active Latin users less in anger than in admiration, she seems oddly reluctant to evaluate – or even to write about – the artistry exhibited in much Neo-Latin prose and verse. The Latin writers of the 15th century and after composed lullabies and love elegies, epithalamia and epics, hymns to the pagan gods and the Christian God, ambitious histories of their times and mordant satires on life at court and university.

Many of the most distinguished vernacular poets, from Petrarch to the members of the Pléiade to Milton, wrote Latin when young to obtain what Leonard Forster called their “training in poetic diction” and continued to do so as adults, producing what they and their readers saw as independent works of art. Such extraordinary creations as Fracastoro’s Syphilis and More’s Utopia match anything written in any European language of their time for distinction of form as well as originality of content.

The reader who hopes to explore this uncharted mare magnum of early modern literature will have to look elsewhere for guidance – for example, to the pioneering surveys by James Binns and the late Josef Ijsewijn, and to the lively survey of the Latin prose of the 17th and 18th centuries, published – in Latin, of course – last year by the Russian philologist Oleg Nikitinski.

Despite the wonderfully subversive materials Waquet compiles, moreover, she falls prey at times to the very nostalgia that she elsewhere deconstructs. Again and again, she mourns the death of Latin everywhere, except among tiny groups of scholars.

When the British film director Derek Jarman was making his film Sebastiane, whose script is in Latin – part of the decadent thematic central to Jarman’s oeuvre – he was forced by the incompetence of some actors in Latin to abridge their lines. It really is all over, what the Goncourts coarsely called “going to bed with Latin books”, the fruitful commerce that Western civilisation maintained with the classical tongue for centuries. Latin no longer says anything, or hides anything.

This is plain wrong. “How did they read Livy,” Zbigniew Herbert asked – “my grandfather my great-grandfather” – and answered the question with a poem that became a modern erotic classic and an anthem of the Polish resistance to Soviet tyranny. Reading the stately prose of Roman history assured him, and many others, that someday “the empire will fall”. If Latin could survive being a required subject, it can survive anything. Epitaphs – even lapidary ones in capital letters – are premature.

For the most part, though, this is a splendid book: original in method, suggestive in argument, and a pleasure to read. Waquet has shown us how an ancient language became a sign – if not the sign – of modern Europe. She has proved that even in a period of relative quiescence, French historiography can still tell new stories in new ways. And she has shown my colleagues and me that the barrage of Latin to which we are subjected once a year under the harsh New Jersey sun represents not the travesty of something that was once great but one stage in a long, complex tradition that continues to grow and change.

· Anthony Grafton’s many books include Joseph Scaliger and The Footnote. The latest is Leon Battista Alberti.

· To read more online essays from the current edition of the London Review of Books visit the LRB. The extensive online archive of essays from past includes John Lanchester on the rise of Microsoft, Alan Bennett’s Diary and much more.

———–

-Ian.

—- http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0133/ridgeway.php

Mondo Washington by James Ridgeway with Ariston-Lizabeth Anderson and Sandra Bisin Manhattan’s Milosevic How You Can Do What the Government Won’t: Arrest Henry Kissinger August 15 – 21, 2001

You might have to be crazy. Or at least foolhardy. But you could try to bring Henry Kissinger to justice for crimes against humanity. Consider, though, what happened to the last people to talk even jokingly about plans for a citizen’s arrest of the real-life model for Dr. Strangelove.

It happened 30 years ago, when Kissinger was at his Strangelovian heights. A group of anti-war protesters sought to raise the spirits of that estimable Catholic priest Phil Berrigan, then in prison for destroying draft records. The group got drunk one night, as Daniel Ellsberg recalls, and dashed off a letter to Berrigan humorously suggesting they nab Kissinger for war crimes in Vietnam. Prison authorities intercepted the mail and the FBI swooped down, charging the writers with conspiracy to kidnap the secretary of state. Dubbed the Harrisburg 6, the friends soon found themselves in a knock-down drag-out to stay out of jail.

Fast-forward to this year, when Christopher Hitchens’s compact indictment, The Trial of Henry Kissinger, flares across the front cover of Harper’s and clings to a lower-tier spot among Amazon.com’s top-100 books. Hitchens builds a case against Nixon’s man for atrocities around the globe, from East Timor and Cambodia to South America and Washington, D.C. He shows just how frighteningly small the world of Kissinger has become, as one foreign government after another tries to get its hands on him, in the same way world courts have tracked down Augusto Pinochet and Slobodan Milosevic. Chile. France. Argentina. Slowly, they’re closing in.

Suddenly, the Harrisburg 6 seem less like relics of a forgotten era and more like prophets of an age to come. Here in the U.S., where the official response has been cold silence, there is renewed behind-the-scenes preparation for legal action against Kissinger. And some are again calling for a citizen’s arrest, lobbying for the public to do what the government won’t.

But could an average person really collar Manhattan’s Milosevic? “It would surely be possible to do so, and to end up quickly in jail or a mental institution,” says the noted linguist and political dissident Noam Chomsky. “A 17th-century English popular poet wrote that laws are like spider webs: ‘Lesser flies are quickly ta’en, while the great break out again.’ Not 100 percent true, of course, but a strong tendency, for reasons too obvious to discuss.”

Some suggest Kissinger, now an aging Manhattanite, is just too cuddly. “After all, he’s the darling of the establishment,” says the historian Howard Zinn. “These are all people who have had dinner with him. They don’t want to say they’ve had a war criminal for dinner.”

Others question why Hitchens—or his readers—would bother with busting Kissinger. “He was very much a No. 2 man, subordinate to Richard Nixon,” recalls Ellsberg, of Pentagon Papers fame. “It’s absurd to say he’s the principal architect. Of course he’s deserving of trial. But some people imagine that Nixon didn’t have the wit to think up those crimes on his own, and that’s quite mistaken. Kissinger was simply a very loyal, opportunist subordinate.”

Nonetheless, there is a growing movement to put him in the dock as the perp—or at least a witness—in crimes against humanity. The old Harvard professor has to watch his step. Though he still moves freely about the streets of New York, this “war criminal” had to slip out of Paris in May when French police tried to serve him with a court summons. Activists from the East Timor Action Network have repeatedly sought to question Kissinger during his book tours, but again the former secretary of state either didn’t answer or disappeared. Demonstrators have also hounded him at speeches around the country. This month, an Argentine judge ordered Kissinger to testify in a human rights trial concerning a plan by Latin American governments to kidnap and kill leftists during the 1970s.

And in July, a judge in Chile sent questions to Kissinger as a witness in a suit brought by Joyce Horman, the widow of Charles Horman, a young journalist killed during the Pinochet coup. Not amused, an administration source told the London Telegraph, “It is unjust and ridiculous that a distinguished servant of this country should be harassed by foreign courts in this way.”

Kissinger, who didn’t respond to Voice questions, shows some signs of knowing the heat is on. In his mounting campaign to protect his image, he recently agreed to release 10,000 pages of his papers kept under seal at the Library of Congress. Such goodwill gestures may not be enough to save the self-styled Dr. K. from a citizen’s arrest, in which he could legally be plucked off the sidewalk and deposited at a nearby precinct station for booking.

He keeps a fairly low profile these days, but he’s hardly invisible. Though it’s not listed on the midtown building’s marquee, the office for Kissinger Associates is located at 350 Park Avenue, on the 26th floor. Anyone can enter the lobby, passing a security guard and concierge unchallenged. Kissinger’s own receptionist sits behind a glass window. The spartan room contains a dark wooden table, upon which rest a white phone and an ashtray, a single couch and two armchairs, and a security camera mounted in one corner. The receptionist politely tells a visitor Kissinger is not in. Not expected. Who knows when he might drop in.

Don’t think you can just hang around and wait for him to show up. A citizen’s arrest is not so easy. While the laws differ from state to state, they generally allow for anyone who witnesses a felony, or knows which person committed one, to make an immediate arrest. That can include a “reasonable” amount of physical force. It would also normally involve some participation from the cops.

Back down on Park Avenue, across from Kissinger’s office, police officer John Vanasco explains the procedure. “We take the person and process the paperwork,” he says. “If it is a crime, we take the person in custody, but we need probable cause proving that the crime was committed.”

In the case of someone accused of being a war criminal, Vanasco says, city cops refer the matter to federal agencies, then hold the suspect for them.

A spokesperson for the NYPD puts it slightly differently. “Citizen’s arrest has nothing to do with us,” he says. “You make the arrest on your own. We do nothing more than transport the person. We are not making the arrest. We are not involved in this.”

Kissinger also keeps a home in Litchfield County, Connecticut, where state police say citizen’s arrests are not allowed. If you tried to capture him en route, you’d get to deal with the New York State police. “It’s all based on what the citizen says,” a spokesperson reports. “They may sign paperwork, but they don’t go out and physically arrest someone. It’s not like it is in the movies. It doesn’t happen a lot.”

The legal details of a citizen’s arrest are downright confusing. “It’s a tricky issue,” says Norman Siegel, former director of the New York Civil Liberties Union and current candidate for public advocate. For misdemeanors, he says, cops usually just write the accused a ticket. Felonies are another matter. When approaching a person you intend to pick up, you’re supposed to explain that you’re about to make an arrest, and tell the suspect why. That’s when the situation can turn ugly. What if the person tries to run away while you’re calling the cops from your cell phone? “Do you tackle them?” asks Siegel. “Cuff them?” The tables could quickly turn, and you’d be the one violating the law.

And if cops have reason to doubt the merit of accusations, they don’t have to follow through with the arrest. “A citizen’s arrest doesn’t really work,” says attorney Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights, who has tried to nail various war criminals, from the contras to Haiti’s Tonton Macoutes. “They have to be committing a felony in front of you.”

Still, despite all the hassles, citizen’s arrests are used in New York City. The unarmed New York Guardian Angels make about two a year. “Basically every citizen has the right to make a citizen’s arrest,” says Mark Moore. “You physically restrain a person and hold them until the local cops come. We’re trained in restraint holds, arm bars, and different locks.”

Since Hitchens and others go after Kissinger for war crimes against civilian populations—like killing 200,000 Timorese, one third of the population—one might think the big human rights organizations would weigh in on this subject. But when it comes to Dr. K., these groups tread lightly.

Alistair Hodgett, Amnesty International’s American media director, says his agency can do little until the government declassifies reams of information. Even then, Amnesty wouldn’t necessarily take aim at Kissinger. “We would put the emphasis with the U.S. government to look at significant information,” Hodgett says. “I don’t believe or suggest that that’s likely to occur.”

The Lawyers Committee for Human Rights likewise barely dips a toe in the water. “The international justice system shouldn’t be about any one case,” says Raj Purohit. “If there is someone who has solid evidence, then he [Kissinger] should be held accountable.”

As for a citizen’s arrest of Kissinger, Purohit says, “That’s not something we would support. When it comes to these most serious crimes there has got to be a proper [order] from a tribunal or indictment. I think under any of these tribunals none of these would apply to Kissinger.”

Human Rights Watch is similarly reluctant to style Kissinger in prison stripes. “If Henry Kissinger signed off on bombing targets in Cambodia and Laos knowing that they included civilian areas, as accounts have suggested, then he could be charged with war crimes, by his victims or by the victims’ families,” says Reed Brody, an attorney who has gone around the world prosecuting human rights crimes. “But I think that it’s difficult not to confuse legal, political, moral, historical responsibility on the one hand, and criminal liability on another.”

Despite such gloomy prognoses, there are other hopes. Ratner thinks you could bring a civil action in Washington against Kissinger on behalf of the children of General René Schneider, the Chilean general who was shot during the Pinochet coup. And it might be possible to file a racketeering complaint in New York arguing that Kissinger and others conspired using the interstate communications—i.e, phones, faxes, etc.—to murder American citizens.

Another country could order him brought to trial on their soil. “Under the extradition laws, we do not have any exceptions for American nationals,” argues Alfred Rubin, a professor of international law at Tufts University. “The U.S. has extradition treaties with many countries, including Spain, and we do not except American nationals from their operation. If any countries in Europe or elsewhere would like to extradite Henry Kissinger, they can bring a case right now in an American court—and I’ll bet you that Henry Kissinger knows all about that.”

Finally, it is conceivable that the widow of Charles Horman, the young journalist who was killed in the Pinochet coup and was made famous by the film Missing, could bring a suit under the civil rights statutes on grounds that Kissinger and others conspired to deprive her husband of his rights. Since the conspiracy took place in the U.S., the suit might have standing in federal court.

Kissinger also might be prosecuted under the Alien Tort Claims Act. There has been considerable talk among lawyers about bringing such a suit on behalf of Chilean parties. Here the prospects are dicey, save for an opening granted by the courts to sue CIA officials for torture in Guatemala. In another case, lawyers argued in a Miami federal court that contra leaders conspired in Miami to kill Ben Linder, a young American engineer in Nicaragua.

The Chilean judge sitting on a case against Pinochet is asking Kissinger to come as a witness. Georgia Democratic representative Cynthia McKinney recently wrote Secretary of State Colin Powell, asking for help in persuading Kissinger to take the stand. She said Milosevic’s arrest should allow the public to concentrate on Kissinger now; if she desires, McKinney is in the position to open a forum on the subject.

But heading to Chile to testify would place Dr. K. in the position of discussing—in public and under oath—decisions he’d just as soon forget. Still, Horman’s widow thinks he should do what’s right. “I don’t see why Henry Kissinger would not want to answer the questions,” says Joyce Horman. “He’s not a defendant in our case; he’s a witness. Considering that he has said several times that he has no knowledge of the death of Charles Horman, he should have no reason not to answer these questions.”

One of the strongest calls for an investigation into Kissinger stems from the violence in East Timor, where he stands accused of supporting Indonesia’s 1975 bloody occupation of the recently freed Portuguese colony. In 1999 East Timor once again exploded into violence, which U.S. troops attempted to quell. A subsequent human rights commission proposed that the UN itself set up a war crimes tribunal.

The U.S.-based East Timor Action Network would like the tribunal to extend back to the original invasion. It could become a tool to find out what actually happened, and a mechanism for trying Kissinger. “I believe a criminal case can be made against him,” says John Miller, a spokesman for the group. “One country invaded another. He aided and abetted genocide. He provided a political go-ahead and was instrumental in continuing the flow of U.S. weapons.” As for supporting a citizen’s arrest, Miller says that would depend on how it was done. “We are not into assaulting people,” he says. “It would be mostly as a way of furthering public education.”

No doubt Kissinger is a disappearing symbol of the Cold War in general and Indochina specifically. During a recent forum sponsored by Harper’s magazine at the National Press Club in Washington, a group including journalists and former government professionals questioned why Kissinger should be singled out when an entire administration ought to take the blame.

“These were not unique actions,” said Scott Armstrong, whose National Security Archive has consistently dug up and published America’s dirty laundry. “They were not covert. They were not Oliver North-type government out of control. These were deliberate manipulations of the levers of power. And Henry Kissinger was—is—very much in the loop. He defined the loop. And [Hitchens’s] indictment is of an entire administration. And those who served with him, above him, across the Potomac, and even in Congress bear similar measures of responsibility.”

In a Voice interview Noam Chomsky seconds that idea. “Kissinger observes, correctly, that he was conducting the foreign policy of the U.S.,” he says. “The U.S. is a powerful state, overwhelmingly powerful, in fact. It follows that its leadership can make mistakes, but it cannot commit crimes in the technical Orwellian sense. Only enemies, or those who are weak and defenseless, can commit crimes in the literal sense. Accordingly, it is inconceivable that there would be an effort to bring Kissinger to trial.

“And even if it were done, he could correctly plead selective prosecution,” Chomsky adds. “After all, it was the Kennedy administration that escalated the war against South Vietnam from Latin America-style terror to outright aggression, and the Johnson administration that escalated the attack sharply, also extending it to the rest of Indochina.”

Roger Morris, best known for his scathing biography of Bill Clinton, worked under Kissinger in the National Security Council during the Nixon era. At the Press Club forum, Morris said he personally worked on a covert effort (unknown to either the secretary of defense or state) to reach a peace agreement in Vietnam. “There was on the table in the early spring of 1970 a negotiated withdrawal of American forces by the end of 1970,” he said. “That was interrupted by the dementia, not, alas, of Henry Kissinger, but of the man he worked for—Richard Nixon—and the ensuing Cambodian invasion. And you know the sequel: Several thousand Americans died in the years that followed as a result.” He concluded, “Henry’s transgressions would not have been possible without the active intellectual and substantive support of his aides.”

Moreover, there’s the whole question of what international law is intended to accomplish. “International law does not involve personal crimes,” argued Rubin, the Tufts professor. “I would emphasize that immorality is not illegality, and illegality is not personal criminal liability.”

But a court hearing could do more for a nation than punish its most visible villains. “I think it would be good to have a trial,” says Zinn, the historian. “I wouldn’t want to put him in jail. I don’t want to put any of these people in jail. I don’t believe in that. I think it should be more like the truth commission in South Africa. Hold them up to the world, shame them, and ban them from dinner parties.”

There may be no tracking down of every powerful figure who has ever broken the rules. Trace it right back through history, says former White House candidate Ralph Nader. “Do you know any president who hasn’t violated international law dozens of times?” Nader says. “If Kissinger is a war criminal, what about Clinton, who killed citizens in Iraq? You can’t pick one person out. It doesn’t have credibility. International law is known primarily for violating it. Is there anything the U.S. won’t do abroad in violation of international law?”

For now, the way Kissinger’s world keeps shrinking may have to be punishment enough—at least until someone takes action. “Maybe if he makes a mistake and travels abroad where he doesn’t expect to be apprehended, then that country could arrest and try him,” concludes Zinn. “He doesn’t want to set foot in France because he’s afraid of that. I think that’s a very nice little punishment that doesn’t allow him to see Paris ever again. Apprehending him in the U.S., with the judicial system and friends—even so-called critics? Nothing is going to happen to him unless someone makes a citizen’s arrest.”

Harms and the Man

An indictment of Henry Kissinger for genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes would include (but not be confined to) the following.

VIETNAM: Kissinger scuttled peace talks in 1968, paving the way for Richard Nixon’s victory in the presidential race. Half the battle deaths in Vietnam took place between 1968 and 1972, not to mention the millions of civilians throughout Indochina who were killed.

CAMBODIA: Kissinger persuaded Nixon to widen the war with massive bombing of Cambodia and Laos. No one had suggested we go to war with either of these countries. By conservative estimates, the U.S. killed 600,000 civilians in Cambodia and another 350,000 in Laos.

BANGLADESH: Using weapons supplied by the U.S., General Yahya Khan overthrew the democratically elected government and murdered at least half a million civilians in 1971. In the White House, the National Security Council wanted to condemn these actions. Kissinger refused. Amid the killing, Kissinger thanked Khan for his “delicacy and tact.”

CHILE: Kissinger helped to plan the 1973 U.S.-backed overthrow of the democratically elected Salvador Allende and the assassination of General René Schneider. Right-wing general Augusto Pinochet then took over. Moderates fled for their lives. Hit men, financed by the CIA, tracked down Allende supporters and killed them. These attacks included the car bombing of Allende’s foreign minister, Orlando Letelier, and an aide, Ronni Moffitt, at Sheridan Circle in downtown Washington.

EAST TIMOR: In 1975 President Ford and Secretary of State Kissinger met with Indonesia’s corrupt strongman Suharto. Kissinger told reporters the U.S. wouldn’t recognize the tiny country of East Timor, which had recently won independence from the Dutch. Within hours Suharto launched an invasion, killing, by some estimates, 200,000 civilians.

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Jon Henley in Paris Thursday November 14, 2002 The Guardian

They are what the French call ludique, which is to say playful, amusing and, by extension, really rather puzzling: nobody knows why they are there, who put them up, or even when they first appeared.

But the rash of bizarre, fake commemorative plaques that has suddenly begun gracing the streets of Paris has got the city council worried. There is, after all, a proper procedure to be followed in such matters, and whoever is responsible is manifestly not following it.

Perfect copies of the marble slabs that usually indicate the spot where a young resistance fighter died, or the past residence of a celebrated writer or composer, the plaques commemorate either nothing at all, or someone who appears never to have existed.

“On April 17 1967,” reads one, “nothing happened here.” Another, on the rue Saint-Sauveur in the second arrondissement, declares: “Karima Bentiffa, civil servant, lived in this building from 1984 to 1989.”

The public records office contains no evidence that a Karima Bentiffa has ever lived anywhere in the Ile-de-France region, nor indeed a certain Pierre Salatier, who according to a third plaque is a computer programmer and was born at no.17, rue du Jour on November 12 1976.

Yet another takes the game into new realms of the absurd. “This plaque,” it proudly announces, “was affixed on December 19 1953.”

In fact, bemused local residents say, it has probably been there since sometime last week. Or maybe it was last month. Nobody really knows.

“I thought they were quite funny at first,” said Claire de Clermont-Tonnerre, a conservative city councillor. “But on reflection, they detract from the real ones. Their unregulated proliferation is not very respectful of those people who really marked history.”

At Ms Clermont-Tonnerre’s urgent request, the council this week debated the issue and decided it was up to the buildings’ owners to decide whether they wanted to remove them. The city’s responsibility was confined to supervising the often interminable procedure governing who deserved a genuine plaque, it ruled.

So, for the time being, the phantom plaque-placer is likely to continue his mission undisturbed. It is at least more more tasteful than the unknown artist who for several months two years ago mystified many Parisians by planting small tricolour flags in a selection of dog turds.

———–

October 6, 2002 The De Facto Capital By FRANK RICH The New York Times

They got it right the first time. New York was the capital of the nation at its birth. The first presidential inauguration, in 1789, wasn’t far from ground zero, and the first presidential residence, at 3 Cherry Street, was on a spot now occupied by one of the supports for the Brooklyn Bridge. George Washington slept there, but not for long. In a political deal purportedly made on a downtown sidewalk, Alexander Hamilton traded away the location of the capital to Thomas Jefferson to entice the South to give the federal government power to assume state debts. A year later, Congress and the president decamped to Philadelphia, and a decade after that, they settled into a new federal city next to which the City of Brotherly Love seems like Shangri-La. As Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer, two New York tabloid reporters of a later day, would assess the fateful final choice of a national capital in their 1951 best seller, ”Washington Confidential”: ”The founding fathers, whose infinite wisdom gave us a Constitution and form of government well nigh perfect, located the seat of that government in a stinking, steaming swamp.”

The country’s seat may still be mired in that swamp, but its heart, soul and brains are more evident than ever in its first capital, 200 miles to the north. While New York has long been the nation’s center of culture, finance, fashion and media, the city in the aftermath of Sept. 11 cohered into something more than the sum of its perennially celebrated parts. After its highest towers were taken down, New York rose from its initial shock to illustrate in real time what America actually is, a huge and resilient democracy animated by citizens of every conceivable stripe, pursuit and ethic (from those who gave their lives for others at the World Trade Center to those who looted its shopping mall). Instead of seeming, as it often had, like an eccentric island adrift from the rest of the country, the city found itself valued instead as a concentrated representation of the whole. That outsiders would regard it as the true American capital was proof that Americans now define themselves far more by their cultural choices, most of which are tweaked and marketed by the information factories of Manhattan, than by their choice (if any) of political party. Not that New York is shy about offering political leadership if it spots a vacuum. When the White House’s occupant was nowhere to be found on the day the country needed him most, New York went so far as to offer up its own chief executive as the nation’s paterfamilias. America is still grateful.

Even at the literal level, New York is more representative of American political values than the official capital. Washington, where I grew up and where my family has lived since the Civil War, is still a colony where the voters are denied the full rights of self-determination. Its citizens and public officials alike remain in thrall to a federal government over which they have virtually no say, in the shadow of a president who serves as the de facto prince regent of the tourist precincts, the only part of the city most Americans see. Washington is less an exemplar of democracy than an agglomeration of marble facades paying unctuous tribute to that aspiration. George W. Bush, and he is hardly the first president to do so, treats it as a politically obligatory diorama that he can flee any and every chance he gets.

New York doesn’t think of itself as competing with Washington — the same cannot be said of the reverse — but periodically it does so, if only to let the world know who’s really boss. After World War II, suburban Virginia tried to lure the fledgling United Nations to metropolitan Washington, until someone belatedly realized that an international citizenry would not take kindly to segregated schools. In 1959, the Washington Board of Trade mounted an elaborate campaign to make the ”Capital of the Free World” the site of the 1964 World’s Fair. According to one account, the D.C. advocates’ hard sell leaned heavily on the annual cherry-blossom festivals, the ”colorful parades constantly held when distinguished foreign guests visit the city” and ”the elaborate and dignified presidential inauguration celebrations.” That was all it took to persuade the World’s Fair Commission to reach unanimity in awarding the plum to Robert Moses’s posse from New York.

This year brought the Olympics bake-off. To increase its odds as a site for the 2012 summer games, Washington entered into a shotgun marriage with the more plausibly urban Baltimore. The capital’s confidence was such that it took for granted a Washington Post report in July that D.C. and San Francisco were ”the apparent front-runners,” beating out New York and Houston. The next month brought the shocking news that it was Washington that had been eliminated along with Houston (the only other city that can match both its toxic summer weather and complement of former Enron executives). After this defeat, there was much local muttering that ”politics” was the culprit and that Washington might have been punished because of the unpopularity abroad of the incipient war on Iraq.

How much easier for Washingtonians to blame Saddam than to take a hard look at their own city. D.C. may have talked a good game about sports to the U.S. Olympic Committee, but for three decades it has lacked a major-league team in the most American sport of them all. It purports to be as up to date as the new economy, but the signature digital-era companies to put down roots there, AOL and MicroStrategy, are synonymous with the dot-com bust. The capital’s Maryland and Virginia suburban enclaves are famous for having some of the country’s most over-the-top houses as measured by square footage but none of the most imaginative architecture.

Such is Washington’s appeal to tourists that it did not make the list of the Top 10 North American cities in this year’s Travel and Leisure magazine readers’ poll. (New York came in first.) The capital’s restaurants can’t compete with those of Vegas, let alone New York, Chicago and the Seattle-to-Los Angeles culinary axis of the West. Its taxicabs have a suspect fee structure as gerrymandered as the map of Congressional voting districts. While New York has contributed to the American language such joyous words as ”whoopee” and ”hot dog,” Washington has coined ”inside the Beltway” and ”Department of Homeland Security.” America’s songwriters and poets have repeatedly celebrated Manhattan, the Bronx and Staten Island too — not to mention San Francisco, Chicago and St. Louis — but where is that romantic lyric about the capital? ”Hail to the Redskins” will have to do.

First appearances can be deceptive to new visitors to D.C. Edmund Wilson once observed that Washington, ”after other American cities, seems at first such a relief, so agreeable,” but ”turns out, when one has stayed there any length of time, to have little personality of its own and to come to taste rather flat.” Or as Cindy Adams wrote this year: ”Even folks who live in Washington don’t want to be there. The high point for a visitor? Catching a glimpse of Trent Lott in Person? I mean, please.”

By contrast, you have to pry people away from New York. The gaping wound only deepened the citizenry’s already intimate connection to their city. In the poignant opening episode of the post-9/11 season of ”Sex and the City,” Carrie went so far as to choose the city over sex, spurning the advances of a Fleet Week sailor after he committed the sin of knocking her town. It was the patriotic thing to do.

New Yorkers who were out of town on 9/11 felt desperate to return. Since then, we seem inexorably drawn to the watering holes and restaurants and merchants downtown, as if to fill in the shadow of death with the lubricious glow and laughter of irrepressible life. We are more aware of our neighbors than before: not just the firemen and the cops and the family that lost someone, but the guy who lost his business in the undertow, the guy who is trying to rebuild, the all-American Sikh cabbie who bedecks his windshield with flags lest he be victimized (as in New York he has generally not been) by guilt-by-turban. The fate of ground zero is, inevitably, a noisy political and aesthetic debate, but whatever acrimony may attend it, it is also a classic American project: a battle between money and values, between commerce and art, between powerful interests and upstart citizenry, between past and future, all staged on an open 16-acre expanse that is urban America’s largest frontier.

Not only were the dire predictions of a mass exodus wrong, but the reverse may be happening. A New York Times/CBS News poll in August found that the number of inhabitants who think that New York will be a better place to live in 10 or 15 years is the same as it was the month before the attack. Manhattan’s residential real-estate values were clocked this summer at 15 percent higher than they had been pre-Sept. 11; signed contracts on apartments were up this July over last, too, reflecting the possibility that more people are arriving than leaving, even during an economic downturn. Neighborhoods reinvent themselves faster than anyone can keep count, from Harlem to the Lower East Side. Queens, generally an also-ran in any five-borough hipness sweepstakes, shows signs of becoming the new Brooklyn (though it still lacks its own Zagat). The Museum of Modern Art lives in Queens now, and so do a disproportionate number of artists, writers, dancers and musicians — including the novelist Jonathan Safran Foer, who is only the latest in a long list of Washington-spawned talents (from Duke Ellington to Paul Taylor) who fled the capital’s culturally parched environment to reach full bloom in the enriching concrete of New York.

In Washington, there is far more culture than there used to be, but spectacle, in keeping with the town’s own bombastic aesthetics, tends to be the hottest ticket — blockbuster shows at the National Gallery, Disney musicals and the Bolshoi on tour. Cities as small as Minneapolis and Seattle have a more lively indigenous arts scene than Washington. The plight of culture in the capital is symbolized by the Kennedy Center, an afterthought not even deemed worthy of its own stop on the city’s part-time Metro system. A world-class impresario, Michael Kaiser, has at last been imported to revive the place, and this summer he performed a Heimlich maneuver in the form of the well-received Sondheim Celebration. But half the weekend audience was New Yorkers, to whom Kaiser may have to continue to cater. The low-slung performing arts barn on the Potomac has for so long been isolated from the best American culture, high, middle and pop, that its annual low-rated televised honors have of late been reduced to bestowing some of their medallions on Brits rather than native genius. (This year’s Kennedy Center knight, Paul McCartney, has taken a rain check.) Such is President Bush’s respect for the capital’s temple of culture that among his first appointments to its board was Bo Derek.

With the exception of the B-list Hollywood names who get all dressed up (once, anyway) for the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, artists turn up in the city en masse only when Congress is posturing about the arts and humanities endowments. As for what American pop culture thinks of Washington as a city, as opposed to a government, one need only look at ”Minority Report,” in which the capital’s defining trait, even years in the future, is its historically high crime rate. The movie’s point seems to be that nothing short of the ability to arrest suspects before they commit a crime would have enabled D.C.’s benighted police force to crack a case like Chandra Levy’s.

New York is hardly without crime, but it also has the positive side of urban friction: the manifest humanity that results when millions of people of all kinds are packed together to make a go of it. The fundamental DNA of the city has never changed. It has always been a gateway for immigrants as well as an arena for big money. Its crowds have been large and raucous from the start. That ”culture of congestion,” in the phrase of the architect Rem Koolhaas, leads to a nonstop chain reaction of serendipitous human fusion, creative and sexual and economic, that is as American as you can get. The byproducts include hyphenated talents, melting-pot families, a constant, bubbling hands-on laboratory for social, political and cultural change in which the experiments alternately succeed big and fail catastrophically, in full public view.

At some point, Washington had its own dreams of being a sizzling capital. In ”Political Terrain,” Carl Abbott writes of how in the late 19th century it was still hoped that D.C. ”could aspire to be the Rome of America in the arts, the Berlin of America in education and the Paris of America as a city of beauty and pleasure.” But the city stood still while those roles were respectively claimed by New York, Boston and San Francisco. (Though George Washington had offered to help endow a major university for the new capital, few of its grandees seconded his enthusiasm.) Despite early hopes that the federal district might be an economic hub, it was as hard for capitalism to take root as culture. As Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace write in ”Gotham,” it became apparent early in the 19th century that the United States ”would have two centers, one governmental, the other economic.” It was a ”separation of powers as emphatic as anything in the Constitution” with ”no parallel in the Western world.” The American capital that emerged was, in John Kennedy’s famous formulation, a city of ”southern efficiency and northern charm” — a rare point of agreement between him and Richard Nixon, who pronounced Washington ”a city without identity” and voted with his feet to spend most of his political exile in New York prior to his 1968 comeback.

If Washington has an indistinct identity, it does have its own DNA — that of a town of transients. When legislative sessions were far briefer than they are now, Congress and the Supreme Court took residence in temporary quarters, then fled to better climes (as they still do when in recess). ”The greatest and most respectable business that is done in Washington is keeping boarding houses,” said an 1829 handbook for new arrivals. It wasn’t until well into the 20th century, as the federal government expanded during the New Deal (with its hefty infusion of F.D.R. New Yorkers) and World War II, that the city’s population did as well. By then it had long since missed out on the great wave of turn-of-the-century immigration that gave New York and every other East Coast metropolis their human and cultural variety. Even now, the capital lacks the ethnic spectrum of other major American cities. In the 2000 census, the Asian population of New York — almost 10 percent of the city’s eight million inhabitants — was substantially larger than the entire population of D.C., where the Asian population is only 2.6 percent. Though the number of Hispanics is rising in Washington as elsewhere, in 2000 they still made up, at most, 9 percent of the city, as opposed to a quarter of New York.

When the W.P.A. assembled its guidebook to the capital during the Depression, the authors seemed almost desperate to imbue their subject with distinction. One wistful accolade paid tribute to the city’s ”profusion of shade trees.” When the book was revised in 1942, the district’s most distinctive aspect was played down — the references to the second-class citizenship of its black residents, who like all Washingtonians had no right to vote, even in presidential elections, but who also continued to suffer many of the deprivations of slavery, from discrimination to poor public health and schools. In a 1983 reissue, a new editor set the record straight, but noted as compensation that ”it is easier to find one’s bearings in Washington than in other American cities.” (So true, and so what?)

Though opponents of full home rule for the District then and now can give all sorts of highfalutin constitutional arguments for their position, the perennial sub rosa reason for its substatus remains the same as it was before anyone had heard of Marion Barry’s coke bust or of the hapless current mayor, Anthony Williams, whose fraudulent nominating petitions contained ”signatures” from New York celebrities like Martha Stewart and Billy Joel. In 1965, Washington became the first major American city in which blacks outnumbered whites by more than 10 percent. Given the Republican Party’s inability to attract large numbers of black voters, it has hardly been in any rush to empower more of them at the price of likely handing the Democrats two voting seats in the Senate and one in the House.

The only time the capital’s residents had true self-rule was during a short-lived biracial governance experiment during Reconstruction, soon ended by white resistance. Though Washingtonians can now vote for president (since 1961), they have but a single nonvoting member of Congress. Under their limited form of home rule, in place only since the early 1970’s, the City Council, the mayor, the budget and even citizen-passed ballot initiatives can all be overruled by congressmen from states whose constituents’ firsthand knowledge of the capital may be limited to the compulsory school trip. It could be argued that nowhere in the country is the plantation mentality still more embedded in civic life than in an African-American city whose citizens lack the full rights of citizenship, even as their Army National Guard units are called on active duty for the war on terrorism. This antediluvian, or at least antebellum, state of affairs makes D.C. a strikingly anachronistic capital of America in the 21st century, whatever its validity as a capital before the passage of the 13th Amendment. Indeed, America’s capital has less democratic autonomy than President Bush this year demanded of the Palestinians.

Whatever Washington lacks in actual democracy, it makes up, of course, in monuments. But what represents the spirit of modern America more than the Statue of Liberty? The view of Lait and Mortimer, Washington’s churlish chroniclers of the 1950’s, still holds. They likened the city’s tourist appeal to that of Hollywood’s Forest Lawn cemetery, where busloads of Americans come to visit the movie stars’ graves. ”Its gleaming public buildings of white marble are like so many mausoleums,” they wrote. ”Where it doesn’t look like a cemetery it resembles a movie set. It has a feel of unreality.” But if politics is show business for ugly people, as the old joke has it, you can’t push the Hollywood analogy too far. ”Washington is dominated by elected and appointed functionaries who are schooled to believe they must never be caught having fun,” Lait and Mortimer wrote. ”Therefore, after dark, it is more like Paducah than Paris.” Unlike New York, which has winked at mayoral girlfriends from Jimmy Walker’s to Rudolph Giuliani’s (and doesn’t care where its current bachelor mayor spends his weekends), Washington was the last to discover John Kennedy’s sex life and is still as open-mouthed as an Edvard Munch screamer when contemplating Bill Clinton’s.

Washington’s idea of a Hollywood sex symbol is a cast member in ”The West Wing” — no matter whom — because what could be more erotic than a powerful government bureaucrat? The city’s idea of an intellectual is a Sunday-morning talking head; its literary apotheosis is the trade journal. Its loudest academic posturing emanates from the so-called university without students, the think tank, invented by the Brookings Institution in 1927 and a major Washington growth industry since the 1970’s. The think tanks’ tenured ”professors,” with grandiose titles that might have been lifted from the Marx Brothers’ ”Duck Soup,” are often out-of-office ideologues with more position papers than books to their credit. Only in this heady environment could William Bennett be mistaken for Harold Bloom and CNN’s ”Capital Gang” for the Algonquin Round Table. Unlike decision makers in other capitals, Washington’s power elite don’t routinely commingle with top-rung scholars, scientists, novelists, artists and musicians who might broaden their thinking beyond the parameters set by the city’s army of lobbyists and single-issue advocates.

Though Washington suffered its own grievous wound on Sept. 11, it remains as insular as it was before the attack. As the country’s official capital, it is to New York as Ankara is to Istanbul, Canberra is to Sydney, Brasilia is to Rio. Strolling through downtown and past the alabaster public buildings on a beautiful afternoon, you find that the sparse pedestrian traffic is often limited to government workers in cookie-cutter garb and cadres of tourists hoping to find some semblance of urban brio after having had their fill of the National Air and Space Museum. (They’d be better advised to hightail it to the city’s black or gay enclaves or even the suburbs.)

Take a similar walk through the central commercial districts of New York, whatever the borough, and you’ll find not just animated sidewalks packed with locals but also signs of a city in perpetual renewal, pursuing creation and demolition with equal abandon, always testing the limits. That hope, that drive, that hunger to keep moving no matter what, is America at its highest throttle. Should the Olympians come to the true capital, they won’t automatically own the town, as they would if they had landed in Washington. In New York, they’ll find that no sooner do the games begin than they are locked into the even tougher competition of winning the city’s favor, just like every other newcomer who has ever come here with dreams of going for the gold.

Frank Rich is a Times columnist and a senior writer for the magazine.

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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 3 – 9 October 2002 Issue No. 606 Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875

Is war inevitable? Is war inevitable or can it be averted, asks Mohamed Sid-Ahmed

Mohamed Sid-Ahmed The US administration’s quarrel with Saddam Hussein is purportedly over his continued stockpiling of weapons of mass destruction in defiance of Security Council resolutions. In fact, however, it goes far beyond the question of Iraq’s alleged arsenal of banned weapons. There is first of all the Iraqi president’s alleged support of terrorism. Then there is also the personal aspect. Bush has not forgiven Saddam for his abortive assassination attempt against Bush senior during the latter’s visit to Kuwait shortly after leaving office. But these are not the only reasons the US administration is determined to topple the Iraqi leader. He has come to represent a problem surpassing the issue of Iraq, even of terrorism proper, a problem with global, and not only regional, dimensions.

Washington’s tireless attempts to link Saddam to Al-Qa’eda despite the absence of any evidence of a connection between them, its insistence on underlining his terrorist connection, have less to do with the 11 September attacks themselves than with another issue that is totally unrelated to the attacks, namely, the challenge to the hitherto restricted membership in the nuclear club. Thanks to the critical degree of technological development in recent years, weapons of mass destruction are no longer the monopoly of a limited number of technologically developed countries. Their production is no longer beyond the technical capabilities of moderately developed countries, nor is their price prohibitive any more. Moreover, quite a number of these weapons have been smuggled out of the Soviet Union in the aftermath of its collapse. As a result, they can now be acquired by a wide range of terrorist networks.

11 September established a link between two issues that until then were totally unrelated: the issue of international terrorism, which spread in societies at the base of the world community, and the issue of weapons of mass destruction, an issue traditionally associated with great powers closer to the summit of the world community. Now a moderately developed state, Iraq, is seen as the catalyst which can bring about the merger of these two issues.

Such a merger brings a new problem to the fore, namely, that disarmament should not go beyond a certain critical point. Throughout the last decades we have heard much about the need to disarm and reduce the stockpiling of nuclear — and other — weapons of mass destruction. But no one has ever suggested that disarmament should reach the point of total disarmament for all states, including the five great powers with veto prerogatives in the Security Council.

Great powers support disarmament to the extend that it would diminish, if not eliminate, the threat of mutual extermination. But no great power wants to find itself helpless in the face of terrorist organisations which could eventually acquire prohibited weapons of mass destruction. This lies at the heart of the whole problem. Disarmament under Cold War conditions was determined by the confrontation between the two superpowers, which forced them to maintain a degree of parity and guaranteed the gradual decrease of weapons levels in a way that would avoid critical discrepancies between them. True, the parity between the superpowers did not extend to their overkill capability, with the United States capable of destroying the Soviet Union 30 times over and the latter of destroying the United States only 20 times over. But as humans die only once, this hardly mattered. At that time, there was not much concern with the post-Cold War era, and whether weapons levels should — or could — be reduced to zero.

But now that the Soviet Union has vanished, and there is no longer a confrontation requiring that parity be maintained between the superpowers, Bush declared in the document published last week on the National Security Strategy of the United States of America — a document also known as the Bush Doctrine — that parity between America and another state, or group of states, is an issue of the past. Never again will the United States accept to be militarily equal or inferior to any other combination of states. The Cold War era was a temporary, transient phenomenon, never again to be tolerated.

From this viewpoint there is no question of proceeding forward with disarmament up to option zero arms. On the contrary, what is now to be expected is some new form of re-armament with weapons devised not to confront great powers but terrorist networks with possible access to weapons of mass destruction via so-called “rogue” states. These new categories of weapons would be designed to deprive terrorists of the surprise element, and to increase the flexibility and mobility of the anti-terrorist drive. War against terrorists is likely to acquire the characteristics of guerrilla warfare rather than conventional warfare between regular armies.

The crucial point in the Bush doctrine is his declared intention to attack potential enemies before they strike. According to The Washington Post, this “represents a new chapter in strategic doctrine that heightens the danger of unintended consequences and raises the pressure on the US national security system to get things right the first time”. The logic behind the new strategy doctrine violates the charters of both the United Nations and NATO. It quotes an American military expert as asking, “If preemption as a policy takes hold, where does it stop?”

The paper adds: “The dramatic change in the decades-old strategy of deterrence and containment puts an option into play that could be effective against rogue states. But experts warn that the shift also risks establishing a precedent for countries whose motives or timing the US government may not support.” This has already happened. In a flagrant case of double standards, the Bush administration objected to President Putin’s announcement that Russia would be justified in attacking Chechen rebels who sought refuge in neighbouring Georgia, even as Bush was preparing to tell world leaders that the United States would act alone against Saddam Hussein if no one else would.

Another problem the Bush doctrine fails to address is whether the threat of a preemptive strike will not drive their likely targets into increasing the capability of their weapons. For example, this can only encourage a country like Iran to acquire nuclear capability. It would also induce Pakistan into counter-balancing India’s superior conventional army by a similar development. The temptation will be great to launch preemptive strikes in situations which, in the absence of the Bush doctrine, could have been solved without resorting to violence. Generally speaking, it is a doctrine which encourages the propagation of banned weapons, nuclear, chemical, biological, etc, rather than the opposite.

Moreover, Bush’s preemptive doctrine is opposed by a wide range of political forces on the world scene. This has taken its most flagrant expression in the difference that distinguishes the French from the American position in the Security Council. Paris focuses on the fact that the draft resolution Washington is attempting to push through the Security Council has very little in common with resolution 1284, which limits the UN mandate to sending weapons inspectors in to monitor Iraq’s disarmament programme, not to using the inspections as an excuse to send military forces in to bring about a regime change.

The American attitude presupposes that the Bush Doctrine has been accepted by all states, which is not the case. Three permanent members of the Security Council with veto prerogatives, France, Russia and China, categorically reject the policy of preemption. This disagreement among the permanent members of the Security Council must be settled if the Council is to have the last word. Otherwise it is to be expected that the US will act unilaterally. What is particularly critical in this matter is that the US cannot claim that it is operating within the context of international legitimacy adapted to the new conditions of fighting terrorism, if only because three permanent members of the Security Council reject such an assumption. Is a compromise possible?

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