Putin Perspective

I was in Paris last Thursday when United Airlines' parent company, after failing to secure a $1.8-billion federal bailout, saw its stock lose 68 percent of its value. At the time, I had a United Airlines ticket in my pocket, which was to take me back to the States a few days later. Naturally I thought: What if this screws up my flight? When I considered the coming December 8 UN deadline for Saddam's weapons inventory, which even last week he looked likely to fudge, a grimmer thought occurred to me: What if a war starts and I'm stuck in Paris forever?

There would be consolations, of course. But the biggest problem with being stuck in Paris forever would be having to read William Pfaff in the International Herald Tribune every few days. In Thursday's column, Pfaff accused American neoconservatives?specifically Eliot Cohen of Johns Hopkins and Kenneth Adelman of the Defense Department?of trying to turn President Bush's war on terror into a war on Islam. "These intellectuals have fallen into Samuel Huntington's pernicious fallacy," wrote Pfaff, "that civilizations, which are cultural phenomena, can be treated as if they were responsible political entities." This fallacy, Pfaff continued, constitutes "totalitarian thinking." La bouche en coeur, as they say over here, Pfaff insists, "neither Muslims nor Americans deserve to die because they are the product of their civilizations, whether those civilizations are admirable or not."

Well, hear, hear! But what is Pfaff talking about? What he's not talking about is any argument I've ever heard any neo-cons make. Christian conservatives maybe, but not neo-cons. Cohen did say the other day in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that the President's praise of Islam as a peaceful religion is overdrawn. That is not the same as saying we ought to fight a war against all Islamic people. Lest there be any ambiguity, Cohen said that he was referring to a "strain" of Islam.

Cohen's point (I don't know Adelman's) boils down to the observation that it might help to have some specific aims in the terror war, beyond just combating "evil." The Herri Batasuna in the Basque country has blown up a great deal of Spain, just as the IRA has blown up a lot of England and Ireland. Both groups have orphaned many children who have done no one any harm, in the name of a cause that the bombers (most annoyingly of all) show few signs of understanding. They're terrorists. But they have no desire to branch out from their own local theater of operations, and lack the demographic weight to do so even if they wanted to. As such, they're not the proper object of either our domestic vigilance or our military mobilization.

The same cannot be said of the Saudi-funded terrorist farm system of madrasas, for instance, whose goal is to corral as many of the world's 1.2 billion Muslims as possible and turn them into wahhabi wannabes. Last week, Russian intelligence made the claim that the Chechens who seized a Moscow theater and threatened to blow it up last October had been monitored during the crisis making calls to the Arabian Peninsula. So now we know what Russian president Vladimir Putin was getting at when he emerged from a St. Petersburg meeting with President Bush a few weeks ago and said, "We should not forget those who provide financing to the terrorists."

But let's suppose that the fundamentalist milieu could be weaned?as it perhaps could?from dependence on a rich government, or, to put it as Pfaff does, from a "responsible political entity." Should we leave this milieu?or this culture, to use another word for the same thing?free to go its own way? Of course not. There is nothing absurd, or totalitarian, about fighting this "culture," any more than there was about fighting "fascism," or "communism," which are cultures more than "responsible political entities." This means our field of vigilance has to be Islam in general?but that does not mean that our enemy is Islam in general, any more than a police force is the enemy of the entire village it protects.

Sole Survivor

My other problem in Paris is that I seem to be heading into a horrible run of restaurant luck. Two nights ago, I went with a friend to a brasserie I've always liked, Le Grand Colbert. It's on an ancient, narrow, straight street in the second arrondissement, and it's the sort of place that makes you feel all dashing and Parisian?bathroom-tile floors, mirrors, hanging lamps that leave the place a bit too brightly lit, an incredibly loud clientele jammed elbow-to-elbow at small tables, and waiters hollering at each other as they speed between the diners balancing trays full of seafood and bottles of wine.

The trouble began when my friend's sole came. She (who is French) did something I thought only American tourists did: She looked down at her sole and said, "Ewww...I didn't realize it had bones in it." Then she did something no American would have dared to do. She summoned the waiter to bring it back to the kitchen and bone it. Our part of the restaurant was now too crowded to allow the waiter to get all the way in, so my friend picked up her own plate and passed it above my head.

Since our waiter was standing behind me, I had to be told later what had happened. Another waiter barreled into ours at just the moment he got the dish into his fingers. He dropped my friend's plate on my head (breaking it in two, incidentally), and showering pieces of sole, carrots, a tab of mustard and a whitish sauce tumbling their fishy way into my face, onto my shoulders and down the back of my jacket. There was even a piece of fish-head sticking out of my collar. "Oops?sorry!" they said (chuckling silently, I'm sure, to their Parisian selves). And by the time they got me cleaned up, the rognons de veau I had ordered were at room temperature and, of course, speckled with sole flakes.

This put an end to my dashing, Parisian feeling for a while. Like, for the rest of my life.

Cross Purposes

France has a strict separation of church and state?much stricter than ours. It is designed not to keep the state away from the church but to keep the church away from the state. It's better thought of as a subordination of church to state. Public figures are solemnly enjoined never even to mention their religious beliefs in public. Decades ago, devout Catholicism was considered a disqualification for service in the president's cabinet, and a bit of that attitude survives today. Last week, Jean-François Copé, a member of Jacques Chirac's ruling UMP party, created a major disturbance when he said in the house of representatives that the present government has "two Muslim ministers." The socialist leader Jean-Marc Ayrault said indignantly (la bouche en coeur, in fact), "Muslim ministers don't exist any more than do Catholic ministers; there are only servants of the French people."

This system?called laïcité?is a century old, and I often find myself wondering why the French continue to tolerate a regime that infringes so seriously on religious freedom. But then I consider the outcome of the priestly pedophilia scandals in the U.S., and realize that there is a slippery-slope logic to church-state separation that could lead us to the same thing. Consider the implication of the lawsuits that have driven the Boston archdiocese to a choice between either paying huge settlements or declaring bankruptcy. Thousands of devout, primarily working-class people have devoted huge chunks of the money their family needed to live on, year after year, to the church. I do mean huge chunks: some Catholics actually tithe. This is often money they can't afford; they may have had to choose between supporting the church and getting a college education for their kids. And now they come to realize that all of that money, pretty much every last nickel of it, has been spent settling the bar tab for a ring of predatory homosexuals.

This realization is destined to produce outrage, and nowhere more so than among the church's bedrock supporters. This will weaken the church and make it a much more attractive target for future lawsuits, however it comports itself sexually. Unfortunately, lawsuits make laws, and such laws lead in one logical direction: toward a French-style subordination of church to state. Because if the church is vulnerable to civil suits for sexual abuse, why not civil suits on hiring? How long before woman priests are, de facto, legislated by the courts?