November 29, 2005
The war in Iraq - switch to airpower
Seymour Hersh writes in the New Yorker on possible scenarios for the US involvement in Iraq. Most chilling is the idea that there could be a switch to airpower. The idea of bombing as a conceivable option for counter-insurgency beggars belief.
As the Blitz showed in London, bombing of civilian targets tends to strengthen rather than weaken opposition. How effective was bombing in Vietnam, Cambodia? It is likely to weaken rather than reinforce any democratic solution to the problem.
Meanwhile, special forces are operating over the border in Syria:
...The covert war in Iraq has expanded in recent months to Syria. A composite American Special Forces team, known as an S.M.U., for “special-mission unit,” has been ordered, under stringent cover, to target suspected supporters of the Iraqi insurgency across the border. (The Pentagon had no comment.) “It’s a powder keg,” the Pentagon consultant said of the tactic.
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November 8, 2005
The Decline of the Standard
The Evening Standard's decline is staggering.
Today's lead story on the This is London website is that Kate Moss is moving house. Wow.
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November 4, 2005
Paris 2005
"Je déteste les francais."
I hate the French. The speaker is a north African youth in his early twenties, in a gang walking home up a narrow street north of the Opéra. It late on Saturday night five weeks ago. The gang is shouting and laughing as they walk. All the normal bars have closed, only the red light bars are open. Two or three women of mature years sitting at the bar eyeing passers-by through net curtains. The gang goes up to one of the glass doors, pulls it open, one of the men shouts that he wants to come in and take a look "C'est gratuit, non?". I can look for free, can't I?
When I lived in Paris years ago these were the Maghrébins. It was a neat way of lumping together Moroccans, Tunisians and Algerians. When I was queuing up trying to get my carte de séjour, suffering the contempt of the officials (you're in the wrong queue, you should be over there ... where is your fichier? ... you have filled it in incorrectly ... come back on Thursday) the Maghrébins had it even worse. Their French wasn't up to coping with the system. The officials attitude towards them verged on hostility.
The young men in Paris are the sons of that generation. Their French is pure, unaccented. They now mingle more freely than they used to with the West Africans from Niger and Mali "les noirs". Over at the bar a woman is arguing with the young man. His friends pull him away, laughing.
It is "La Nuit Blanche". Paris Up All Night - as the poster helpfully explains in English. The streets are unusually full of people for so late in the evening. But most of the bars have closed at the normal time - perhaps the Mairie de Paris forgot to ask them to participate - and the Métro has stopped running.
I have to get back to my hotel in the Western suburbs. I am in Paris for the Prix de l'arc de triomphe, and I have left my friends in a noisy club. My ears are hurting and a large Lebanese supper sits uncomfortably in my belly. I want a calm walk and go looking for a night bus. I used to live here many years ago and I am fond of the place. I want to see how it has changed.
The answer is that something is wrong. Paris is out of sorts.
The previous day I get a sense of it when I am trying to buy a tube ticket at La Défense at 6pm on a Friday night. All the ticket machines take cash, and I only have bills. A woman in a neat uniform advises me to use a credit card as there are no ticket offices open (a strike?). I queue up for twenty minutes to pay by credit card. The machine rejects all my cards. I had been early and now I am late. There is a group of German tourists behind me, forty of them, all wanting tickets. There are probably five hundred people on the concourse wanting tickets. I catch the eye of a middle-aged German and we shrug. It's the kind of thing that happens in all big cities - you put up with it.
All around me I notice small but telling changes: posters that would have been in French are now written in English. Cosmetic products, yoghurts, holidays, department stores, they are all speaking to their buyers in English. Is this to be chic? Or is it good marketing?
I go to buy my wife perfume at Frédéric Malle, admire the witty window displays and wander around the corner to a bookshop I always visit. It is 11am on a Saturday morning. The street is behind the Odéon towards the Jardins de Luxembourg. It is super quiet. You can walk in the road without being run down. I get to the bookshop. It is closed. The sign says that it is open "15h-19h mar-sam" (3pm to 7pm Tuesday to Saturday). The sign invites the customer to visit its website.
Why not go the whole hog and just open for an hour every day before dinner? Or perhaps "by appointment".
I find a scarf to buy.
I worked with a Frenchman in 2001 and visited him in Paris on business. We took a long lunch to talk things over in the French manner and then walked back to his house in Neuilly (his wife was a rich banker). I asked him how the 35 hour week effected him. He said he worked four days a week. What did he do on the fifth day?
"Je joue au tennis."
Now I am wandering along the Seine stopping to look at the old copies of Paris Match from the fifties and sixties. I flick through the copies, enjoying the pictures of the great events: the space race, Jackie Kennedy, the assassination of Kennedy, the Beatles. The attendant comes over to me and says somewhat crossly:
"Voila monsieur, ils sont tous la."
He hands me a four page Paris Match pull-out, showing tiny thumbnails of the same images. 50 years of Paris Match. You can't make the pictures out. He turns away, talking on his mobile. More hostility. I put the thing down and walk away.
"Monsieur! Monsieur!"
I have gone fifty yards.
"Will you give the guide back to me?"
"I left it on the stall."
"Show me where."
I wander back, irritated, and point out his guide. "You should have given it back to me."
"You were on the phone," I say.
"All the same," he says.
I go to get my hair cut. The receptionist looks around. Three empty chairs. She seems unkeen. Finally, she indicates a chair.
We are silent during the hair-cut. Then she says:
"Do you use anything for your dandruff?"
I say: "No." (Actually, the answer is yes but somehow I am confused by the question)
Silence.
Later that night. Le Chatelet. Paris Up All Night has apparently been a hit. The streets are full of thousands of young men and women. There are night buses, but the bus companies don't seem to have laid on enough. The atmosphere is brutal, hostile. Behind me three African women are shouting at an African man. He calls them whores. The crowd laughs. One of the women is enraged. He is a sad old man, a limp dick, a gay. The crowd are enjoying it, but she has lost her cool. Now her friends are trying to calm her down, leading her away. There are so many people in the crush that they can't avoid one another.
A bus appears. The crowd roars. The young men run out like ants, block the street and start hammering on the door. No other traffic can get through. Horns sound.
The drive wags his finger. He is not going to open the door. The young men tug the door, bang on it, push against the side of the bus. The driver sits stolidly, looking ahead, trying to ignore the men jumping up and down in front of him, rolling forwards inch by inch.
"Tu vas te faire tuer," someone shouts. You'll get yourself killed. Unclear who she means, the driver or the young man.
The French state was founded on a Revolution. That is, the people overthrew their ruler and had him and his family murdered. There have been period eruptions ever since. Another four of them in fact. We have now reached the fifth republic. Every French ruler understands this is in his blood. If the crowd shout for something, you better give in, or they will have your head.
That very morning there was evidence of this in the press. Ferry workers on the Marseille-Ajaccio route, angry about a proposed privatisation, have taken their passengers hostage and blockaded the port. The government, far from sending in the troops, has caved into their demands and is asking the EU for permission to continue state subsidy and postpone the privatisation.
The central authority is weak, and everyone knows it.
Don't admit that people have to work harder, to compete with China, to accept fewer state benefits. Pretend that you can solve the problems in a special way, a French way. ("L'exception francaise", they call it). Instead of creating more jobs by cutting back the state sector and taxes, why not make companies share out the existing jobs by forbidding workers from putting in more than a certain number of hours a week. You can opt out of globalisation if you are French, protect your markets, subsidise your farmers and maintain your living standards.
Earlier this year the French people voted down the European constitution. The French President had put his personal prestige on the line in trying to persuade them to accept it. They should have been happy with it. A Frenchman - former President Giscard d'Estaing - drafted it. But they didn't. It was as if the French people had decided they don't like the way things are going in the world and the constitutional vote seemed a handy way of expressing their annoyance.
Chirac's credibility was always low. He became president only in a run-off against the Fascist Jean-Marie le Pen. As soon as he leaves office Chirac will face a number of corruption allegations which he has hitherto managed to avoid by invoking his presidential immunity.
The bus driver opens his doors. A fight breaks out. A passenger is trying to push his way off past some passengers who are trying to get on. He is white, they are black. Someone has grabbed his hat and he is trying to get it back.
The shorter working week was supposed to solve the French unemployment problem. It hasn't. Unemployment is still 11%, youth unemployment is severe and the problem and is particularly bad in the suburbs where the poor immigrant populations live. It is to these suburbs that the immigrants at Le Chatelet are trying to return.
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November 3, 2005
Microsoft's web services
Nicely written survey in Business Week about Microsoft's web services initiative.
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