Media Muzzled- An Absolutely Disgraceful Performance
The News We Kept to Ourselves
Russia Hid Saddam's WMDs - (by fellow compatriot) Ion Mihai Pacepa
For its intellectuals, France falters
Media Muzzled- An Absolutely Disgraceful Performance
By Notra Trulock
CNN chief news executive Eason Jordan, admitted earlier this year that his network had been withholding the truth about the Iraqi regime for years. In the New York Times, he confessed that his network didn't report all the "awful things" it learned about life under Saddam Hussein. His reason: CNN feared that by doing so it would jeopardize the lives of Iraqis working for the network's Baghdad bureau. But he also admitted that CNN was afraid that Iraq's information ministry would shut down that bureau and cut off CNN's access to Iraqi "newsmakers."
Confirmation that the media have been distorting the news out of Iraq has now come from some surprising sources. John Burns, the Times' Baghdad bureau chief and a veteran foreign correspondent, had denounced the media's "absolutely disgraceful performance" in coverage of Iraq. Burns' critique was published as an excerpt from an oral history chapter in a new book on the media and Iraq at Editor & Publisher.com. He is blunt in his criticism of colleagues for their failure to report "awful things" about Saddam Hussein's regime. Burns' words have been widely circulated on the Internet and appeared, in an abbreviated form, in the Wall Street Journal.
He recounts the bribes paid to Iraqi information ministry officials in exchange for favorable treatment. He tells of $600 cell phones given to family members of the director of the ministry as well as bribes to other officials totaling "hundreds of thousands of dollars" from television correspondents "who then behaved as if they were in Belgium." NPR correspondent Ann Garrels confirmed Burns' account of the bribes in her new book on the war. Book reviews in the Denver Post and USA Today cite her references to the bribes paid to Iraqi officials in return for visas, access and information. USA Today has her citing one mid-level bureaucrat who made at least $200,000 off his share of the bribes. In addition to access and information, Garrels charges that some of her colleagues had "unspoken agreements" with the Iraqis not to report the awful truths about human rights abuses. The USA Today review says she singled out CNN for its efforts to "curry favor" in order to maintain its presence in Baghdad.
One anecdote from Burns, repeated endlessly on the Internet, involves a correspondent "from a major American newspaper." This correspondent took the trouble to print both his own and his competitors' stories off the Internet. He then provided these to Iraqi officials in an effort to demonstrate that he was "a good boy" in comparison to the regime's detractors, like Burns. Burns doesn't name names, but many continue to wonder about the identity of that "reporter."
Burns' main criticism focuses on the Western media's refusal to portray the human rights abuses and reign of terror in Iraq. He thinks that with the possible exception of North Korea, Iraq as a terror state was in a category by itself. "Absolute evil," he said. In fact, he thinks that the war could have been justified on human rights grounds alone. But many journalists, according to Burns, simply refused to report this fundamental truth about the Saddam Hussein regime.
With regard to CNN's Jordan, Burns says that he "missed the point completely." Jordan had defended CNN by claiming that the network withheld stories about Iraqi brutality because it was trying to defend its own Iraqi employees. But Burns charges that this group was only "one thousandth of one per cent of the people of Iraq." Why didn't the media tell the story of "murder on a mass scale" he wonders.
Not surprisingly, the mainstream media have generally ignored Burns' allegations. Fox News' Brit Hume made a brief reference to Burns and the Wall Street Journal editorial page printed a brief excerpt from his chapter. The Washington Post's media critic, Howard Kurtz, did likewise. His only comment was to wonder about the identity of the newspaper correspondent mentioned above. The excerpt originally appeared in Editor and Publisher, a journal about the media. It generated "tons of email" both praising and criticizing Burns.
Among the emails was one from CBS News' Dan Rather. Rather praised Burns' article as "a brilliant, important contribution to American journalism." But Rather has come in for some criticism himself, this time from National Public Radio correspondent Ann Garrels. In her new book, Garrels characterized Rather's pre-war interview with Saddam Hussein as "obsequious tripe." She quotes a colleague as accusing Rather of lobbing "softball questions" at Hussein and saying that he "might just as well have been interviewing the prime minister of Belgium."
Another Times' star, columnist Thomas L. Friedman, seconded Burns' critique. Appearing on the Charlie Rose show, Friedman reportedly said that the last ten years of media coverage of Iraq was hardly "a shining example of American journalism." Friedman agreed that the media failed to cover Iraqi atrocities in order to get and keep visas and access. He thinks, "the press has something to answer for" on this story.
Burns concluded, "there is corruption in our business," and he urged his colleagues to "get back to basics." But the real censors in the Iraq case seem to have been the network executives and newspaper editors who cared more about maintaining a "presence" in Baghdad than truth or accuracy in their reporting. What does that say about the reporting from the capitals of other regimes, like Cuba, Syria, Iran or Saudi Arabia?
Notra Trulock is Associate Editor of the AIM Report and can be reached at aimeditor@yahoo.com.
The News We Kept to Ourselves
by EASON JORDAN Friday April 11, 2003 at 01:18 PM
ATLANTA -- Over the last dozen years I made 13 trips to Baghdad to lobby the government to keep CNN's Baghdad bureau open and to arrange interviews with Iraqi leaders. Each time I visited, I became more distressed by what I saw and heard -- awful things that could not be reported because doing so would have jeopardized the lives of Iraqis, particularly those on our Baghdad staff.
For example, in the mid-1990's one of our Iraqi cameramen was abducted. For weeks he was beaten and subjected to electroshock torture in the basement of a secret police headquarters because he refused to confirm the government's ludicrous suspicion that I was the Central Intelligence Agency's Iraq station chief. CNN had been in Baghdad long enough to know that telling the world about the torture of one of its employees would almost certainly have gotten him killed and put his family and co-workers at grave risk.
Working for a foreign news organization provided Iraqi citizens no protection. The secret police terrorized Iraqis working for international press services who were courageous enough to try to provide accurate reporting. Some vanished, never to be heard from again. Others disappeared and then surfaced later with whispered tales of being hauled off and tortured in unimaginable ways. Obviously, other news organizations were in the same bind we were when it came to reporting on their own workers.
We also had to worry that our reporting might endanger Iraqis not on our payroll. I knew that CNN could not report that Saddam Hussein's eldest son, Uday, told me in 1995 that he intended to assassinate two of his brothers-in-law who had defected and also the man giving them asylum, King Hussein of Jordan. If we had gone with the story, I was sure he would have responded by killing the Iraqi translator who was the only other participant in the meeting. After all, secret police thugs brutalized even senior officials of the Information Ministry, just to keep them in line (one such official has long been missing all his fingernails).
Still, I felt I had a moral obligation to warn Jordan's monarch, and I did so the next day. King Hussein dismissed the threat as a madman's rant. A few months later Uday lured the brothers-in-law back to Baghdad; they were soon killed.
I came to know several Iraqi officials well enough that they confided in me that Saddam Hussein was a maniac who had to be removed. One Foreign Ministry officer told me of a colleague who, finding out his brother had been executed by the regime, was forced, as a test of loyalty, to write a letter of congratulations on the act to Saddam Hussein. An aide to Uday once told me why he had no front teeth: henchmen had ripped them out with pliers and told him never to wear dentures, so he would always remember the price to be paid for upsetting his boss. Again, we could not broadcast anything these men said to us.
Last December, when I told Information Minister Muhammad Said al-Sahhaf that we intended to send reporters to Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq, he warned me they would "suffer the severest possible consequences." CNN went ahead, and in March, Kurdish officials presented us with evidence that they had thwarted an armed attack on our quarters in Erbil. This included videotaped confessions of two men identifying themselves as Iraqi intelligence agents who said their bosses in Baghdad told them the hotel actually housed C.I.A. and Israeli agents. The Kurds offered to let us interview the suspects on camera, but we refused, for fear of endangering our staff in Baghdad.
Then there were the events that were not unreported but that nonetheless still haunt me. A 31-year-old Kuwaiti woman, Asrar Qabandi, was captured by Iraqi secret police occupying her country in 1990 for "crimes," one of which included speaking with CNN on the phone. They beat her daily for two months, forcing her father to watch. In January 1991, on the eve of the American-led offensive, they smashed her skull and tore her body apart limb by limb. A plastic bag containing her body parts was left on the doorstep of her family's home.
I felt awful having these stories bottled up inside me. Now that Saddam Hussein's regime is gone, I suspect we will hear many, many more gut-wrenching tales from Iraqis about the decades of torment. At last, these stories can be told freely.
Eason Jordan is chief news executive at CNN.
Russia Hid Saddam's WMDs
By Ion Mihai Pacepa
Washington Times | October 2, 2003
On March 20, Russian President Vladimir Putin denounced the U.S.-led "aggression" against Iraq as "unwarranted" and "unjustifiable." Three days later, Pravda said that an anonymous Russian "military expert" was predicting that the United States would fabricate finding Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov immediately started plying the idea abroad, and it has taken hold around the world ever since.
As a former Romanian spy chief who used to take orders from the Soviet KGB, it is perfectly obvious to me that Russia is behind the evanescence of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. After all, Russia helped Saddam get his hands on them in the first place. The Soviet Union and all its bloc states always had a standard operating procedure for deep sixing weapons of mass destruction -- in Romanian it was codenamed "Sarindar, meaning "emergency exit." I implemented it in Libya. It was for ridding Third World despots of all trace of their chemical weapons if the Western imperialists ever got near them. We wanted to make sure they would never be traced back to us, and we also wanted to frustrate the West by not giving them anything they could make propaganda with.
All chemical weapons were to be immediately burned or buried deep at sea. Technological documentation, however, would be preserved in microfiche buried in waterproof containers for future reconstruction. Chemical weapons, especially those produced in Third World countries, which lack sophisticated production facilities, often do not retain lethal properties after a few months on the shelf and are routinely dumped anyway. And all chemical weapons plants had a civilian cover making detection difficult, regardless of the circumstances.
The plan included an elaborate propaganda routine. Anyone accusing Moammar Gadhafi of possessing chemical weapons would be ridiculed. Lies, all lies! Come to Libya and see! Our Western left-wing organizations, like the World Peace Council, existed for sole purpose of spreading the propaganda we gave them. These very same groups bray the exact same themes to this day. We always relied on their expertise at organizing large street demonstrations in Western Europe over America's "war-mongering" whenever we wanted to distract world attention from the crimes of the vicious regimes we sponsored.
Iraq, in my view, had its own "Sarindar" plan in effect direct from Moscow. It certainly had one in the past. Nicolae Ceausescu told me so, and he heard it from Leonid Brezhnev. KGB chairman Yury Andropov, and later, Gen. Yevgeny Primakov, told me so, too. In the late 1970s, Gen. Primakov ran Saddam's weapons programs. After that, as you may recall, he was promoted to head of the Soviet foreign intelligence service in 1990, to Russia's minister of foreign affairs in 1996, and in 1998, to prime minister. What you may not know is that Primakov hates Israel and has always championed Arab radicalism. He was a personal friend of Saddam's and has repeatedly visited Baghdad after 1991, quietly helping Saddam play his game of hide-and-seek.
The Soviet bloc not only sold Saddam its WMDs, but it showed them how to make them "disappear." Russia is still at it. Primakov was in Baghdad from December until a couple of days before the war, along with a team of Russian military experts led by two of Russia's topnotch "retired"generals: Vladislav Achalov, a former deputy defense minister, and Igor Maltsev, a former air defense chief of staff. They were all there receiving honorary medals from the Iraqi defense minister. They clearly were not there to give Saddam military advice for the upcoming war--Saddam's Katyusha launchers were of World War II vintage, and his T-72 tanks, BMP-1 fighting vehicles and MiG fighter planes were all obviously useless against America. "I did not fly to Baghdad to drink coffee," was what Gen. Achalov told the media afterward. They were there orchestrating Iraq's "Sarindar" plan.
The U.S. military in fact, has already found the only thing that would have been allowed to survive under the classic Soviet "Sarindar" plan to liquidate weapons arsenals in the event of defeat in war -- the technological documents showing how to reproduce weapons stocks in just a few weeks.
Such a plan has undoubtedly been in place since August 1995 -- when Saddam's son-in-law, Gen. Hussein Kamel, who ran Iraq's nuclear, chemical and biological programs for 10 years, defected to Jordan. That August, UNSCOM and International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors searched a chicken farm owned by Kamel's family and found more than one hundred metal trunks and boxes containing documentation dealing with all categories of weapons, including nuclear. Caught red-handed, Iraq at last admitted to its "extensive biological warfare program, including weaponization," issued a "Full, Final and Complete Disclosure Report" and turned over documents about the nerve agent VX and nuclear weapons.
Saddam then lured Gen. Kamel back, pretending to pardon his defection. Three days later, Kamel and over 40 relatives, including women and children, were murdered, in what the official Iraqi press described as a "spontaneous administration of tribal justice." After sending that message to his cowed, miserable people, Saddam then made a show of cooperation with UN inspection, since Kamel had just compromised all his programs, anyway. In November 1995, he issued a second "Full, Final and Complete Disclosure" as to his supposedly non-existent missile programs. That very same month, Jordan intercepted a large shipment of high-grade missile components destined for Iraq. UNSCOM soon fished similar missile components out of the Tigris River, again refuting Saddam's spluttering denials. In June 1996, Saddam slammed the door shut to UNSCOM's inspection of any "concealment mechanisms." On Aug. 5, 1998, halted cooperation with UNSCOM and the IAEA completely, and they withdrew on Dec. 16, 1998. Saddam had another four years to develop and hide his weapons of mass destruction without any annoying, prying eyes. U.N. Security Council resolutions 1115, (June 21, 1997), 1137 (Nov. 12, 1997), and 1194 (Sept. 9, 1998) were issued condemning Iraq--ineffectual words that had no effect. In 2002, under the pressure of a huge U.S. military buildup by a new U.S. administration, Saddam made yet another "Full, Final and Complete Disclosure," which was found to contain "false statements" and to constitute another "material breach" of U.N. and IAEA inspection and of paragraphs eight to 13 of resolution 687 (1991).
It was just a few days after this last "Disclosure," after a decade of intervening with the U.N. and the rest of the world on Iraq's behalf, that Gen. Primakov and his team of military experts landed in Baghdad -- even though, with 200,000 U.S. troops at the border, war was imminent, and Moscow could no longer save Saddam Hussein. Gen. Primakov was undoubtedly cleaning up the loose ends of the "Sarindar" plan and assuring Saddam that Moscow would rebuild his weapons of mass destruction after the storm subsided for a good price.
Mr. Putin likes to take shots at America and wants to reassert Russia in world affairs. Why would he not take advantage of this opportunity? As minister of foreign affairs and prime minister, Gen. Primakov has authored the "multipolarity" strategy of counterbalancing American leadership by elevating Russia to great-power status in Eurasia. Between Feb. 9-12, Mr. Putin visited Germany and France to propose a three-power tactical alignment against the United States to advocate further inspections rather than war. On Feb. 21, the Russian Duma appealed to the German and French parliaments to join them on March 4-7 in Baghdad, for "preventing U.S. military aggression against Iraq." Crowds of European leftists, steeped for generations in left-wing propaganda straight out of Moscow, continue to find the line appealing.
Mr. Putin's tactics have worked. The United States won a brilliant military victory, demolishing a dictatorship without destroying the country, but it has begun losing the peace. While American troops unveiled the mass graves of Saddam's victims, anti-American forces in Western Europe and elsewhere, spewed out vitriolic attacks, accusing Washington of greed for oil and not of really caring about weapons of mass destruction, or exaggerating their risks, as if weapons of mass destruction were really nothing very much to worry about after all.
It is worth remembering that Andrei Sakharov, the father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, chose to live in a Soviet gulag instead of continuing to develop the power of death. "I wanted to alert the world," Sakharov explained in 1968, "to the grave perils threatening the human race thermonuclear extinction, ecological catastrophe, famine." Even Igor Kurchatov, the KGB academician who headed the Soviet nuclear program from 1943 until his death in 1960, expressed deep qualms of conscience about helping to create weapons of mass destruction. "The rate of growth of atomic explosives is such," he warned in an article written together with several other Soviet nuclear scientists not long before he died, "that in just a few years the stockpile will be large enough to create conditions under which the existence of life on earth will be impossible."
The Cold War was fought over the reluctance to use weapons of mass destruction, yet now this logic is something only senior citizens seem to recall. Today, even lunatic regimes like that in North Korea not only possess weapons of mass destruction, but openly offer to sell them to anyone with cash, including terrorists and their state sponsors. Is anyone paying any attention? Being inured to proliferation, however, does not reduce its danger. On the contrary, it increases it.
General Ion Mihai Pacepa is the highest-ranking intelligence officer ever to have defected from the former Soviet bloc. He is currently finishing a new book, Red Roots: The Origins of Today's Anti-Americanism.
For its intellectuals, France falters
John Vinocur/IHT
Thursday, October 2, 2003
PARIS A growing sense of France's decline as a force in Europe has developed here.
The idea's novelty is not the issue itself. Rather it is that for the first time in a half century that the notion of a rapid descent in France's influence is receiving wide acknowledgment within the French establishment.
At its most hurtful and remarkable, and yet perhaps its most honest, there is the start of acceptance by segments of the French intellectual community that French leadership, as it is constituted now, is not something Europe wants - or France merits.
Several current books, three on the bestseller lists, have focused discussion on the country's incapacities, rigidities and its role, they say, in the context of the Iraq war, in dividing the Western community and fracturing notions of Europe's potential unity.
The books, with titles that translate to phrases like "France in Free Fall" or "French Arrogance," are merciless in their accusations of the fantasy-driven ineffectualness of French foreign policy and the extent of the country's economic breakdown. Or they more specifically target what one of books, "Le Pouvoir du Monde," by Bernard Poulet, regards as the implosion of the newspaper Le Monde, mirror of the French establishment, from one-time symbol of rectitude to self-appointed "universal mentor and Great Inquisitor"; or what another, essentially a short essay, called "Au Nom de l'Autre" by Alain Finkielkraut, contends is the rise in France of a new kind of anti-Semitism in proportions greater than anywhere else in Europe.
Together, they project the image of a decadent France, adrift from its brilliant past, incapable of inspiring allegiance or emulation and without a constructive, humanist plan for the future.
Of all the books, the current No. 2 on the bestseller list of L'Express, "La France Qui Tombe," by Nicolas Baverez, has been the focus of unusual attention.
Baverez, a practicing attorney and economist who has a strong place in the Paris establishment, argues that France's leadership hates change. Rather, it "cultivates the status quo and rigidity" because it is run through the connivance of politicians, civil servants and union officials, bringing together both the left- and right-wing elites. They are described as mainly concerned with preserving the failed statist system that protects their jobs and status.
Although he has little patience with the American role in the world (it is branded unilateral, imperial and unpredictable, yet flexible and open to change) Baverez charges that the failure of French policy on Iraq and Europe - resisting the United States with nothing to offer in exchange, and attempting to force the rest of Europe to follow its lead - "crowns the process of the nation's decline" and leaves France in growing diplomatic isolation everywhere.
Over the past year, said Bavarez, "French diplomacy has undertaken to broaden the fracture within the West, and duplicate American unilateralism on the European scale by its arrogant dressing down of Europe's new democracies. It has sustained a systematically critical attitude that flees concrete propositions in favor of theoretical slogans exalting a multipolar world or multilateralism."
As for Europe, Bavarez maintains that France has been discredited by its reticence to transfer any kind of meaningful sovereignty to the central organization, its resistance to giving up its advantages in the area of agricultural policy and its disregard for the directives and rules of the European Union executive commission.
He does not stop there. Of a united Europe, Bavarez said, France has "ruined what might have remained of a common foreign and security policy, deeply dividing the community and placing France in the minority." His country was at the edge of marginalization in Europe and the world, he claimed, because of its "verbal pretense of having real power" that is "completely cut off from its capacity for influence or action."
In a real sense, none of this is new. But this time, the provenance is a respected establishment figure talking, so to speak, from the belly of the beast. The echo has been striking within in national debate.
Over the years, foreign journalists, free of establishment pressures, have made Bavarez's points one by one without denting French public discourse. Talk circulated during the presidential election campaign last year about French decline, coming largely from Jacques Chirac, but it was basically dismissed as political taunts aimed at the Socialist government of Prime Minister Lionel Jospin.
Now, in response to the Bavarez book, there is public rage from the Chirac camp, which the Bavarez book charges with having neither the courage nor the competence to confront the basic problems.
But the density of Bavarez's factual argumentation, bolstered by the presence of the other books, all treating France's pride-of-rank and French conceits with brutal disrespect, have given the notion of French decline a legitimacy, reality and currency that it lacked before in public debate.
Alain Duhamel, perhaps the most consensual of France's mainstream political commentators, has praised Bavarez for launching "a legitimate debate on a subject that merits one: French decline." He said it touched "a sensitive point in the national subconscious that set off an intellectual hullabaloo."
An ardent advocate of limited surrender of French sovereignty so that the EU can become the vector of French worldwide ambitions - he too has written a new book whose title translates to France in Disarray - Duhamel acknowledges that France no longer pulls Europe along behind it, although he insists Europe will not advance without France.
Indeed, Le Monde, which normally makes French ambitions, or distress about their failures, synonymous with Europe's, made some rare admissions this week about the French descent in Europe's eyes.
Daniel Vernet, a former senior editor of the newspaper, wrote, "We often irritate our partners because too frequently we have the tendency to want to impose our views, or only to consider as truly European those positions that conform to a French vision, however much in the EU minority it may be."
That resulted in a dilemma without an obvious exit, Vernet said. "The European partners don't want to hear about European policy independent from the United States," he wrote. "So, either France acts alone, and, regardless of what's claimed, its influence remains limited. Or it seeks a common denominator with its partners and it has to give up its ambitions."
Even Chirac may have given a sign that he understands the changing vision of France's real possibilities. In two major speeches on world affairs since the end of the summer, he dropped any references to multipolarity, the French notion of a world of competing poles with Europe set up as a rival pole to the United States.
In the sense that they project the picture of a country that has lost its way, the other books complemented the Bavarez thesis and set the tone of discussion.
In "Ouest contre Ouest," by Andre Glucksmann, one of the few leading French intellectuals to challenge the country's position on the Iraq war, France is described as a nation, with others in Europe, that fled the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, on the United States in panic and attempted to set up a sterile biosphere away from the world's realities.
The book, also a bestseller, maintains that this flight from confronting trouble carried with it an attempt to create two opposing notions of the West: a serene Europe, sheltered from terrorist kamikazes, and a warlike, imperialist, autistic United States.
Glucksmann wrote that the central question of the future was not hegemony or multipolarity, the key French terms illustrating the Chirac government's seeming obsession about the United States and its desire to counter the Americans, but civilization versus nihilism, and whether the West together could make a fight to protect civilization.
Glucksmann believes that France's leadership has wanted to bring Russia into its project to counter the United States, with France promising in the bargain a return of Russia's lost rank and prestige.
"What does France gain?" he asked. "The possibility to continue its siesta. It would be up to Russia to counterbalance America, and keep the Islamist and Eastern hordes away. It would be the United States' job to chase down all the worldwide risks that we want to avoid. Paris, in all this, gives itself the role of directing the world by proxy. Once the Euro-Asiatic bloc is cemented through the inspiration of the Elys?e Palace, Washington, put in its just place and counterbalanced, will conform."
These messages converge with that of "L'Arrogance Fran?aise," by Romain Gubert and Emmanuel Saint-Martin, whose chapter and section headings - How France Lost Europe or Narcissistic Blindness - well sum up a book that holds that French foreign and European policy is guided by "obsessive concern with its standing, and terror in the face of its decline."
France's essential arrogance, the authors suggest, is in continuing to act as if the world community and its European partners do not comprehend that for the French leadership, the "EU serves as the means for France to recover its influence and to reconquer its lost power."
In this light, although the writers of "L'Arrogance Fran?aise" do not say so specifically, it is possible to see French policy in relationship to Iraq as a temporary instrumentalization of Germany in an effort to recapture European primacy - an attempt understood and foiled by the vast number of its NATO and EU partners.
Months later, the fact is, after Sweden's rejection of the euro (in part because of France's refusal to conform to the economic performance standards it set up itself for the currency's credibility), and the likely splintering of the EU into groups of several speeds without any semblance of a unified foreign or defense policy, France has come up empty.
The sum of the messages of the books, in French to the French, is that this vision of the country's current circumstances is not a French-bashing invention from afar, but a home truth.
For Bavarez, France is threatened with becoming a museum diplomatically and a transit center economically. To do anything about it, it must revive itself internally first, getting away from what he calls its "social statist model." To advance, it must end the dominant role of a "public sector placed outside of any constraint requiring productivity or competitiveness."
The reform of the rest of French policy, based on genuine integration into Europe, should follow, he argues.
He recommends what he calls shock therapy, a forced march toward modernity that involves the risk of a clash among French interest groups and an end to the "sinister continuity" that unites the presidencies of Fran?ois Mitterrand and Chirac in a kind of angry immobility.
But for Bavarez, and most of the other writers now gaining the nation's attention, the present reality is harsh for France.
"Overtaken by the democratic vitality and technological advance of the United State," Bavarez concludes, "downgraded industrially and challenged commercially by China and Asia, the decline of France is accelerating at the same rhythm as the vast changes in the world."
International Herald Tribune