Noah Sudarsky

To those who think that there is some kind of ancient personal animosity and mistrust between Sharon and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, which caused the Israeli prime minister to declare him, rather than Sheik Yassin (Hamas’ spiritual leader), public enemy No. 1, consider this historical anecdote, as related by the writer and correspondent Marek Halter in the French daily Liberation last April. In September 1970, Halter had been invited to the residence of the Israeli prime minister to discuss the Jordanian civil war. As King Hussein of Jordan launched his Bedouin Guard against Arafat’s PLO militia, which had massed on the outskirts of Amman and Irbid to the north (PLO guerrillas operating as a state within a state were threatening to overthrow Hussein), Ariel Sharon, then chief of the Southern Command Staff of the Israeli army, managed to convince Golda Meir to support Arafat as a way to resolve the Palestinian question. The Palestinians, he said, would finally have their own country, and the Jordan River, he argued, would constitute the best natural boundary between Israel and the new Palestinian state. Golda Meir authorized Sharon to take an armored division of Israeli soldiers towards Irbid, to help Arafat achieve his coup d’etat. Henry Kissinger, however, aware of the unfolding power play, called the Israeli prime minister and convinced her to play the king and call off the operation. A disgruntled Sharon turned his troops back, and Hussein’s tanks quickly annihilated the PLO during what became known as Black September. Arafat had to flee to Lebanon for his life, where he painstakingly rebuilt the PLO from scratch, only to be defeated and evicted again in 1982, this time by Sharon.

Sharon’s politics have nothing to do with any kind of historical hatred toward Arafat, and despite his public declarations to the contrary, he has no more personal animosity or mistrust toward Arafat than toward any other prospective Palestinian leader. His great genius has been to fool Bush and the entire State Department that he would gladly negotiate with some other Palestinian representative, realistically knowing there could never be any, for lack of anyone with Arafat’s stature, not to mention internal rivalry between all the various Palestinian factions. Sharon merely wants the same thing he wanted in 1970, Eretz Israel — the grand biblical Israel stretching from Jordan to the Mediterranean, unencumbered by the presence of another people with national aspirations.

In 1970, Arafat could have been an instrument toward that end, but today he is the major obstacle. Whereas in 1970, Sharon was anxious to become Arafat’s ally despite the fact that the Palestinian leader had for years been attacking Israeli targets and launching commando raids against Israeli checkpoints, today, as the most visible and legitimate representative of a Palestinian population that wants a state in the West Bank and Gaza strip (all parts of Eretz Israel), he is the enemy. By refusing to recognize that Arafat has any shred of legitimacy, by wrecking the infrastructure of the Fatah leadership and of the Tanzim, Fatah’s military wing, by destroying the Palestinian security apparatus and the command centers of the Palestinian Authority, and by humiliating the Palestinian people, Sharon has in effect allowed Hamas to expand its policy of suicide bombings to unprecedented levels, and has by the same token managed to radicalize the Palestinian mainstream. All worthy ambitions for a man who will not resign himself to giving back to the Arabs what Israel won in 1967. Suicide bombings recently became a staple of even Arafat’s Tanzim militia, through the actions of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an organization tied to Fatah.

Although it is possible to argue that Sharon does have a vision for peace, namely a demilitarized Palestinian state that would be substantially narrower than the present West Bank, it is highly doubtful that his vision for a final settlement will ever be anything more than purely academic. Under his unofficial plan, Israel would maintain two bands of territory on the eastern and western flanks of the fledgling Palestinian state for security reasons and to guarantee continued control of Israel’s water supply. All of Jerusalem would remain under Israeli sovereignty, and not a single Jewish settlement would be dismantled (although a recent poll showed that two-thirds of Israelis are in favor of removing these isolated enclaves that have served as the main focal point of Palestinian resentment). Referring to a minuscule, isolated Israeli bastion in the Gaza Strip, Sharon made his preemptive ideological leanings evident: “The fate of Netzarim is the fate of Tel Aviv.”

Evidently, Sharon’s biggest fear is pathological — it is the insurmountable, irrational conviction that Israel will disappear if any land once occupied by Jews is handed over to Palestinians. Unless Israel can control the borders, airspace, and even the educational policies of a hypothetical Palestinian nation that will be curtailed territorially by not one, but two, cordons sanitaires on either side of it, such a state, in his view, would threaten the very existence of Israel. For Ariel Sharon, the notion of a Palestinian state exists only to satisfy the United States, and his lip service to the idea of territories for peace serves only as a red herring allowing him to preserve the present precarious status quo.

No world leader has gone so far as to even comment on Sharon’s plan for a Palestinian state, and there is no doubt that Arafat himself would rather die a martyr than accept a pale, truncated version of what he was offered at Camp David.

Although killing the founder of the military wing of Hamas, a man probably responsible for hundreds of Israeli civilian casualties, is an understandable goal, one can only question why Sharon ordered the use of a huge bomb instead of the smaller laser-guided Apache helicopter missiles that could have pinpointed Shehada’s apartment, and not leveled the entire three-story building and caused so much collateral damage. Bearing in mind that the Israeli attack took place the day after Sheik Yassin had outlined, in several interviews, the possibility of a Hamas cease-fire in exchange for an Israeli withdrawal from West Bank towns and an end to targeted assassinations of Hamas operatives and leaders, the reason seems clear: to prolong the cycle of violence indefinitely, thereby perpetuating the perceived necessity for Israeli military control over the occupied territories, and stalling any real possibility of negotiations that could lead to the creation of a Palestinian state.

The price to pay for such a stubborn ideological stance, and for the dream of Eretz Israel, is sure to be worse than anything we’ve seen so far. Hamas is a many-headed hydra. Sheik Shehada’s death, combined with unnecessary civilian casualties, including many children, will only stir the radical organization to unprecedented homicidal heights. The question is, will that price be too high for Israel, or will Israelis and American policy makers continue to tolerate Sharon’s attempts to force a military solution to the Palestinian quandary?

Stresses in the alliance have been growing since last fall, when European leaders and Bush administration moderates prevailed in getting the U.S. to take its case against Iraq to the United Nations. The latest conflict, however, is widely seen as the worst in the 53-year history of NATO and a defining moment in the post-Cold War era.

Europe and the U.S. have weathered past conflicts, and no one expects the alliance to end anytime soon. For now, European governments remain divided on the war. But grassroots opposition to the war is so strong that it is endangering leaders who back the U.S. effort — British Prime Minister Tony Blair, for instance, and Spanish Prime Minister José Maria Aznar. And in the longer term, some analysts say, opposition to the U.S. as a solo superpower could create favorable conditions for a Paris-Berlin-Moscow axis that would reshape global relations for years to come.

“For a long time, only France was proposing to use the European Union as a counterweight to the United States,” says Georgetown University professor Charles Kupchan, who served as a foreign policy advisor in the Clinton administration. “Today, that idea has been adopted by virtually everyone … This generation [of Europeans] believes it’s important to have a European voice on the global stage.”

And, Kupchan warns, “if America is perceived less and less as a munificent power, and more and more as a predatory power, the risks of ‘hard’ competition will increase.”

The immediate crisis was provoked Monday, when the three countries — with strong backing from Russia — charged that the U.S. move on Turkey’s behalf was designed to undermine peace efforts. It has been exacerbated by a new French-led effort to triple the number of weapons inspectors in Iraq and, according to some reports, to put peace-keeping troops in the country. The argument has featured an unusual display of public acrimony among leaders whose countries have been allied since the end of World War II.

“It’s clear that if NATO had accepted the American demands, we would already have entered a logic of war without a U.N. mandate,” Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt declared on Monday. U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell answered that the decision by France, Germany and Belgium to veto NATO deployment in Turkey was “inexcusable,” and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld called the opposition a “disgrace.”

To many in Europe, the Bush administration seems to care little — or not at all — if it is perceived as a Wild West Lone Ranger who has morphed into an insensitive 21st century hyper-power. In fact, many signals suggest that the U.S. recognizes the divisions within modern Europe and will not hesitate to exploit them.

Emerging victorious from the Cold War with the Soviet Union, and galvanized into action by the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the Bush administration has made clear that it will act unilaterally and preemptively, if need be, to protect and advance American interests. But from the European grass roots to its halls of power, that position has frightened and incensed those who believe that working within multilateral governing bodies like the United Nations or the European Union is essential to resolving global disputes.

Robert Kagan, a journalist, author and former U.S. diplomat, makes the case that U.S.-Europe relations are dictated by one fundamental principle: Europeans, he argues in his new book “Of Paradise and Power,” are guided by the ideal of perpetual peace, which implies a desire to settle disputes not by military power but by law, consensual politics, negotiation and cooperation. The United States, on the other hand, sees a chaotic, more Hobbesian world, in which it imposes a liberal order by the threat — and sometimes by the use — of blunt force. Europe may indeed want a more multilateral world, Kagan says, but isn’t attempting to create a “countervailing power.”

Conservative pundits in the U.S. have generally embraced that view; so has much of the Bush administration, no doubt reinforced by the Republicans’ midterm electoral sweep. But that means they’ve failed to see, or have ignored, the desire of a growing segment of Western European society to break from the U.S. sphere of influence.

On issues ranging from the death penalty to the Kyoto Protocol on global warming, from the creation of the International Criminal Court to the imminent invasion of Iraq, the European establishment is at odds with Washington. Hundreds of thousands of demonstrators have been marching through the streets of European cities in a popular upwelling against a new war with Iraq — the most visible manifestation of a massive grassroots phenomenon that has been gaining momentum. European leaders, no matter what their views on Iraq, are increasingly concerned that they are being perceived by a new generation of constituents as subordinated to U.S. imperatives.

Concerned about their own loss of international clout and fearful of an eroding political base at home, European leaders like German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder have pulled away from the superpower that helped restore Europe after World War II and protected the continent during the Cold War. France and many of the other core E.U. states have begun to radically rethink their military dependence on the United States and their commitment to NATO as the organization best suited to defend Europe. That revolutionary notion, while probably latent even before the election of George W. Bush, has gained widespread acceptance in recent months.

In September, France officially declared itself “the defining power” behind the yet-to-be-created European Rapid Reaction Force (it will provide 20 percent of the funding). The European force would be able to mobilize 60,000 troops, hundreds of fighter jets, and dozens of battleships. The French nuclear aircraft carrier Charles-de-Gaulle, the only one of its class in Europe, would serve as an operational and logistical platform.

In November, France used its position as a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council to leverage the U.S. into acceptance of Resolution 1441. The resolution established a two-step process for any military action against Iraq, though the two sides disagree over whether a second vote by the council is ultimately needed.

French historian Patrice Higonnet, now a Harvard professor, has never been known for anti-American views. But in a Op-Ed piece published recently in the left-leaning French daily Liberation, he expressed a withering frustration with the Bush administration and suggested Europe had no choice but to step out of the U.S. sphere. “Europe, sooner or later, will have to separate from this new America,” he wrote. “It would be best to do it audaciously, firmly, and with dignity.”

Failure to do so, he suggested, meant that France must “collaborate” with a “gun-toting, arrogant, imperial, racist, opportunistic, politically manipulative, conspiratorial” United States epitomized by the Bush administration.

But while the confrontational methods of the Bush administration have squandered much, if not all, of the sympathy engendered by the 9/11 terrorist attacks, there is still no universal opposition to a U.S.-led war against Iraq, even in France. Instead, many critics expressly oppose only a war dictated by the United States outside the bounds of the United Nations. Jean-Marie Colombani, editor of the prestigious newspaper Le Monde, has argued that the “Bush factor” is merely contextual and shouldn’t erase the long history of cooperation between France and the United States.

“We cannot remain prisoners of the ‘war-antiwar’ dilemma,” he wrote in an editorial last week. “And for that to occur, we must rise above a simplistic negative reaction to the American attitude. That’s the basic problem of Europe in general, and France in particular. What is the strategic doctrine the Europeans would oppose to the preventive war America is calling for?”

The Franco-German plan of beefing up inspections, while giving inspectors more time to determine whether Iraq actually possesses weapons of mass destruction, seems to answer that question. Unlike Germany, France has never said it opposed a war on principle, and there has been no effort by any mainstream media outlet or politician to paint Saddam Hussein in anything but a negative light.

But the United States, pushing an urgent timetable for war, seems uninterested in such subtleties. If France and Germany will not support the coalition, White House hawks suggest, then the U.S. will isolate them and undermine their heavyweight status within the E.U. by turning to other European allies. The eight-nation declaration of support for the Euro-U.S. bond is seen as illustrative of this strategy — and has made French President Jacques Chirac furious. He considered the statement a machination of the Bush administration, and a personal affront.

“Chirac thought he could well have signed that letter, as it did not explicitly mention war,” a source close to the French leader told Salon. “He wasn’t consulted and felt the administration was deliberately attempting to isolate France. He was not amused.”

White House hawks did not seem especially concerned about his pique. Richard Perle, interviewed Sunday night on CNN, stated that “overreaching by France” and “German pacifism” would lead to a strengthening of U.S. ties with other European countries that are “unsatisfied” with the Franco-German tandem — and particularly with the new Eastern bloc members of NATO. Currently, the U.S. has the backing of the U.K., Italy, Spain, Portugal, Denmark, the Netherlands, Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic.

Within Europe, there has always existed a split between nations who think of European unity basically in terms of the traditional transatlantic alliance with the United States, and the federalists who want to increase the degree of European unity as well as the degree of autonomy with regard to America. Traditionally, the balance has been in favor of the federalist faction, but with the E.U. spreading eastward, the balance could tip in favor of the “Atlantists,” who have yet to adhere to the concept of strong Europe independent from the United States. The Eastern European nations look to America for leadership rather than to France or Germany.

The Bush administration seems to be assuming that the divisions in Europe will grow deeper before they get begin to close. The letter signed by the “European 8″ in favor of strong cooperation with Washington could undermine the development of the E.U. as a political entity. The new European constitution will call, in particular, for the election of a European foreign minister who will present a “common position” on issues of diplomacy and defense, based on a majority vote. But with countries like Hungary, Poland, Romania, Lithuania, and the Czech Republic now E.U. members or about to become E.U. members, that prospect seems increasingly illusory. The Franco-German tandem is going to find it more challenging to mold the E.U. into a more federalist entity with a coherent foreign policy and an independent military.

“It’s going to take a while for these countries to feel part of the European family, and not Euro-Atlantic,” one French diplomat conceded in an interview.

One result of the emerging split within Europe could be the consolidation of an axis among Bonn, Paris, and Moscow. If that were a reliable alliance, it would exert a powerful gravity on the rest of Europe, perhaps extending all the way to China. Such a coalition would prove a formidable challenge to any U.S. administration.

In the near term, however, conditions within the alliance will be volatile, with the scales tipping tentatively toward Europe. Lebanese President Emile Lahoud has called on Europe, and France in particular, to start playing a bigger role in the Middle East. That could breed more conflict with the U.S., which is generally more pro-Israel than Europe. Saudi Arabia this month signaled that it wants U.S. troops out after the Iraq campaign is completed. Meanwhile, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., announced during a trip to Europe last Friday that U.S. troops stationed in Germany would probably be deployed elsewhere, perhaps permanently.

The major problem with the current White House gambit is that popular opposition to a U.S.-led strike against Iraq outside the aegis of a new U.N. resolution has become overwhelming in virtually all of Western Europe. In Great Britain, Spain and Italy, opposition fluctuates between 77 percent and 98 percent. Saturday’s scheduled antiwar demonstrations, which observers predict will dwarf anything previously seen in Europe, are likely to provide Blair and Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi with the strongest indication yet that granting unconditional support to America will likely have significant long-term political ramifications.

Within his own Labour Party, Tony Blair is facing potentially crippling opposition over his policy of open support for the United States. Two high-ranking officials from his government have threatened to resign if the Blair goes to war without a second U.N. resolution. Clare Short, the International Development secretary, has stated that waging war without another resolution would be unacceptable.

According to Hans-Ulrich Joerges, a prominent German political analyst, Chancellor Schroeder likewise sees popular revolt as the force behind Europe’s declaration of independence. This, Joerges says, is Schroeder’s hope: “The most important allies, Tony Blair included, spurn the United States because people would otherwise turn their backs on them. The conflict becomes the birthing hour of European unity. NATO and the United Nations are democratized. The Old Continent becomes a world power.”

Because of financial considerations and internal divisions, it is doubtful that Europe will become a powerhouse anytime soon. France’s military ambitions are already creating a huge national deficit, putting it at odds with official E.U. dictates to achieve a balanced budget by 2004. Whether or not the present crisis is resolved, though, George Bush’s brand of power politics has clearly convinced much of Europe that it must set off on a different course, however uncertain.

Appearing to catch Colin Powell off guard during a press conference following an anti-terrorism summit at the U.N., French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin lambasted the idea of waging a war on Iraq, saying that “nothing today justifies…military action.” The Washington Post called the surprise declaration “the diplomatic equivalent of an ambush,” but it was only the expression of the most widely held view in France, where 77 percent of the population opposes a war. In Germany, the percentage is identical. And while the Bush administration has at times placed great weight on Monday’s expected report from the U.N. weapons inspection team, it is considered by most European governments as merely an interim stage in the disarmament process. The Middle East, French President Jacques Chirac says, “does not need another war.”

As Chirac and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Elysée Treaty, a catalyst in creating the European Union, their positions of opposition to war have come into alignment. Signing a joint political declaration, the two leaders underscored their nations’ “common historical responsibility towards serving Europe” by broadening their cooperation on the international level. Henceforth, France and Germany will strive to “adopt common positions within international institutions, including the Security Council.” The opposition to a U.S.-led strike on Iraq, fluid until now, has solidified around the Franco-German axis.

U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld dismissed the burgeoning rift within NATO and the split between Europe and the U.S. over Iraq. “You’re thinking of Europe as Germany and France. I don’t. I think that’s old Europe,” he said. In those comments and in other ways, the Bush administration seemed to be indicating that it was ready to wage war against Iraq without substantial help from the Continent. But Rumsfeld’s remarks and similar signals only further incite top officials and members of the public in those countries that already consider the United States and the Bush White House arrogant and impetuous. The Franco-German axis is the motor behind the development and growth of the E.U., and their collective weight is probably greater than that of all other E.U. nations combined. Nations such as Spain and Italy have yet to commit to either the U.S. or the French position regarding Iraq.

At least six members of the 15-member Security Council have adopted the position that the American administration still hasn’t made a good case for attacking Iraq and that the inspectors need to be granted substantially more time. Russia and China, also permanent veto-bearing nations, subscribe to that view.

How deep the chasm between the United States and its traditional European allies will get is anyone’s guess. For many French and German analysts, there is a clear distinction between the benevolent power the U.S. symbolized to Western Europeans in the last century, and the America of George W. Bush. On the one hand lies the enlightened America of the New Deal, Jimmy Carter, the elder George Bush and Bill Clinton; on the other hand is the confusing, primal United States of the death penalty, powerful corporate interests, Christian fundamentalism and the Bush doctrine. While they still consider Europe to be the ally of the first America, they argue that it should vehemently oppose the second on principle.

Writing in the London Review of Books, Anatol Lieven has put it most bluntly: America, that elder daughter of the Enlightenment, has become “a menace to itself and to the rest of the world.”

To find a French equivalent to the present United States government, argues Patrice Higonnet, a professor of French history at Harvard, one would need to go back to Napoleon the Third, the French emperor of the mid-1800s who was a heavy-handed diplomat and whose response to opposition could be ruthless. And to most Europeans, the Bush administration is an anachronism, an archaic throwback to medieval politics. Germany and France believe that the administration, in the words of Laurent Murawiec of the Hudson Institute in Washington, wants to “end the present structure of the entire [Persian Gulf] region, inherited from the Pax Britannica.”

“The hawks believe the fundamental source of the woes of the Middle East is the absence of a dominant power over the last 30 years,” argues Pascal Riché in the French daily Libération. “Following the Ottoman Empire and the British domination, there was a power vacuum, and the radical hawks [within the Bush administration] suggest that the United States should fill it, even if that means becoming an imperial power.”

Clearly, that prospect is unpalatable to France, Germany and Russia, to name only a few. Beyond the potential for regional chaos it would provoke in the Middle East, Western European nations fear a rise in Muslim fundamentalism and terrorism in their own countries. A bilateral U.S.-British strike in the absence of clear evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and without a resolution specifically authorizing war, would be counterproductive, Villepin argued at the U.N.

The Iraqi imbroglio has crystallized the fears in European public opinion over a U.S.-dominated world. Mainstream Europeans, and not just the tens of thousands of peace activists who have demonstrated daily from Florence to Berlin, want a renegotiation of the global status quo. What is more surprising, however, is that their leaders seem to be embarking on a sweeping effort to achieve just that. Unveiling a draft of the new European constitution in December, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, the former French president, made it clear that the long-term ambition of Europe should be to compete with the United States politically as well as economically. The draft constitution calls for the elaboration of a common European policy for foreign, defense and security issues, and a much stronger federal backbone for the E.U. — which will count 26 member-states by 2004, and twice the population of the United States.

France, under the new government of Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin, has been particularly brazen in its efforts to build a viable military alternative to the U.S. Its military budget for 2003 has grown by nearly 8 percent, the largest percentage increase since 1987. Topping $33 billion, it still represents less than 10 percent of annual U.S. military spending, but it is a massive amount by European standards.

Writing in Le Monde of the unprecedented increase in France’s military budget, the journalist Jacques Isnard put it succinctly: “It’s not merely about rebuilding the capacity of the French army: The effort is geostrategic in nature.” Chirac is actively exhorting other European heads of state to get on the bandwagon and increase their own military spending, so that France’s vision of a multilateral world can one day come to pass.

The Bush administration’s “regressive nationalism” abandons “dissuasion in favor of preemption” and “permanent alliances in favor of ad hoc coalitions,” military analyst Nicholas Baverez argues in Le Monde. “This doctrine implies the disappearance of an automatic American engagement in the case of a menace on Europe’s security. Thus, the United States, previously a guarantor of the status quo, is now reinforcing global instability, and the Middle East is an example of that.”

Spurred by France and Germany, the European Union could well be on the verge of one of these sporadic revolutions that have defined its complex, unpredictable evolution. Imagined in the aftermath of WWII as an economic and political union that would prevent future wars between the European greats, the question of rebuilding the military might of Europe has long remained taboo. The fall of the Soviet empire only comforted the notion that Europe didn’t need to be a military powerhouse, as there was nothing to defend against, and countries gladly capitalized on the “peace dividend” by reducing chronic deficits while continuing to provide “welfare state” benefits to their citizenry. The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, however, engendered a new paradigm.

“September 11th, by revealing the nature of the risks faced, and by the radical reorientation of American diplomacy and strategy it provoked, obliterated the illusions of European nations concerning the peace dividend and their own security policies,” argues Le Monde.

It’ll be a long time yet, however, before Europe creates a new world order, and in the interim international institutions such as NATO and the U.N. Security Council are in for a rough ride.

Most of the headlines were about Le Pen, but the extreme left also scored a major victory in Sunday’s elections, with Arlette Laguiller, the retired bank clerk and eternal maverick of French politics, snaring 6 percent of the vote. Altogether, the far left, including the forlorn Communist Party, managed to snag over 15 percent of the voters from the mainstream Socialists and their pedantic figurehead Jospin.

Le Pen’s victory is relative, however. What’s most true about this election is that there were no real winners. To begin with, he scored barely 2 percent more than he managed in the 1995 contest, and it is widely acknowledged that there is no way he can beat incumbent President Chirac in the final round of the race May 5. Just about every other political leader has already called on his or her electorate to “sustain the values of the Republic” and to “preserve the honor of France” by leaving Le Pen in the dust. It is only the ineptitude of the Socialists, and more generally the lethargy of their usual constituency, that has allowed the ex-paratrooper turned populist authoritarian leader to reach the second round of an otherwise mind-numbing election.

With some 17 candidates from all walks of French civil society, from the Hunting, Fishing, Nature, and Traditions Party, which managed to glean 4 percent of the vote, to various environmentalist factions who couldn’t manage to endorse one single candidate, to Catholic advocates and extremists from every horizon, this election was an embarrassing fiasco long before the final votes were ever tallied. Indeed, most observers of French political life agree that the two-round system, instituted by de Gaulle as a vehicle for his own reelection, has seen its day. With nothing other than the required 500 signatures from municipal officials required to run, there is theoretically very little to prevent any number of “candidates” from using the presidential race to promote their various agendas, which range from the most trivial (establishing more lenient hunting regulations) to the most revolutionary (establishing a proletarian dictatorship). Without a profound institutional overhaul, France is doomed to replay such a parody of democracy at every presidential ballot.

On Sunday, 10 million registered voters suffering from election overload — out of a total population of 60 million — just couldn’t be bothered to cast a ballot. Although some of the blame undoubtedly rests with Jospin himself, an ex-professor who is at best a mediocre communicator unable to stir Socialist ranks after five years of lackluster, if dogged, leadership, the two-step system was clearly a factor. Having to vote twice is a burden most constituents would rather avoid, and no one, probably least of all Le Pen, imagined that anyone besides Jospin and Chirac would face off for the second round. So the French, many of whom were on Easter break, decided to take a vacation.

On Belle-Ile, an island paradise that lies only a few dozen nautical miles from Jean-Marie Le Pen’s hometown of La Triniti-en-Mer, multitudes of vacationing Parisians were ambling the streets on Sunday, taking time off for spring break and enjoying the good weather far from the bustling voting centers of the City of Lights. The fact that Belle-Ile lies some 600 kilometers from the capital didn’t dissuade the tourists and owners of secondary homes crowding the marketplace from taking a vacation during the first round of the presidential ballot. All of them, like Henri Carron, an intellectual property lawyer who lives in the fashionable Marais district, just took for granted the second round would oppose the two politicians who have clogged the forlorn French political landscape for the past seven years. And Henry Carron, like all the other “continentals” on Belle-Ile, did not have an absentee ballot.

“Why should I vote twice?” he says. Now, presumably, he knows.

Like Henri Carron, an overwhelming number of middle-class French liberals who favor Lionel Jospin because of his “honesty” and “work ethic” will now have to choose between a worn fixture of old-school French power politics accused of corruption and a street thug who liked nothing more than to beat up rival student leaders in the ’60s, and who not so long ago defined gas chambers as “a detail of history” and called for the incineration of a Jewish government minister. To say that the country is in a state of shock would be an understatement.

Serge July, perhaps France’s most famous editorialist, and the director of the center-left daily Libiration, summed it up in a nutshell:

“You should know: France is a country that is clueless, panicked, afraid of its own shadow, and which, politically, is incapable of facing the future.”

Paradoxically, it is violence perpetrated against Jews and Jewish institutions by second- and third-generation immigrants of Arab extraction as a result of the situation in the Middle East that helped Le Pen beat the opposition. He has always been a staunch law-and-order advocate (despite his own problems with the law), and Chirac as well as Jospin have been forced to follow in his tracks, making security and rising crime rates the biggest issue of these elections. But, as Le Pen says, “The French have always preferred the original to the copy,” and allowing “the big Celt” to define the terms of the debate virtually guaranteed that he would win the debate.

Le Pen’s real victory, in fact, is that all his old battle-horse issues — immigration, globalization, American domination and the European Union; all the menaces that are robbing France of its identity — have come to dominate French politics, and indeed to define French society.

France, today, is indeed a far cry from the righteous, patronizing nation that lambasted America for allowing the election of President Bush after the contested Florida vote, or threatened to boycott Austria after Jvrg Haider, another effigy of the European extreme right, was elected to national office. Compared to Le Pen, Bush is a civil libertarian and Haider is a flower child, and the French know it better than anyone. So many French feel humbled by his ascent. Cloaked in a new veneer of respectability, Le Pen is still considered by the vast majority of the French to be a dangerous autocrat and a racist. But he is also one of two men vying to be the next president of the country that drafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and as such sees itself as the birthplace of civilized society and the spearhead of egalitarianism.

Speaking of the necessary “guilt of the absentees and the undertakers of the Left,” Serge July concluded his scathing editorial with a brutal assessment: “French democracy is in a coma.”

Many are hoping the big bruiser from Brittany will wake her up.

True, the work had progressed incredibly. Since New York City officials allowed cranes and excavators to replace bucket brigades and men with shovels, the massive mountain of wreckage where I once worked has disappeared entirely. In its place, there is a gaping, smoldering crater. Where rescue workers once scurried and crawled like so many work ants deftly delving for survivors, Caterpillar and Hitachi lifters with steel shears are plowing into the wreckage like a pack of hungry tyrannosaurs — the mechanical jaws tearing indiscriminately into the remains of the WTC before lifting the rubble into dump trucks, along with whatever else is caught in their crushing embrace.

The violence with which these giant mechanical beasts plow through the wreckage is shocking to someone who did rescue and recovery work there. Like most firefighters, I still see Ground Zero as a massive killing field, and I cant help thinking that human remains in some form or another are being dumped unceremoniously into the trucks along with everything else.

“Its become a pick and dump operation,” says an outraged Ron Werner, who was assigned to Ground Zero from FDNY headquarters in downtown Brooklyn. “There are torsos being found in Staten Island.” Shaking his head when I start to ask more questions, the firefighter drove away in a six-wheel transporter. On Warren Street, near the AmeriCares tent that serves as on-site Transport Headquarters, I start a conversation with a firefighter who will identify himself only as Chuck about the changed nature of the operation. He has difficulty holding back a sneer: “Of course we dont have enough guys here.” As for the site being a potential health hazard, he scoffs: “Thats bullshit, buddy. Theyre just blowing smoke so contractors can clear this up in a hurry and put up another building. Were in the way.”

Although Giuliani and construction professionals at the site hail the progress, it is difficult for anyone who worked to find bodies at Ground Zero not to sympathize with the enraged firefighters, who believe that much of what’s left of their dead brethren is being dumped by the excavators into rigs along with the mangled remains of the WTC — only to be sifted through when the debris gets to the aptly named Fresh Kills landfill site in Staten Island. The FDNYs stubborn insistence on a return to the days of search and recovery is understandable. True, there is no one alive in the wreckage, but for firefighters that isnt the point. Initially, search and rescue workers might have been scouring every square foot of rubble to find survivors, but that illusion quickly wore off, and only the moral imperative of finding the dead remained.

At first, I had used adrenaline and a sense of urgency to burrow into the wreckage, to penetrate deep into the architecture of devastation, imagining that somewhere survivors were waiting desperately to hear a voice, to feel a hand, to be retrieved from their inconceivable nightmare. All I ever saw was pieces of what had once been human beings, and corpses battered and broken beyond recognition, their clothing shredded by the inconceivable violence of the fall.

Once I realized I wouldn’t be working to liberate survivors, it was frankly hard for me to return. That wasnt true of the firemen I worked alongside of, who went back day after day for seven weeks, committed to finding the remains of the fallen and to bringing some dignity back to those who had suffered savage, unspeakable deaths.

I gained a unique perspective into that mindset Sept. 15, when I went below the impact zone, that burning mountain of wreckage where American Airlines Flight 11 hit, with a firefighter named Gus. Twisted girders provided a way down. Gus had to remove his protective jacket and helmet to squeeze through narrow gaps in the rebar. We descended about 30 feet through a series of jagged openings, then Gus went down a void another 40 feet, signaling with his light every so often to establish visual contact, while I provided more slack on his security line. Where I was, the temperature on my Casio G-Shock registered 132 degrees Fahrenheit. I couldnt touch anything with my bare hands. Where Gus was must have been unbearable.

Even after we were told to get out, Gus kept descending deeper into that burning inferno. He knew he wouldnt come across any survivors in such unearthly conditions. The only thing he could hope to find were charred remains. Remains that might be identifiable through DNA testing, providing some kind of closure to someone he had never met. That prospect was what prompted him to risk his life in such a blistering, unstable environment.

That same stubborn drive animates the FDNY to this day, which is why the decision to allow only a handful of firefighters at the site while human remains are still in the wreckage appalled them, and drove some to violence. But despite the settlement between the firefighters and Giuliani, which tripled their numbers at the site — and dropped charges against 18 firefighters accused of assault and battery and criminal trespassing — the nature of the operation is unlikely to change.

Looking out at the entire span of Ground Zero from a blown-out window in the Merrill Lynch Office on the second floor of the World Financial Center, I could count at least 20 excavators on the site digging furiously, seven cranes, and no “spotters” from the police or fire department examining the wreckage being extricated. The equation is brutally simple: If heavy machinery is everywhere, people can’t be anywhere.

I went back to the site Friday, the day the city announced its new deal with the firefighters in an emotional press conference. The operation didn’t look any different from what I’d seen 10 days earlier. Whether the number of firefighters is 25 or 75, they wont be able to look for remains until the excavators give them an opportunity to do so, and the frantic pace of the machines is unlikely to be significantly reduced just because more firefighters are going to be milling around command centers at the periphery of Ground Zero.

Fire Commissioner Thomas von Essen did say the city would reduce the number of cranes and earth movers, as well as give firefighters new orange safety vests, to make it possible for them to get closer to the action. But I saw no evidence of that Friday, and the firefighters I met scoffed at the idea that the new agreement was going to make a difference.

They want this cleared up fast,” said Mike, of the 25th Ladder Company. What theyre doing now is a good PR move, but I doubt its gonna change things. Theyre still tearing through that rubble.

Despite Giuliani’s assertions that “the effort here by the City of New York is to recover human remains,” nothing about Ground Zero these days resembles a recovery operation. In the aftermath of the attack, we were finding crushed bits of bone and shredded pieces of flesh all over that killing field — enough to get the bodies identified if survivors provided DNA samples. Now, although bodies are still being found, including the remains of a police officer a week ago last Friday, its hard to imagine that the smaller parts will be spotted as long as people arent physically in the rubble doing the digging.

Giuliani insists site safety was the sole reason he cut back the police and fire department involvement in the recovery effort. “When they say that we have a time commitment to getting this done, [it's] totally wrong,” he insisted. “That were worried about overtime, [it's] totally wrong.” And yet according to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, Ground Zero has never been safer. The vast majority of injuries sustained by search and rescue personnel occurred in the three weeks following the attack, when the perceived urgency of the situation persuaded everyone to throw caution to the wind. An Environmental Protection Agency study released two weeks ago concluded that the air around Ground Zero was safe to breathe.

But it’s hard not to conclude Giuliani made his decision in order to speed up clearing the site. Jay Vecchione, a 32-year-old “shop steward” from Local 45 in Queens, has worked there since Sept. 11. I ask Vecchione what, if anything, he sees as a health hazard at Ground Zero. Ive heard rumors about everything from toxic chemicals to vermin infestation.

“The rats arent what I’d call a problem, for now. I haven’t seen any in the rubble. Vibrations and the smoke keep ‘em awaythey’ve got good survival instincts. But they’re everywhere else in Battery Park City.”

Vecchione says air-quality tests found the fumes contain microscopic bits of fiberglass insulation (which lodges in the lungs and can cause cancer in much the same way as asbestos), silica from the pulverized cement, dioxins, and some asbestos, which was used for fireproofing in the lower floors of the WTC. But the smoke has thinned considerably in the last few weeks, and the advancing excavators are removing materials that might otherwise fuel more fires.

The shop steward admits he used to break down in tears over the death he saw everywhere at the site, but now he sees the WTC site as a construction job. “I’m being pragmatic. If we kept doing everything by hand, it would take forever. Years, maybe.”

Instead, the work proceeds furiously. The city’s largest contractors — Turner Construction, Amec, Tully Construction, and Bovis Lend Lease (which helped build the the tallest buildings in the world, the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur) — have divided the site into sections, and their excavators are working night and day to remove all the remains of the WTC. And the biggest general contractor in the world, the Bechtel Group, has been in negotiations with the Giuliani administration over a multi-million-dollar management contract. To the chagrin of local contractors, the San Francisco-based company, which is well connected in Washington, could eventually take over the job. The total value of the contracts, including the four already signed for the excavation for $100 million, is expected to reach upward of a billion dollars, making it the most expensive construction project ever.

Still, some firefighters’ survivors are heartened by Friday’s compromise over the cleanup, and that can only be a good thing. Giuliani and Von Essen have credited retired firefighter Lee Ielpi for helping craft the compromise; his son Jonathan, also a firefighter, died Sept. 11. Ielpi told the New York Times he wished the dead firefighters’ survivors had been able to organize more quickly to deal with the city.

“If the families would have started this group two weeks after the disaster, all this could have been avoided,” Ielpi said. “It was a subject that was so monstrous. We didn’t know how to deal with it.”

The fact that Ielpis role was considered so fundamental by Giuliani and Von Essen shows that there was something wrong with their approach to the situation in the first place. Public entreaties by grieving family members shouldnt have been a prerequisite before the city started to show proper deference for the remains the victims, be they firefighters or ordinary joes. Not when the pain and suffering was so obvious from day one. I can only hope the latest compromise is more than a PR measure, and that victims and survivors alike get the respect they always deserved.

Bin Laden’s strategies, in many respect, reflect those of Palestinian fringe groups in the late 1960s such as George Habash’s Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which was in direct competition with Arafat’s Al Fatah. Whereas Arafat believed in armed struggle, including commando operations within Israel and acts of sabotage against Israeli targets, he strongly condemned acts of terrorism, particularly against objectives outside Israel. By contrast, Ahmad Jibril’s PFLP-General Command and Habash’s PFLP favored acts of terror on an international scale. In the summer of 1968, Jibril’s “Fedayeen” hijacked an Israeli plane to Algiers, and in February 1970 blew up a Swissair flight en route to Israel, killing nearly 50 people. Habash’s PFLP, which wanted to weaken the Jordanian regime and feared that the Arab states were preparing to make peace with Israel, was responsible for the spectacular hijacking of three planes to Jordan, sparking what came to be known as the Jordanian civil war of September 1970. If bin Laden is anyone’s brainchild, he is George Habash’s.

Since the inception of Al Fatah in the years following the Suez War, Arafat has attempted to steer the Palestinian movement clear of far-reaching ideologies of any sort, defining it as purely nationalistic in outlook. The adoption of any ideological base, he argued — be it social, political, or religious — would have submerged the nascent Palestinian movement in the obscure depths of intra-Arab rivalries, like a sardine caught in a feeding frenzy of Great White Sharks with names like Nasserism, Ba’athism, the Muslim Brotherhood and the Arab National Movement.

The insistence of Al Fatah on a separate Palestinian identity, however, was regarded with suspicion not just by many Arab leaders, but also by many influential Palestinians such as the young Habash, who believed that Al Fatah should work with revolutionary Arab regimes like Nasser’s Egypt or Syria. In the 195Os and ’60s, most Palestinians were of the same opinion.

Almost 50 years later, though Arafat has gone from being one of the leaders of a tiny underground cell (Khalil Wazir, also known as Abu Jihad) to leading the Palestinians into a phase of quasi-state development, he is still facing the same, potentially terminal schism. Bin Laden, that horrifically effective spearhead of pan-Arab resentment, could well turn out to be the gravest challenge to Arafat’s particular brand of pragmatic nationalism.

Initially, the absence of a distinct ideological core within Al Fatah was a means of gaining wide-ranging support from Palestinian society as a whole. For Arafat and Wazir, the struggle was exclusively one of national liberation, and the deliberate lack of ideology was intended to make the movement impervious to domination by any single social class or political line. This policy proved relatively successful, and by the end of 1962 an underground network of cells was in operation throughout the Palestinian diaspora. In 1963, the first Al Fatah central committee would be formed in Kuwait.

Although the absence of ideology within Al Fatah was designed to avoid alienating specific groups within the Palestinian population (and not to draw undue antagonism from any particular Arab regime), neither did it draw unwavering support from any one particular political faction, except perhaps for the educated middle class that dominated the movement. For the same reason, Al Fatah failed early in its development to draw the Palestinian population away from the pan-Arab movements or political personalities of the time. Despite the inability of Nasser or Syria’s Hafez el-Assad to deal adequately with the Palestinian question, and despite the evident failings of Arab unity (in 1961, the short-lived United Arab Republic of Egypt and Syria broke up), many Palestinians still considered the new-order Arab regimes their best bet to achieve the liberation of Palestine.

Today, although Arafat has achieved more, in many respects, than he ever dreamed possible, he is still faced with a similar problem. When confronted with the obvious reticence of Israeli leader Ariel Sharon to allow the establishment of an independent Palestinian nation, how do you contain a frustrated Palestinian population from siding with charismatic leaders who make wide use of Islamic fundamentalist ideology and proclaim themselves the true representatives of the Arab world? Anyone who today doubts Arafat’s sincerity when he condemns the World Trade Center attack only has to read the numerous statements he made in the late ’60s and ’70s condemning terrorism and hijackings as “counter-productive.” When Arafat orders the Palestinian police to shoot the violent activists who would place bin Laden on a pedestal, he is fighting the same struggle he has been fighting for over 40 years. Arafat wants to keep the Palestinian question under Palestinian control, first and foremost, but he also wants it to remain a distinct issue, one that will not be confused with the extremist ideology of individuals such as bin Laden, who do not accept the principle of compromise.

Since 1974, when the Palestinian National Council opted for the principle of a political settlement with Israel based on the notion of a “mini-state,” Arafat has been in conflict with the various disciples of Habash, who resigned from the PLO executive committee in September 1974 and, with three other organizations, formed the “Front of Palestinian Forces Rejecting Surrenderist Solutions.” The “Rejection Front,” as it became known, obtained immediate grass-roots support within the Palestinian refugee camps which had previously formed Al-Fatah’s political base. Today, Arafat’s political base is also threatened, and no one knows this better than Arafat himself.

The probability of a settlement with Sharon leading to the creation of a Palestinian state is slim, increasing the appeal of bin Laden’s lethal mix of religiosity and political fanaticism within the occupied territories. Unfortunately, Palestinian supporters of Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, Ahmad Jibril’s PFLP and now bin Laden already outnumber Al Fatah loyalists. And the only way to tip the balance of power in Arafat’s favor once again is to pressure Sharon into abandoning his habitual inflammatory rhetoric and signing a peace settlement.