O Canada, eh!

I had the good fortune to spend most of the week in Quebec City.
It was a complete change of climate. Not only did Quebec register a frosty 32F, to the balmy 70s of my current Virginia plantation, but life, as we live it in the US, seems to be totally lost in translation.
Up here, in La Belle Province, no GWOT, no paranoia, no orange alert, no fear.
Our Canadian neighbors have already had their "fire the bums" catharsis. They voted the Liberals out of power, and the Conservatives in. Only now, they have noticed their PM, Stephen Harper, is trying to be a small GW. His popularity instantly descended to the level of his model's.
I worked in the National Assembly building of the Quebec parliament. There , one party aims to achieve independence for Quebec. The opposition party wants to keep the Province within the Federation.
Quebec, with over 7 million inhabitants, and 7 times the size of France, would be a very prosperous country of its own. Hydropower alone makes it energy independent already.
Canada's economy is at a very enviable place right now. The Loony (Canadian $), is worth over 90 US cents. Universal health care, free college education, and a very strong immigration makes it a very good place to live.
Canadians have an ambiguous relationship with their non-metric neighbor to the south. They wish they could build a wall to prevent the smuggling of drugs, weapons, and the general onslaught of American culture. But they think a wall between countries is a repugnant affair, would be too expensive, and useless. American retirees would always find a way to overcome it to get their cheap Canadian medicine anyway.
The same baby boomers who fled the Vietnam war to Canada in the 60's are now retracing the same path to get their meds.
As one RCMP officer told me: "Meme si on construisait un mur de 8 pieds, ces sacres tabernak des Etats iront acheter des echelles de 9 pieds a Wal-Mart."

The end of the war.

In Virginia, the "war", pronounced "the wah", refers to the War of Northern Aggression, known in our history books as The Civil War.
What is known in German as "Die Invasion", is called in French "Le debarquement", and in English D Day.
Liberation is in the eye of the beholder.
As I grew up in Lorraine, my childhood was full of tales of WWII. We even played war, dressed up in authentic GI fatigues, helmet liner included, waving a US flag that had gone through the actual Normandy landings. America, where some of my relatives had found a haven in the 1880's, was a mythical land, peopled with good guys, with unlimited power. Our TV screens were full of Hollywood productions. Our town was ringed with US air bases, defending us from a far from hypothetical Soviet invasion.

In 2004, the inhabitants of the Thionville area, regrouped in the Moselle River Association, gathered over 200 000 Euros to invite the US heroes who liberated them from the Nazis on November 11, 1944. The US veterans were feted, wined and dined and profusely thanked by a grateful population.

In August 2005, as Becky and I were visiting a D Day museum in Normandy, I heard a group of French high school students, expressing their surprise that the US were "the good guys"!

The damage caused by the ill fated war in Iraq goes beyond the 655,000 Iraqi dead, the 3,000 US soldiers lost, or even the billions of dollars wasted.
That war has destroyed the moral image of America, and worse, has tarnished its democratic values in the rest of the world.
To me, the removal of "the beacon of hope" that the US represented for the world at large, is the gravest failure committed by those who dragged the country in this adventure for sheer ideological, non-American reasons.
I trust that the Constitution will prove its worth and that the mid-term elections will allow us to rebuild this shattered image.

Big trouble in Korea

The news that the Democratic and Popular Republic of Korea, under the leadership of the Dear leader Kim Jong Il, has carried out the test of a nuclear bomb, is grim.
Not that it should be a great surprise.
After having heard that the greatest power on earth had put them on the list of "the axis of evil", that the first on the list, Iraq, was promptly invaded and turned into a raging inferno, the Dear leader had only one option if he wanted respect......nuclear weapons.
Donald Rumsfeld (no relation to Donald Duck as the French keep believing), when asked what should N.Korea do in 2003, famously answered:"They should take a number".
Besides being exactly the opposite of all non-proliferation policies, it is a call to nuclear arsenals to all the DPRK neighbors: Japan, Thailand, Taiwan, Malaysia, Indonesia etc.. Most of these countries have the means to do it, and quite a few will do it because they hate Japan.
This reminds me of the chain of events started in Sarajevo in 1914.

Not to worry. The US will not attack the DPRK. It is too late. As an officer told me in Florida: "We cannot afford to lose Seoul". The other thing they cannot afford, is more troops and more equipment after the Iraq adventure.Too bad. They had WMDs!

Ah, but there is still Iran and Syria. They should not be too hard to crush? especially since we are getting close to November 7th and the polls have taken a serious dip after the Foley follies.

Peaceful Fall.

I just celebrated my birthday with a day trip to the Shenadoah Valley, here in Virginia. The excuse was the Green valley Book Fair that I would not miss for anything, although my acquisition of new books is way ahead of my reading them all...
The fall colors have started in their gorgeous splendor.
While I was in full contemplation, an Amish village in Pennsylvannia, was quietly burying 5 little girls, murdered by a deranged man with an easy access to murderous weapons. If we wanted a proof of who is really backwards, the grieving Amish invited the murderer's widow and forgave her husband.
In the surreal world, Republican operatives are trying to blame the scandal of one of their own's pedophile activities on their Democratic opponents.
The country will be far better off when it is cleansed of lying, power hungry politicians who would rather endanger pages entrusted to their care than losing power and privileges. RAUS!
Last week, I had the privilege of attending the Library of Congress' Book fair. The line for a signature by Bob Woodward on his book "Denial" was a mile long.
Frankly, none of his revelations are earth shattering to those of us, regular observers, who knew from day one that the illegal invasion of Iraq was based on false assertions and condemned to catastrophic failure.
I welcome Woodward's late conversion to the new conventional wisdom. His book, the latest NIE, Chairman Warner's pessimistic evaluation of the misadventure im Iraq, and the latest Foley scandal, might finally open the door to a long list of hearings that will advance the truth.