Why I Declined To Serve
By John J. Sheehan
Monday, April 16, 2007; Page A17

Service to the nation is both a responsibility and an honor for every citizen presented with the opportunity. This is especially true in times of war and crisis. Today, because of the war in Iraq, this nation is in a crisis of confidence and is confused about its foreign policy direction, especially in the Middle East.

When asked whether I would like to be considered for the position of White House implementation manager for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, I knew that it would be a difficult assignment, but also an honor, and that this was a serious task that needed to be done. I served as the military assistant to the deputy secretary of defense in the mid-1980s and more recently as commander in chief of the Atlantic Command during the Cuban and Haitian migrant operation and the reconstruction of Haiti. Based on my experience, I knew that a White House position of this nature would require interagency acceptance. Cabinet-level agencies, organizations and their leadership must buy in to the position's roles and responsibilities. Most important, Cabinet-level personalities must develop and accept a clear definition of the strategic approach to policy.

What I found in discussions with current and former members of this administration is that there is no agreed-upon strategic view of the Iraq problem or the region. In my view, there are essentially three strategies in play simultaneously.

The first I call "the Woody Hayes basic ground attack," which is basically gaining one yard -- or one city block -- at a time. Given unconstrained time and resources, one could control the outcome in Iraq and provide the necessary security to move on to the next stage of development.

The second strategy starts with security but adds benchmarks for both the U.S. and Iraqi participants and applies time constraints that should guide them toward a desired outcome. The value of this strategy is that everyone knows the quantifiable and measurable objectives that fit within an overall strategic framework.

The third strategy takes a larger view of the region and the desired end state. Simply put, where does Iraq fit in a larger regional context? The United States has and will continue to have strategic interests in the greater Middle East well after the Iraq crisis is resolved and, as a matter of national interest, will maintain forces in the region in some form. The Iraq invasion has created a real and existential crisis for nearly all Middle Eastern countries and created divisions among our traditional European allies, making cooperation on other issues more difficult. In the case of Iran, we have allowed Tehran to develop more policy options and tools than it had a few years ago. Iran is an ideological and destabilizing threat to its neighbors and, more important, to U.S. interests.

Of the three strategies in play, the third is the most important but, unfortunately, is the least developed and articulated by this administration.

The day-to-day work of the White House implementation manager overseeing Iraq and Afghanistan would require a great deal of emotional and intellectual energy resolving critical resource issues in a bureaucracy that, to date, has not functioned well. Activities such as the current surge operations should fit into an overall strategic framework. There has to be linkage between short-term operations and strategic objectives that represent long-term U.S. and regional interests, such as assured access to energy resources and support for stable, Western-oriented countries. These interests will require a serious dialogue and partnership with countries that live in an increasingly dangerous neighborhood. We cannot "shorthand" this issue with concepts such as the "democratization of the region" or the constant refrain by a small but powerful group that we are going to "win," even as "victory" is not defined or is frequently redefined.

It would have been a great honor to serve this nation again. But after thoughtful discussions with people both in and outside of this administration, I concluded that the current Washington decision-making process lacks a linkage to a broader view of the region and how the parts fit together strategically. We got it right during the early days of Afghanistan -- and then lost focus. We have never gotten it right in Iraq. For these reasons, I asked not to be considered for this important White House position. These huge shortcomings are not going to be resolved by the assignment of an additional individual to the White House staff. They need to be addressed before an implementation manager is brought on board.

The writer is a retired Marine Corps general

Iran’s Oil Mafia
By Hassan Daioleslam
FrontPageMagazine.com | April 16, 2007

Robert William (Bob) Ney is a current federal prisoner and a former Ohio Congressman from 1995 until November 3, 2006. On October 13, 2006 Ney pled guilty to charges of conspiracy and making false statements in relation to the Jack Abramoff lobbying and bribery scandal. Ney reportedly received bribes from Abramoff, other lobbyists, and two foreign businessmen - a felon and an arms dealer - in exchange for using his position to advance their interests.
Conspicuously missing from this dossier of disservice to the country was Ney’s assistance in the creation of a Washington-based lobbying enterprise for the Iranian theocratic regime, The National Iranian-American Council (NIAC). NIAC is part of an extensive US lobbying web that objectively furthers the interests of the Islamic Republic of Iran. This article will address the creation of NIAC, Tehran’s role, NIAC’s connection to Iran’s oil mafia, and NIAC attempts to penetrate US political system.

Creation of NIAC

The National Iranian-American Council (NIAC) was founded thanks to the efforts of four non Iranian-Americans: Roy Coffee, Dave DiStefano, Rep. Bob Ney, and Trita ParsiCoffee and DiStefano, both Washington lobbyists, were investigated by the Justice Department for arranging a trip to London for Bob Ney, where he met a Syrian arms dealer and convicted felon involved in a conspiracy to circumvent sanctions to sell US-made aircraft parts to Tehran.
Roy Coffee sent a letter to the Dallas Morning News in February 2006 to justify his relationship with the two London-based felons. Part of the letter discussed the founding of NIAC:

“Back in the spring or summer of 2002, a good friend of mine from law school, Darius Baghai, had just returned from visiting relatives in Iran for the first time since his family left before the revolution. He spoke with me about how the economy of Iran was humming …….From this, I took Darius in to visit with Mr. Ney. What was to be a 15 minute meeting became a 1 1/2 hour meeting as they spoke passionately about their hopes for the Iranian people. They also spoke in Farsi a great deal - I'm sure talking smack about me. From that meeting, Darius, Dave and I began to work with Trita Parsi, another Iranian-American to try to form a political action committee of Iranian-Americans to pursue a strategy of normalization of relations between the two countries…. The 4 of us worked very hard for about 9 months to form this committee.”

At the time, Trita Parsi was a Swedish-Iranian graduate student in his early twenties, best known for ties to Iran’s ambassador in Sweden. A successful self-promoter, he soon attached himself as a part-time aide to Congressman Ney before he was appointed president of NIAC.
The New Lobby
NIAC’s predecessor, the American-Iranian Council (AIC), was established in the 1990s with backing from multinational oil companies. For many years, it spear-headed pro-Tehran lobbying effort in the US.
AIC president Houshang Amirahmadi had been an active pro-Tehran player since early 1980s. While residing in US, he was also a presidential candidate in Iran’s elections, and officially collaborated with different Iranian institutions and notably the foreign ministry. In 1999 and 2000 Trita Parsi was helping Amirahmadi to organize lobbying events in Washington.
In 2001, the pro-Iran lobby in the United States became intensely active to prevent the renewal of the Iran Libya Sanctions Act (ILSA), and to lift U.S. sanctions on Iran. Despite extraordinary pressure from the lobby, ILSA passed overwhelmingly.
Prior to his imprisonment in March 2007, Bob Ney led Congressional efforts to defeat ILSA and initiate Tehran-friendly policies in concert with AIC. Disappointed and angered by the ILSA vote, Ney began to plan for the next battle of the war.

“The ILSA vote doesn’t look very promising, but that doesn’t mean the struggle should stop on this entire issue. It is a matter of education and re-education and people getting together and forming a citizen’s lobby to make sure that members of Congress and their offices are educated on this issue,” Ney told AIC in a June 2001 speech.

While Ney was hard at work “forming a citizen’s lobby,” Trita Parsi claimed that the majority of lawmakers voted against their true wills. In a tone apologetic to Tehran, he expressed his hope that the Iranian regime understood that he and his colleagues had worked hard to prevent this result:
“Hopefully, Tehran will recognize that an honest attempt was made to defeat or at least weaken the sanctions. The call for a review and Speaker Hastert's pledge to insist on Congressional action based on the review must also be interpreted by Tehran as a step in the right direction” (Iran Analysis July 2001 Peyvand Iran News)
This failure to block the renewal of ILSA in 2001 marked the start of a new era for the pro-Iran lobby in the United States. The lobbyists recognized that they must broadly reach out to Iranian-Americans.NIAC was created to put those plans in motion.

Trita Parsi was the regime’s trusted man within the new network. Tehran’s faith in Parsi was so profound that in 2003 when Iran decided to send a highly secret proposal for negotiations to the White House, Parsi was called on to arrange the delivery of the message through Bob Ney to Karl Rove. Parsi, moreover, was among the few chosen men (along with Mahallati, Iran’s former ambassador to UN) to present the results of a shady Tehran-friendly poll of the Iranian population which indicated the popularity of Iran’s nuclear program.
Trita Parsi and the Regime’s Inner Circle

During the eight years of Rafsanjani’s presidency, which ended in 1997, the Iranian regime had attempted without success to attract the Iranian Diaspora to its cause. Khatami’s presidency recharged Tehran’s efforts. With the Supreme Leader’s direct involvement, the High Council for Iranian Compatriots Overseas was created in 2000. The President heads the Council, and the Foreign Minister serves as its deputy director. The Ministry of Intelligence and the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance collaborate to implement the decisions of the council.

The objective was to create a network of organizations to infiltrate and seemingly represent the Iranian community abroad, and promote policies favorable to the Iranian government. Tehran anticipated that this strategy would neutralize opposition activities abroad and legitimize the new lobby.

State-sanctioned Iranian newspapers started a campaign to promote Trita Parsi and NIAC. Pro-government publications outside Iran followed suit. The former head of the Iran interest in Washington, Ambassador Faramarze Fathnejad, was thrilled with the efforts of Trita Parsi and NIAC, and underlined “the importance of relation with Iranian organizations in the U.S. and specially pointed to NIAC and his young leader who is a consultant to CNN and has been very successful in his efforts.” The Iran Ambassador even claimed 20,000 strong membership for NIAC (while only 150 is claimed by NIAC itself)!

But token rhetorical support would not alone turn an inexperienced graduate student and a corrupt Washington politician into a lobbying enterprise. Entities with ample financial resources and direct access to Iran’s top leaders had to enter the scene. This is where Siamak Namazi, an important figures of this new lobbying enterprise and a prominent member of the Iranian oil Mafia, enters the scene.

Trita Parsi and Namazi worked closely on developing the details of a grand plan to create an Iranian-American “Citizen’s Lobby.” They traveled to Iran together They organized joint conferences and meetings. In 1999, they co-authored a seminal paper, that provided the roadmap for the organization that later became NIAC. 24

Namazi, along with his sister Pari and brother Babak, control the Atieh enterprise in Iran and its three sister companies Atieh Roshan, Atieh Bahar and Atieh Associates, as well as numerous other direct and indirect partnerships, including Azar Energy, Menas companies in England, Atieh Dadeh Pardaz, FTZ Corporate services and MES Middle East Strategies.. Particularly noteworthy is the fact that Baquer Namazi (their father) is the Chairman of Hamyaran, identified by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars as a “resource center” in Tehran for Iranian non-governmental organizations (NGOs).

Atieh claims to be a “fully private strategic consulting firm that assists companies better understand the Iranian market, develop business and stay ahead of [the] competition.” People familiar with the oil industry in Iran understand the coded language, After all, rulers in every country in the Middle East use outside consultants to negotiate the discrete terms of lucrative oil contracts.

Atieh’s customers include the foreign corporations who wish to do business in Iran. One Atieh Bahar customer, Norway’s Statoil, has been publicly identified as a participant in a scheme to bribe Iranian government officials by the US Securities and Exchange Commission and the Department of Justice. A number of high officials in the company were fired and the company had to pay tens of millions of dollars in penalties to the US and Norwegian governments for “payments to an Iranian official in 2002 and 2003 in order to induce him to use his influence to obtain the award to Statoil of a contract to develop phases 6, 7 and 8 of the Iranian South Pars gas field.”

The most recent debacle of Atieh enterprise was in March 2007 when the CEO of the French oil company Total SA was charged with having bribed senior Iranian officials to secure contracts. Total is a major customer of the Namazi’s Atieh enterprise.

Tehran’s trust in Namazi is further evidenced by the fact that his company provides the network and computer services for almost all Iranian banks, the Majles (parliament), and other important institutions. Namazi’s groups monitor nearly all Iranian economic or political activities and have access to the country’s most sensitive data. This is a clear indication of his prominent place inside the inner circle of power in Tehran.

While representing Tehran, Namazi, disguised as a scholar travels to the US to seemingly pursue academic activities . He succeeded so well that the Congressionally-funded National Endowment for Democracy awarded him a Reagan-Fascell Democracy Fellowship in 2005.

This link between the Iranian oil Mafia and “scholarly” pursuits in the US is hardly isolated. Three former Iranian deputy foreign ministers currently live in Boston posing as “scholars”: Mohammad Mahallati who was also the Iranian ambassador to the UN in the late 1980s, Farhad Atai and, Abbas Maleki. In addition to his diplomatic past, Maleki has been one of the most important figures within the Iranian oil Mafia.

The Roadmap

In 1999, Parsi and Namazi presented a joint paper titled “Iranian-Americans: The bridge between two nations” at a conference organized by the Iranian government in Cypress. This report contains the manifesto and the roadmap for the new Iranian lobby in the US. The authors argue that “an Iranian-American lobby is needed in order to create a balance between the competing Middle Eastern lobbies. Without it, Iran-bashing may become popular in Congress again.”

The “competing lobby” was AIPAC (American Israeli Public Affairs Committee). The pillars of the road map were:

· To have the appearance of a citizen’s lobby

· To mimic the Jewish lobby in the US

· To impede Iranian opposition activities

· To infiltrate the US political system

· To break the taboo of working with the Iran’s cleric rulers for the Iranian Diaspora

· To improve the image of the Iran’s government abroad24.

In their report, Namazi and Parsi acknowledged that problems of organizing a pro-regime lobby within the Iranian-American community:

“This group’s role has not been utilized any where close to its potential, however, for several reasons: A good portion of them were against the IRI [Islamic Republic of Iran], therefore would not do anything to help.”

“The point is, [Iranian Americans] were not about to form a lobby group that would benefit the establishment in Tehran, or benefit the Iranian-Americans themselves as a community, nor was it for the most part interested in forming a pressure group against the Islamic Republic.”
This was also underlined by Roy Coffee, one of the NIAC’s founders:

“We [NIAC’s founders] found that most Iranians do not want to get involved in politics because of their experiences in Iran during and after the revolution. They have come to this country to make a better life for themselves and their children and don't want to get involved.”

The lack of participation by the Iranian American community in this lobby has been overcome with a sophisticated machine of professional lobbyists and “friendly” circles who favor a rapprochement with the Iranian regime.

Tehran’s Advice: Mimic Jewish Lobby in Washington

One of the hallmarks of the new lobby was its desire to rival the “Israeli Lobby” in the United States. This aspiration led to the creation of the Iranian American Political Action Committee (IAPAC), loosely modeled after similar organizations created by AIPAC (American Israeli Public Affairs Committee). Three of IAPAC’s board members came from the AIC’s leadership.

In their 1999 paper, Parsi and Namazi analyzed at length the techniques used by AIPAC, and suggested that the same approach should be taken to create an Iranian lobby in Washington:

“Creating similar types of seminars and intern opportunities to Iranian-American youth may not improve Iran-US relations in the short run, but it will help integrate the Iranian-American community into the political life of America. In the long run, a strong and active Iranian- American lobby, partly established through these seminars and by the participants of these programs, may serve to ensure that the US and Iran never find themselves in violent opposition to each other again.”

Trita Parsi has been reciting this comparison to the Israeli lobby since the late 1990’s, about the time that the High Council was formed in Tehran. At the beginning his tone was more contentious and resembled the mullah’s usual rhetoric, but more recently he has toned down his anti-Israeli remarks, at least in English.

The government-owned newspaper Aftab published an interview with Trita Parsi on December 28, 2006 that underscores Parsi’s efforts on behalf of the Iranian regime..

Translation: “The conflict between Iran and the West on Iran’s nuclear file has entered a critical state. The government must now utilize all the possible resources to defend the national interest. In this, we have not paid enough attention to the potentially significant influence of the Iranian American society in moderating the extremist policies of the White House. In comparison of this untouched potential to the influence of the Jewish lobby in directing the policies of Washington in supporting Israel, we see the difference between what is and what could be.”

Siamak Namazi began sounding similar themes.:

“I propose that we should start showing up to the leadership training seminars and other events organized by the American-Israeli Political Action Committee (AIPAC) for their youth. Not only will this create an opportunity to learn the fine skills of community organization and grassroots lobbying, but it also takes away from AIPAC's ability to spread misinformation about Iran through a deliberate campaign to further its own political agenda.”

Not Lobbyists?

As Ney’s criminal bribery and lobbying fiasco became more public, NIAC’s president Trita Parsi began to downplay NIAC’s lobbying activities. (NIAC is registered as a 501 c3, to which certain legal restrictions apply.) Furthermore, being lobbied by a former aid would have added to Ney’s already complicated situation. Asked in 2005 whether his group lobbied the US Congress, Trita Parsi told an interviewer:

“Our group does not do any lobbying at all. We do not contact the Congressmen to support or oppose a bill.”

Since its creation, however, NIAC has strived to penetrate the US political system in accordance with the roadmap Namazi and Parsi established in 1999. As the Washington Post reported on June 25, 2006:

“The NIAC helped persuade a dozen conservative House members to sign a letter to President Bush earlier this month calling for unconditional negotiations with Iran's regime.”

The external communications of Parsi and other NIAC leaders shed further light on NIAC’s lobbying activities.

“The NIAC members have educational and experimental knowledge on the lobbying process and politics in America.”

“.. we must establish connections on Capitol Hill to establish early-warning systems about proposed votes or bills that may oppose the best interests of Iranian-Americans.”

Bob Ney, Roy Coffee, and Dave DiStefano arranged numerous workshops, training classes, seminars and speeches in which they themselves and others with experience prepared members and affiliates of NIAC to lobby and influence Congress. Parsi, Namazi and Ney organized public gatherings and discrete and exclusive $1,000 per plate fundraiser events. They even developed a training manual for lobbyists, a copy of which was sent to this writer by a former NIAC member.

NIAC itself admits that “In 2002, Congressman Ney benefited from letters sent by Iranian-Americans through NIAC's Legislative Action Center in support of his resolution on US-Iran relations.”

Infiltrating Congress

Trita Parsi, Namazi and their backers fully intended to infiltrate the US Congress. One of the methods they boast of involves recruiting young Iranian Americans to serve as Congressional interns or pages by offering room, board and financial incentives. NIAC’s website brags of success stories in this venture.

NIAC claims to have drafted the young Iranian American Press Secretary for Rep. Marcy Kaptur to help in improving the lobbying skills of NIAC members and affiliates. Similarly, an Iranian American student in the University of Minnesota received a financial scholarship in his senior year and becomes an intern in Senator Norm Coleman’s (R-MN) Washington office. Another intern, a graduate of University of South Florida, was placed in Congressman Jim Davis’ (D-FL) Washington, D.C. office. Expanding the operation to penetrate the US political system, NIAC has now formally implemented a paid trainee program and is actively in search for unwary Iranian American youth.

Conclusion

Since the early 1990’s, Tehran has embarked on developing a sophisticated lobbying enterprise in the United States. Iran’s government has devoted significant manpower and financial resources to this cause. This lobbying enterprise consists of a complex, intermingled web of entities and organizations with significant overlap of leadership, and heavy involvement of the notoriously mafia-like inner circles of the Iranian regime. Disguised as scholars, many of the former Iranian government officials reside in the US and constitute an important piece of the lobby machine. NIAC and its major figures, such as Bob Ney and Trita Parsi are effective nodes of Tehran’s efforts to manipulate US policy toward self-serving ends.

Hassan Daioleslam is an independent researcher and writer who has worked closely with two experienced investigative reporters inside Iran to explore and expose Iran lobbying enterprise in the United States.

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Barnett: Nixon and Deng: architects of our globalized world
By THOMAS P.M. BARNETT, tom@thomaspmbarnett.com
April 15, 2007

Pope John Paul II hurtles toward sainthood in the Catholic Church, while Ronald Reagan achieved that ideological status long ago in the hearts of American conservatives.
Both are judged by many historians as decisive figures in the West's Cold War victory over the socialist bloc.

While not denigrating the contributions of these two great men, let me submit that two other figures loom far larger as architects of the socialist bloc's transformation from vaunted global menace to valued global market: Richard Nixon and Deng Xiaoping.

Yes, I know I'm talking about Watergate's criminal-in-chief and the real butcher of Tiananmen, but neither leader's political sins compare to their absolutely pivotal roles in history.

Nixon's reaching out to both the Soviet Union and China in the early 1970s could not have been more surprising, given his pre-presidential history as a vicious anti-communist. But, by doing so, Nixon effectively ended the Cold War by the start of his second, deeply troubled term in 1973.

In forging a detente with the Soviets that included limitations on strategic arms, Nixon basically killed the worldwide socialist revolution. For once, Moscow - that movement's leader - entered into such agreements with its capitalist archrival, it admitted to both itself and its empire of imprisoned satellite states that its model of socialist development suffered limited appeal.

In short, Western Europe was lost, and bipolar rivalry with the United States remained valid only in the underdeveloped Third World - an equally impractical vision that perished barely a decade later in Afghanistan's mountains.

Far more damaging for Moscow's communist leadership were the economic connections with the West triggered by detente.

By opening itself up to trade, the U.S.S.R.'s fake economy was ultimately undermined by the dollar's infiltration: Its hard value revealed the illogic of the Kremlin's central planning and pretend pricing.

In short, Nixon revealed this emperor had no clothes.

By introducing goods with actual values attached, Western trade poisoned the entire Soviet production chain by suggesting that the vast bulk of its output arrived with little appreciable market value.

So long as the Soviet economy remained virtually isolated from free markets, the illusion of productivity was maintained.

But, once connected to the real world, Soviet consumers began to opt out of the dysfunctional Soviet system in increasing numbers, instead availing themselves of desired goods via a black market whose pervasiveness was matched only by its sophistication.

By the time Mikhail Gorbachev and his fellow reformers arrived on the scene in the mid-1980s, the historical die was cast and the great unraveling of the Soviet empire inevitably began.

I know, I know. Reagan's "star wars" allegedly spent the Soviets into oblivion. But realize this: Without Nixon's detente, that price tag would have remained incalculable and therefore economically meaningless.

Even more important than setting the Cold War's trajectory toward our successful outcome, Nixon's opening up of China enabled that giant's eventual emergence as globalization's prime agent of economic change in the 21st century.

Here, Nixon deserves serious credit as a formative influence on today's amazingly robust global economy, for without China's rise under Deng Xiaoping, globalization as we know it would not have been possible.

If Nixon is arguably the world's most influential political leader of the second half of the 20th century, then Deng is arguably its most important economic figure.

Coming out of the long national nightmare that was Mao Zedong's phenomenally disastrous and bloody rule, China in 1980 stood - in absolute terms - as the planet's most pervasively impoverished country.

By some definitions, China will possess the world's largest national economy within a quarter-century's time, and the man who set that all in motion was Deng.

Rarely in history has one dictator held in his hands such discretionary power to choose between further enslavement of his subjects and their rapid empowerment through economic liberation.

In disassembling Maoism, Deng chose the latter route, validating both Nixon's previous strategy and discrediting Gorbachev's later decision to pursue political glasnost before economic perestroika in the now-defunct Soviet Union.

Richard Nixon routinely ranks as one of our nation's worst presidents, and Deng Xiaoping appears forever doomed to live in Mao's dark shadow, but neither deserves this historical fate.

Instead, both should ultimately be appreciated for what they were: lead architects of our globalized world, one marked by more peace and poverty reduction than ever before witnessed in human history.

Thomas P.M. Barnett is a distinguished strategist at the Oak Ridge Center for Advanced Studies and the senior managing director of Enterra Solutions LLC. Contact him at tom@thomaspmbarnett.com.

April 15, 2007
Battle Over the Banlieues

By DAVID RIEFF
“If I could get my hands on Sarkozy, I’d kill him.” I had asked Mamadou, a wiry young man wearing gray camouflage pants and a tank top, what he thought of France’s former minister of the interior, who is also the right’s standard-bearer in this spring’s presidential elections. “I’d kill him,” he continued and then paused as if savoring the thought. “Then I’d go to prison. And when I got out, I’d be a hero.”

We were in Les Bosquets, one of the impoverished housing projects that are scattered across the banlieues, the heavily immigrant working-class suburbs that surround Paris. I asked Mamadou’s friend Ahmad if he felt the same way. He said he would not go that far. “I wouldn’t kill him, no,” he said. “But I hate him. We all hate him.”

A lot of this was bravado, of course, friends showing off for friends in the disaffected, hyperaggressive macho style that now predominates among France’s disenfranchised suburban young. As a group, their unemployment rate stands at around 40 percent. Seen from the Paris familiar to most foreigners or, for that matter, to most native Parisians, Les Bosquets seems like another country. And yet it takes only about an hour to get there from the Place de la Concorde. Paris is ringed by hard-up towns like Clichy-sous-Bois and Montfermeil, each with its own version — some far better, very few much worse — of Les Bosquets. These cités, as the housing projects are known, suffer from much more than being simply ugly or neglected. Nor is their poverty what sets them apart; there is poverty in Paris itself, after all, and in the French countryside as well. Still less is it their immigrant character: the great French cities, like all major European cities these days, are filled with new immigrants, the majority of them Muslims. (A third of the Muslims in Europe now live in France.) And yet there is something particularly soulless and depressing about these suburbs. An increasing number of those who live in the cités have the sense that they are unwelcome in a France whose treatment of them, whether hostile or indifferent, utterly contradicts the claim the country makes for itself: that in France everyone is treated equally and that the Republic neither makes nor will accept any distinction between citizens on the basis of race, class or ethnic background.

The elections have pitted Nicolas Sarkozy against two main challengers, the Socialist Party’s Ségolène Royal and an upstart center-right candidate from the small Union for a Democratic France, or U.D.F., François Bayrou. Much of Sarkozy’s political identity in the campaign comes from the mutually antagonistic relationship he has with young men like Mamadou and Ahmad. As interior minister, Sarkozy was responsible for confronting the unrest in the cités that in 2005 boiled over into full-scale riots, and in doing so he came to embody the hostility that many of the Français de souche — that is, French people whose ancestors have lived in France for centuries — now feel toward the Français issus de l’immigration, that is, French people whose parents or grandparents immigrated from the Maghreb or sub-Saharan Africa or the islands of the Indian Ocean. In Sarkozy’s campaign speeches, he denies any affiliation with the country’s anti-immigrant parties. But as the presidential campaign nears its conclusion (the first round of voting takes place next weekend), Sarkozy has seemed only to accentuate his hard-line stances on illegal immigration, on assimilation and on “security,” which in France today refers mostly to the violence of the suburban young.

For many observers, both inside and outside the country, the future of France is at stake in this election. Sarkozy’s supporters, who include a number of prominent intellectuals (unlike in almost every other rich country, their role continues to be significant in France), say he represents a clean break with the politics of the past half-century in France. For the novelist Marc Weitzmann, an enthusiastic “Sarkozyiste,” French postwar politics was dominated first by an unholy alliance between Charles de Gaulle and the French Communist Party and then by the Socialist François Mitterrand and the Gaullist Jacques Chirac, who in a sense perpetuated this sclerotic political arrangement. For Weitzmann, Sarkozy provides an alternative to a system that has failed to produce social peace, failed to adapt to France’s reduced role in the world and above all failed to reform its economy on either the Tony Blair model or the German Social Democratic model.

A decade ago, it would have been inconceivable to have found a Parisian intellectual like the writer Pascal Bruckner supporting a right-wing candidate like Sarkozy. But as Bruckner put it to me recently, Sarkozy “wants to give a kick in the rear to our old, decrepit country, to put an end to the French feeling of self-hatred, to reinforce our self-esteem and the value of work. He wants to extricate us from our decadence and put an end to the so-called ‘French exception,’ which is nothing more than the narcissism of failure.”

Philip Gordon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, largely agrees. Like Bruckner, he is persuaded of the novelty of Sarkozy in French politics. “He’s a new type of character for the Fifth Republic,” Gordon told me. Unlike most French politicians, Sarkozy did not graduate from one of France’s so-called great schools; he attended the University of Paris. Notably, he is not himself a member of the Français de souche; his father, a public-relations executive, immigrated from Hungary in 1946. What’s more, Gordon says, Sarkozy “is radically different in orientation from those within the Gaullist movement who have come before him, including Jacques Chirac.” In economic policy, Sarkozy is neoliberal rather than statist, and in foreign affairs, he is Atlanticist rather than Europeanist and pro-Israel rather than pro-Palestinian.

His real break from the past, though, can be seen in the way he has made the interconnected issues of immigration, assimilation and national identity the centerpieces of his campaign. Traditionally, immigration has been a concern of only the French hard right, notably Jean-Marie Le Pen and his National Front. That changed after the unexpected result of the 2002 elections. The French electoral system involves two rounds of voting; the second round is a runoff between the two candidates who get the most votes in the first round. In the past, many French voters have expressed their support for minority parties in the first round in the belief that in the second the contest will revert to a familiar choice between France’s two major parties: the Socialist Party and the Union for a Popular Movement, or U.M.P., the center-right inheritor of Gaullism. In the 2002 elections, however, that strategy helped Le Pen earn more votes than the Socialists in the first round, which gave him a place in the runoff against Chirac. The French left was forced to rally behind Chirac, but Le Pen still managed to get 17 percent of the vote, largely by playing the anti-immigrant card. It was an astonishing result and one that still traumatizes many French voters, who prefer to think of Le Pen’s politics as far outside the mainstream and of limited appeal.

Roland Cayrol, the dean of French pollsters, told me that most French people, like voters everywhere, care more about bread-and-butter issues than questions of immigration and national identity. He added, however, that “those who are concerned with immigration, who form the base of support for Le Pen, are single-issue voters, and in a close election, their votes can determine the outcome.”

The consensus among French political observers is that Sarkozy knows this and has tailored his campaign accordingly. His strategy in the first round appears to be to tack far enough to the right to attract a substantial number of Le Pen’s supporters, while taking care not to alienate too many centrist voters. Maintaining this delicate balance requires prodigious oratorical gifts, and Sarkozy is a brilliant speaker, perhaps the best in France for a generation. And his job as interior minister has helped with this positioning as well; until last month, when he resigned in order to campaign full time, he used his post to signal his toughness and his tenacity. He carried out a policy of cracking down on illegal immigrants, up to and including sending police into schools to arrest, with a view toward deportation, young people enrolled in them. He has boasted that his policies prevented France from being subjected to the kinds of immigrant floods that Spain experienced after the Socialist government there legalized many illegal residents. In what has been received in France as a clear signal to Le Pen’s constituency, Sarkozy has insisted that “there was an obvious link between 30 or 40 years of a policy of uncontrolled immigration and the social explosion in French cities.” And as if to cap all this, in a recent speech he unveiled a plan for a new ministry to be called the Ministry of Immigration and National Identity. To many French people, the concept was a horrifying echo of the racism of the fascist Vichy regime during the Second World War. But, as he usually does, Sarkozy stood firm.

It is impossible to understand the French elections of 2007 without first taking the measure of what happened in November 2005, when riots convulsed the French suburbs and shocked the French public. They began in the Paris suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois, after two teenagers from one of the town’s toughest cités were chased by the police into an electric-power substation and electrocuted, but before long they had spread across much of the country. For many voters, the trauma produced by the conflict — which the conservative writer and TV personality Alain Minc calls “the revolt of 2005” — has never been far from the surface, and last month, when a small riot broke out in the Gare du Nord, the principal terminus of the RER suburban rail network that links Paris with its northern suburbs, the issue once more assumed center stage.

An internal report commissioned by the French prime minister’s office called the 2005 riots “unprecedented in their length, their geographic spread, their economic cost and their political impact, both nationally and internationally.” The only proper comparison, the authors argued, was the rioting in Los Angeles in 1992 after the Rodney King verdict. But, they added, those riots did not spread outside greater Los Angeles and only lasted six days, whereas the French riots lasted almost three weeks.

Politically, the riots were a polarizing event. Many residents of the cités, even those who condemned the violence, insisted that given the conditions that existed there and the brutality and racism of the police, an explosion was inevitable. And even the political establishment in France, up to and including Sarkozy, concedes that racism in employment is endemic in the country. There are data that seem to demonstrate that if your name is Mohammed or Fatima, you have less than 50 percent of the chance of being hired than you do if your name is Jean or Marie. The French Republic may proclaim its commitment to equal opportunity, but few French people believe it to be genuine. Abderrahmane Dahmane, who is in charge of the Sarkozy campaign’s relations with France’s immigrant communities, told me that when a policeman stops an immigrant youth, the youth might say something like “I’m as French as you,” and the policeman might agree, but they would both know it wasn’t true. The radical young people I met, whether would-be rappers like Mamadou and Ahmad in Les Bosquets or young Islamists affiliated with the Tawhid Center in Lyon, made much the same point, although in far more bitter language and without Dahmane’s belief that this reality could be changed — and that Sarkozy was the man to do it.

For the vast majority of the French electorate, watching the rioting on television or reading about it in the newspapers was both an alien and an alienating experience. It was alien because, for them, these suburbs were already a foreign land into which they almost never went (just as the residents of the cités rarely took the suburban rail links into the great cities like Paris, Lyon or Strasbourg). And it was alienating because the violence seemed both so savage and so self-destructive. Polling data showed that it was the older cohorts of French voters who were most affected, emotionally, by the riots. As the pollster Roland Cayrol put it to me, “these older voters are of the age where one is often governed by one’s fears.”

Their fears are anything but groundless. Violent crime and burglary are rising, though as yet guns are almost never used — nor were they, significantly, during the 2005 riots — and so the homicide rates are far, far lower than in American cities. There was, for example, only one death during the riots, compared with dozens in Los Angeles in 1992. But guns or no guns, there is a palpable air of menace when you take a ride after dark on certain parts of the superb Paris métro system or the anything-but-superb suburban RER network. To a New Yorker, it is reminiscent of the accumulated petty disorders of pre-Giuliani New York, with its squeegee men, hustlers, beggars and turnstile jumpers. And it seems hard to believe that anyone who has spent much time in the RER section of the Gare du Nord could have been surprised that things there turned violent so quickly last month. Whenever I passed through, it always seemed to me that both the suburban youths and the young policemen on duty were spoiling for a fight.

the outgoing president, share a political party, but they have had a bitter political rivalry for years. When Chirac first named Sarkozy to the interior post in 2002, many observers speculated that it was done in the hope that Sarkozy would fail there, or at least be marginalized. But the riots in 2005 instead had the effect of putting Sarkozy at the center of the national political dialogue. A few days after they began, as it was becoming clear that the situation was not likely to abate quickly, Sarkozy traveled to Argenteuil, a suburb very much like Clichy-sous-Bois. In France, the minister of the interior directly controls the national police force, so suppressing the rioting was Sarkozy’s job. Everyone, including Sarkozy himself, knew that his political career was on the line.

Rare is the French politician who does not exude self-confidence — it is the national political style — but even by French standards Sarkozy has always seemed utterly confident both in his abilities and in his way with words. Thus, there was nothing surprising about Sarkozy’s rushing to the scene of the rioting, surrounded by police, reporters and local residents. But what he said when he got there was the antithesis of what a government minister was expected to say. After making the predictable statement that he was determined to suppress the rioting by all means at his disposal and to crack down hard on those responsible, Sarkozy said the words that have defined him ever since in the minds of the young people of the suburbs and many others as well. His voice rising in anger, he declared that the rioters were nothing more than “racaille.”

In French, the word “racaille” means “scum.” It is hard to think of a word more likely to cause offense, not only among the youths themselves but among their parents and older relatives as well. Unlike the epithet that so many American black youths continue to use toward one another — so often to the despair of their elders — the young people of the cités rarely employ “racaille” to describe themselves or as a form of address. (When they do, it is in Verlan, the inverted slang of the suburbs in which words are said backward thus “racaille” becomes the ironic “caillera.”) They believe that the term expresses the way most French people view them. From the perspective of the suburbs, Sarkozy’s “racaille” was the equivalent of yelling fire in a crowded theater.

For Pascal Bruckner, it was simply vintage Sarkozy. “That is his great fault,” he told me. “There is this supercop side of him, this tendency toward conflict that prevents him from keeping his calm. He has so much energy in him that it is as if he is always about to explode. You know, his legs actually move when he speaks.” For Bruckner, the racaille incident was one in which Sarkozy’s emotions overcame his reason: “The problem is that he deeply despises his adversaries. That use of the word ‘scum,’ it dishonored his function.”

Dahmane, Sarkozy’s campaign liaison to immigrants, told me that he often feared Sarkozy’s weakness as a politician was that he was not politic enough. Sarkozy was not ashamed of this fact, Dahmane said: “He once told me that he said in a loud voice what most people only whisper under their breath.”

Bruckner and Dahmane were identifying precisely what troubles so many French people about the prospect of Sarkozy’s becoming president. As Dominique Sopo, a Socialist Party member and Royal supporter who runs a civil rights advocacy group, explained to me: “No one sensible would claim that there weren’t some rioters who could indeed justifiably be called racaille. But a responsible person neither indicts a whole community nor adds fuel to the fire in this way. Certainly not a minister. And certainly not someone who thinks himself ready to become president.”

(Sarkozy’s use of such extreme language was hardly unprecedented. In June 2005, in the suburb of La Courneuve, he said he would clean up the cités as if with a “Kärcher,” a high-pressure industrial cleaning machine. After Sarkozy’s remarks, the Kärcher corporation felt obliged to take out ads in major French newspapers saying that it in no way approved the sentiments behind the use of its name.)

As the unrest continued in the fall of 2005, the Molotov- and paving-stone-wielding rioters could be heard on television yelling about being treated as racaille. To this day, the wound of that remark festers. The rioting youths at the Gare du Nord last month chanted anti-Sarkozy slogans as they hurled bottles at the police. And it’s not just the rioters: I can’t remember a single political conversation in any of the cités I have visited in the last year, on any subject — jobs, discrimination, France herself — that wasn’t prefaced by at least a few almost ritualistic denunciations of Sarkozy.

Sarkozy and his political advisers certainly know that he crossed a Rubicon with his remarks. Not once during the campaign has Sarkozy visited the cités. Eugène-Henri Moré, the Communist deputy mayor of La Courneuve, told me that the one time people in his suburb thought Sarkozy was going to come, there was an uproar and much threatening talk about what the response would be. Asked at a news conference when Sarkozy would visit a cité, one of his principal spokeswomen, Rachida Dati, a well-known magistrate who is herself the daughter of North African immigrants, dodged the question, speaking instead of her own frequent visits to such places and of Sarkozy’s plans for economic and social revitalization. As François Bayrou, the U.D.F. candidate, said sarcastically, Sarkozy must be the only interior minister in Europe for whom a portion of his own country is completely off limits.

Bayrou has made frequent visits to the suburbs, where young voters are increasingly drawn to him. Sarkozy seems unconcerned; given the public mood, he may have calculated that being despised in the suburbs will help him with the electorate as a whole more than it will hurt him. Such is the depth of mainstream French disquiet, in fact, that many figures in French politics who have traditionally viewed themselves as defenders of immigrants’ rights and of the residents of the suburbs are bowing to the prevailing winds and taking a tougher stance toward the immigrant youth. Daniel Cohn-Bendit, once one of the most radical of the student leaders of May ’68 in France and now an influential voice in European Socialist politics, recently declared in Le Monde that if he and his fellow Socialist Party members “do not speak clearly on the suburbs and on immigration, we leave an avenue open to Le Pen.”

Ségolène Royal has had difficulty articulating a coherent response to the electorate’s shift. She horrified many of her more left-leaning supporters during the campaign by calling for the military to be involved in training programs for delinquent youths and for “putting school and family back at the center of society” — a coded way of promising that if elected she would get tough with the immigrant youth of the suburbs. Royal has presented herself as the anti-Sarkozy, but in an effort not to cede the ground of patriotism to him, she recently said that she thought every French household should have a tricolor flag. The events of the Gare du Nord forced her onto the defensive once more.

Lhaj Breze, the head of the Union of Islamic Organizations in France (a group that is often accused of being Islamist by the French right but whose grass-roots support even its enemies do not deny), says he understands the attraction that many young French Muslims feel for Bayrou. “He is a path to hope for them,” Breze told me when we met in the group’s modest offices in an industrial area of the Parisian suburb of La Courneuve.

“And Sarkozy?” I asked him.

Breze smiled wanly: “I’m afraid you won’t find a single young French Muslim who will vote for him. No one is yet willing to forgive him. As far as they are concerned, what he said at the time of the riots — as well as his closeness to America’s policy in the Middle East, which is very important to the Muslim community in France — makes him unacceptable to them.”

Interestingly, Breze did not share this antipathy at all. “In many ways,” he told me, “Sarkozy has been especially sensitive to the concerns of French Muslims. He did not initiate the project to create a representative Muslim institution in France that was long overdue. The Socialists did that. But the C.F.C.M.” — the Council of the French Muslim Community — “could not have come into being without Sarkozy having pushed for it when he became minister of the interior. I’ve spoken with him many times, and I always found him very forthright and very committed.”

I asked Breze why, if this was the case, Sarkozy had taken such a hard line on French national identity, on the need for immigrants to adopt that identity, up to and including the proposed new ministry. Smiling more broadly this time, Breze said, “Well, you might say that there is Sarkozy I and Sarkozy II, and that after the election we’ll have Sarkozy I back again.” Breze even allowed that he might vote for Sarkozy himself.

Breze’s contention is that Sarkozy’s current hard line is only for electoral purposes, that he is in fact sympathetic to the aspirations of immigrant and native-born nonwhite communities. This thesis is controversial in France (and anathema to both the youth of the suburbs and those supporting either Bayrou or Royal), but it is by no means groundless. Some of Sarkozy’s supporters point to his support for affirmative action in the workplace and in the educational system, which, they say, is the only way to change the dismal life chances young people now confront. And pious Muslims like Breze see in Sarkozy someone who is more sympathetic to religious concerns than the Socialists, for whom atheism remains a touchstone.

the weakness of France’s traditional political arrangements, and they have fragmented long-settled party loyalties. The pollster Roland Cayrol told me that Royal’s poll numbers went up whenever she diverged from party orthodoxy and went down whenever she reverted to it, and in fact she has been covertly opposed by rivals from within her own Socialist Party. Bayrou has presented himself to the electorate as the politician who is “beyond parties.” In his speeches, he has called for people across the political divide to unite to work for what is best for France, not what is best for the Socialist Party or Sarkozy’s U.M.P. or even his own U.D.F. (A cynic might observe that this last point is easy enough for him to make since the U.D.F. normally gets about 6 percent of the vote.)

In the campaign’s remaining days, the voters who oppose Sarkozy will mostly be trying to work out whether Royal or Bayrou has the better chance of defeating him in the runoff. Bayrou’s hope is that Royal will turn off many of her natural constituents and that they will choose him instead. Socialists reply that voters will in the end abandon Bayrou as a kind of impractical fantasy and return to the fold. They point to the fact that the polls consistently show that Royal’s support is hard while Bayrou’s is soft. What is undeniable, and what even some members of the Bayrou and Royal campaign staffs will agree to off the record, is that the 2007 French presidential election is really a referendum on Nicolas Sarkozy.

When I accompanied Bayrou into the RER station in central Paris for one of his recent campaign swings through the suburbs, a number of people in the crowd, which included many girls with head scarves and young men in hooded sweatshirts and hip-hop regalia, shouted, “Save us from Sarkozy,” as if Bayrou were a physician and the U.M.P. candidate a dread disease. A lot of Sarkozy’s opponents, and not only in the suburbs, think that he is precisely the “new type of character” who will heighten the French crisis, not resolve it: a man who will sow division in a country already bitterly divided and aggravate social, religious and racial tensions in a country already racked by them.

Sarkozy’s supporters obviously reject these apocalyptic predictions of what their candidate will do should he become president. But they agree with supporters of Royal and Bayrou that Sarkozy has challenged the traditional right-left fault lines that have, to one degree or another, dominated French politics since the storming of the Bastille in 1789. Although Sarkozy is the most conservative candidate and a member of the incumbent party, supporters like Marc Weitzmann tend to view him as representing change and hope — and Royal and Bayrou as representing the status quo. For Sarkozy’s opponents, he represents change too: precisely the wrong kind of change.

David Rieff, a contributing writer, covered the recent elections in Bolivia and Mexico for the magazine.

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

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