The Rag Blog

Depleted uranium, which is used in armor-piercing ammunition, causes widespread damage to DNA which could lead to lung cancer, according to a study of the metal’s effects on human lung cells. The study adds to growing evidence that DU causes health problems on battlefields long after hostilities have ceased.0508 05 1DU is a byproduct of uranium refinement for nuclear power. It is much less radioactive than other uranium isotopes, and its high density – twice that of lead – makes it useful for armor and armor piercing shells. It has been used in conflicts including Bosnia, Kosovo and Iraq and there have been increasing concerns about the health effects of DU dust left on the battlefield. In November, the Ministry of Defense was forced to counteract claims that apparent increases in cancers and birth defects among Iraqis in southern Iraq were due to DU in weapons.

Now researchers at the University of Southern Maine have shown that DU damages DNA in human lung cells. The team, led by John Pierce Wise, exposed cultures of the cells to uranium compounds at different concentrations.

The compounds caused breaks in the chromosomes within cells and stopped them from growing and dividing healthily. “These data suggest that exposure to particulate DU may pose a significant [DNA damage] risk and could possibly result in lung cancer,” the team wrote in the journal Chemical Research in Toxicology.

Previous studies have shown that uranium miners are at higher risk of lung cancer, but this has often been put down to the fact that miners are also exposed to radon, another cancer-causing chemical.

Prof Wise said it is too early to say whether DU causes lung cancer in people exposed on the battlefield because the disease takes several decades to develop.

“Our data suggest that it should be monitored as the potential risk is there,” he said.

Prof Wise and his team believe that microscopic particles of dust created during the explosion of a DU weapon stay on the battlefield and can be breathed in by soldiers and people returning after the conflict.

More than half of the members of Iraq’s parliament rejected for the first time on Tuesday the continuing occupation of their country. The U.S. media ignored the story.

On Tuesday, without note in the U.S. media, more than half of the members of Iraq’s parliament rejected the continuing occupation of their country. 144 lawmakers signed onto a legislative petition calling on the United States to set a timetable for withdrawal, according to Nassar Al-Rubaie, a spokesman for the Al Sadr movement, the nationalist Shia group that sponsored the petition.

It’s a hugely significant development. Lawmakers demanding an end to the occupation now have the upper hand in the Iraqi legislature for the first time; previous attempts at a similar resolution fell just short of the 138 votes needed to pass (there are 275 members of the Iraqi parliament, but many have fled the country’s civil conflict, and at times it’s been difficult to arrive at a quorum).

Reached by phone in Baghdad on Tuesday, Al-Rubaie said that he would present the petition, which is nonbinding, to the speaker of the Iraqi parliament and demand that a binding measure be put to a vote. Under Iraqi law, the speaker must present a resolution that’s called for by a majority of lawmakers, but there are significant loopholes and what will happen next is unclear.

What is clear is that while the U.S. Congress dickers over timelines and benchmarks, Baghdad faces a major political showdown of its own. The major schism in Iraqi politics is not between Sunni and Shia or supporters of the Iraqi government and “anti-government forces,” nor is it a clash of “moderates” against “radicals”; the defining battle for Iraq at the political level today is between nationalists trying to hold the Iraqi state together and separatists backed, so far, by the United States and Britain.

The continuing occupation of Iraq and the allocation of Iraq’s resources — especially its massive oil and natural gas deposits — are the defining issues that now separate an increasingly restless bloc of nationalists in the Iraqi parliament from the administration of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, whose government is dominated by Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish separatists.

By “separatists,” we mean groups who oppose a unified Iraq with a strong central government; key figures like Maliki of the Dawa party, Shia leader Abdul Aziz Al-Hakeem of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (“SCIRI”), Vice President Tariq Al-Hashimi of the Sunni Islamic Party, President Jalal Talabani — a Kurd — and Masoud Barzani, president of the Kurdish Autonomous Region, favor partitioning Iraq into three autonomous regions with strong local governments and a weak central administration in Baghdad. (The partition plan is also favored by several congressional Democrats, notably Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware.)

Iraq’s separatists also oppose setting a timetable for ending the U.S. occupation, preferring the addition of more American troops to secure their regime. They favor privatizing Iraq’s oil and gas and decentralizing petroleum operations and revenue distribution.

CONCORD, New Hampshire (AP) — Three retired generals challenged a dozen members of Congress in a new ad campaign Wednesday, saying the politicians can’t support President Bush’s policies in Iraq and still expect to win re-election.

“I am outraged, as are the majority of Americans. I’m a lifelong Republican, but it’s past time for change,” retired Maj. Gen. John Batiste told reporters.

“Our strategy in Iraq today is more of the same, a slow grind to nowhere which totally ignores the reality of Iraq and the lessons of history,” Batiste said. “Our president ignores sound military advice and surrounds himself with like-minded and compliant subordinates.”

Batiste and Paul Eaton, also a retired major general, are featured in the ads by VoteVets.org. They challenge the president’s argument that he listens to his commanders on the ground in Iraq and say the president’s Iraq policies endanger U.S. security.

The former CIA chief is earning big money from corporations profiting off the war — a fact not mentioned in his combative new book or heard on his publicity blitz.

05/08/07 “Salon” — – May. 07, 2007 | If you go by the book jacket of his new memoir, “At the Center of the Storm,” George Tenet is enjoying the life of a retired government servant teaching at Georgetown University, where he was appointed to the faculty in 2004. The former CIA director played up the academic image when he kicked off the recent media blitz for his new book by doing an interview for CBS’s “60 Minutes” from his spacious, book-lined office at the university. His academic salary, and the reported $4 million advance he received from publisher HarperCollins, should provide the former CIA director with more than enough money to live comfortably for the rest of his days and leave a substantial fortune to his children.

But those monies are hardly Tenet’s entire income. While the swirl of publicity around his book has focused on his long debated role in allowing flawed intelligence to launch the war in Iraq, nobody is talking about his lucrative connection to that conflict ever since he resigned from the CIA in June 2004. In fact, Tenet has been earning substantial income by working for corporations that provide the U.S. government with technology, equipment and personnel used for the war in Iraq as well as the broader war on terror.

When Tenet hit the talk-show circuit last week to defend his stewardship of the CIA and his role in the run-up to the war, he did not mention that he is a director and advisor to four corporations that earn millions of dollars in revenue from contracts with U.S. intelligence agencies and the Department of Defense. Nor is it ever mentioned in his book. But according to public records, Tenet has received at least $2.3 million from those corporations in stock and other compensation. Meanwhile, one of the CIA’s largest contractors gave Tenet access to a highly secured room where he could work on classified material for his book.

Tenet sits on the board of directors of L-1 Identity Solutions, a major supplier of biometric identification software used by the U.S. to monitor terrorists and insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan. The company recently acquired two of the CIA’s hottest contractors for its growing intelligence outsourcing business. At the Analysis Corp. (TAC), a government contractor run by one of Tenet’s closest former advisors at the CIA, Tenet is a member of an advisory board that is helping TAC expand its thriving business designing the problematic terrorist watch lists used by the National Counterterrorism Center and the State Department.

Tenet is also a director of Guidance Software, which makes forensic software used by U.S. law enforcement and intelligence to search computer hard drives and laptops for evidence used in the prosecution and tracking of suspected terrorists. And Tenet is the only American director on the board of QinetiQ, the British defense research firm that was privatized in 2003 and was, until recently, controlled by the Carlyle Group, the powerful Washington-based private equity fund. Fueled with Carlyle money, QinetiQ acquired four U.S. companies in recent years, including an intelligence contractor, Analex Inc.

By joining these companies, Tenet is following in the footsteps of thousands of other former intelligence officers who have left the CIA and other agencies and returned as contractors, often making two or three times what they made in their former jobs. Based on reporting I’ve done for an upcoming book, contractors are responsible for at least half of the estimated $48 billion a year the government now spends on intelligence. But exactly how much money will remain unknown: Four days before Tenet’s book was published, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence decided not to release the results of a yearlong study of intelligence contracting, because disclosure of the figure, a DNI official told the New York Times, could damage national security.

That may be a real break for Tenet. Under his watch, according to former CIA officials and contractors I’ve interviewed, up to 60 percent of the CIA workforce has been outsourced. A spokesman for the CIA told me last week that that figure “is way off the mark,” but wouldn’t provide the actual figure, which he said is classified. But publication of that number could prove embarrassing to Tenet, particularly in light of his own deep involvement in the privatization of U.S. intelligence.

Despite making himself available for plenty of airtime of late, Tenet was not available for an interview with Salon, said Tina Andreadis, his publicist at HarperCollins. She referred me to Bill Harlow, Tenet’s co-author and his former director of public affairs at the CIA, who said Tenet’s work on corporate boards “is all a matter of public record.”

Tenet’s ties with contractors were underscored last week in a dispute between two groups of former CIA officials over Tenet’s legacy. On April 28, six former intelligence officers wrote to Tenet, saying he shared culpability with President Bush and Vice President Cheney for “the debacle in Iraq,” and suggesting he donate half the royalties from his book to Iraq war veterans and their families. All of the signatories had severed their ties to U.S. intelligence, although three of them, Phil Giraldi, Larry Johnson and Vince Cannistraro, work as consultants for news organizations, corporations and government agencies outside of intelligence.

Even the mayor of Los Angeles admits “Nobody, nobody should be victimized in a way we saw women, children and families victimized just a few days ago.”

He was referring to the openly brutal assault by the LAPD on a peaceful rally of migrant families and their supporters on May 1 in LA’s MacArthur Park, where dozens of pigs in riot gear viciously and repeatedly fired volleys of tear gas and rubber bullets into a crowd of Brown families with children and babies, even before a helicopter hovered overhead announcing–in English only–that the Park must be vacated. The rally had a permit until 9 P.M. But, according to eyewitness accounts collected by the National Immigrant Solidarity Network, hundreds of cops arrived at 6, a mere hour after the event started, and, unprovoked, immediately began harassing a crowd watching Mexica/ Azteca danzantes, driving their motorcycles straight into the onlookers and sending a wedge of riot clad cops into their midst. More people gathered in the area to denounce this outrage, as waves of cops shot their way into the crowd of ten thousand nearby. The LAPD tried to blame “agitators” and “anarchists” for their attack, but this as a straight up lie.

Reporter Ernesto Arce of LA’s KPFK told Democracy Now!, “they were trying to clear the Alvarado Street for ongoing traffic, and there was a gathering, a large gathering, a circle of people that were gathered around Aztec danzantes, or pre-Columbian Mexican dancers, and they were holding a ceremony. And police on motorcade decided to forcibly break that up, and they drove their motorcycles through this crowd.”

A reporter for Telemundo said “One minute I was on live, the next minute I was running for my life. It was excessive force. They basically hit women, children, and journalists.”

Another reporter wrote, “Television news crews captured images of the police swinging their batons at an arm’s length of a frightened child who cried as he stood frozen in the chaos.

Let’s be clear. This would never happen to a gathering of white suburban families. No one would tolerate it for a moment if white babies were fired on by pigs using “less than lethal” weapons” that have been known to kill, hurling projectiles with the force of a 95 mile per hour baseball. Is a 95 mile per hour baseball “less than lethal” when hurled at an infants’s skull? If it strikes a baby’s eye? About 600 cops, including 100 from the ultra elite Metro Division, fired hundreds of rubber bullets and tear gas canisters and systematically beat Brown mothers, fathers, youth, and members of the news media with batons. Tear gas projectiles have long been known to have lethal potential. LA Times writer Ruben Salazar was killed by the LAPD with a tear gas canister during the police riot against the anti-war Chicano Moratorium as far back as 1970.

But Brown children are expendable in Los Angeles, and migrants are the new scapegoats for a nation steeped in a deep tradition of white racism.

The race equation, the hate equation, is that simple. The Conservative voice website called the families “criminals” taking to the streets, and, in an effort to justify the LAPD attack, launched a racist war of words on the children themselves ,saying “the children of illegals, who are themselves illegal (sic), do not share their parents’ work ethic or docility. The children are often lazy, are predominantly hateful, and commit crimes at rates far above the American statistical norm. Imitating the worst qualities of American blacks, they refuse to patiently work their way up the ladder of social mobility, and despise everything that America stands for. Meanwhile, they demand that everything that law-abiding Americans have worked so hard for be taken from them and given to the second-generation illegals.”

The website called the families “Thugs hiding behind children, and backs the claim with a citation from the virulently racist website VDARE:

I wonder if the plan to Boycott America also includes not giving birth to their ‘jackpot’ babies, not driving while drunk, not accepting welfare payments, not using food stamps, not dealing drugs, not murdering, stealing or raping, not attending government schools, not buying homes using government financing, not clogging our court system, not sending remittances to Mexico, not breaking our laws by being here and not insisting that we speak Spanish?

The essay concludes that white “Americans” should “begin exercising their legal right (sic) to effect citizens’ arrests of illegals.” What the Right wants is for even more intense brutality to be unleashed on the Brown community, by police and vigilantes alike. “The Americans, writes the Voice,” will need to break into march lines, make citizens’ arrests, and force policemen to choose their allegiances: To America’s laws and citizens, or to foreign criminals and their American accomplices.”

The Hate Equation is so simple and so transparent that the nation’s most brutal police chief, William Bratton, was forced to apologize- but his early efforts were apologies wre to the brutalized news media, and to the cops themselves, for “what happened” to them – not to the families who were attacked.

Bratton finally admitted, ” “I’m not going to defend the indefensible. Things were done that shouldn’t have been done.”

The Corporate Democratic Party is into snuff politics.

The target this month–single payer, Medicare for all.

The motive–protect the corporate health insurance industry.

Democratic snuff politics was on display yesterday on Capitol Hill.

Senator Ron Wyden was on the Hill surrounded by his corporate supporters–Steve Burd, CEO, Safeway Inc., Art Collins, CEO of Medtronic, Inc, H. Edward Hanaway, CEO, CIGNA, Steve Sanger, CEO, General Mills, and Ronald Williams, CEO, Aetna, Inc.

Wyden has introduced legislation that is similar to that introduced by Republican Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney and Republican California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

All claim to create universal health care.

None can, do or will.

What’s the common denominator between Wyden-care, and Romney-care and Schwarzenegger-care?

Individual mandates.

The individual must get insured or the individual is violating the law.

As opposed to single payer.

Which says to the health insurance companies–get out.

We will take care of our people.

If you sell basic health insurance, you are violating the law.

Everyone is in one insurance pool.

Nobody is out.

All are covered.

No bills, no co-pays, no deductibles.

No losing your health insurance when you change jobs.

No escalating premiums when you get sick.

Cheaper than the current system.

With better outcomes.

One approach sets up a system that outlaws individual wrongdoing.

The other sets up a system that outlaws corporate wrongdoing.

The corporate executives were at the press conference to support Wyden’s plan and to push their own newly created Coalition to Advance Healthcare Reform.

The key element focused on by the CEOs–market-based healthcare system.

The goal–derail publically funded single payer legislation that will cut administrative waste.

The single payer bill has 70 sponsors in the House of Representatives and is supported by 52 percent of the American people.

When asked why he doesn’t support single payer when 52 percent of the American people do, Wyden didn’t blush.

“The people of my state, not a poll, but at the ballot box in 2002, they voted by about 3-1 against a single payer proposal,” Wyden said.

Well yeah, after the insurance industry dumped millions to scare people into believing the government was going to take over their lives.

“If you go to a community meeting and take a poll in my state, what people want is coverage like their member of Congress gets,” Wyden said. “They want benefits like their members of Congress. They want the quality of care that their members of Congress get.”

But can’t single payer deliver exactly that?

A man inspects the body armor police riot gear displayed on a mannequin, at the ‘Rebuild Iraq 2007,’ the 4th International Trade Exhibition for the Rebuilding of Iraq in Amman, Jordan, Monday, May, 7, 2007. More than 40 countries are taking part in the conference to encourage countries and companies to invest in all aspects of Iraqi life. (AP Photo/Nader Daoud)

Rebuild Iraq? Police in riot gear are supposed to rebuild Iraq? And this is the FOURTH trade fair for ‘rebuilding’ Iraq? Have they lost their minds? If they want to rebuild Iraq, they should start with supplying all the hospitals and clinics with EVERYTHING that they need. They should start by seriously looking for a neutral third party (not the USA!) to broker peace and stability in Iraq. They should make sure everyone has enough food and a decent shelter.

Having more armed men in riot gear or body armor is not going to REBUILD IRAQ – have we not had four years of evidence to establish that fact? More guns and more armies and more mercenaries are not going to REBUILD IRAQ.

Sometimes I think this whole war business is just a racket to make some sickos out there a LOT OF MONEY. They keep promoting violence and chaos and strife, and hey, guess what, some of the people fall for it. And then some more people are fearful and feel they need to protect themselves – and the weapons manufacturers get to sell even MORE weapons. And people like George Tenet can help get a war on, whine that they were mis-judged, write a damn book about it and MAKE TONS OF MONEY. And he is far from being the only one – Senator Edwards who co-sponsored the bill for the war on Iraq ALSO made money off the war (all legal) and now is going around telling other people what they should be doing – now that the political winds have shifted!

So far US forces in Iraq have paid out $32m for ‘wrongful deaths’. Karzan Sherabayani went back to Kirkuk to ask why his uncle had to die

One cold London morning in January, I received a phone call from one of my brothers. Uncle Kakarash was dead, killed by American soldiers at a checkpoint. He was my mother’s brother, 75, and like most Kurds had suffered greatly under Saddam and welcomed the Americans as liberators.

Civilians in Iraq face everyday hazards beyond the snipers and the insurgents’ bombs – hundreds have been run over by tanks or hit by stray bullets or shot at checkpoints. There are no records kept of the numbers of civilians killed during the war or by coalition troops.

Figures released last month after a request from the American Civil Liberties Union revealed that the US army has paid out $32m to Iraqi civilians in compensation for ‘wrongful deaths’ and injuries. That does not include condolence payments which can be made at the discretion of commanders on the scene.

I had been back to Iraq several times since the war, reporting for More4 News. But this time I had a personal mission to return to Kurdistan, the homeland I fled 27 years ago.

My cousin Sabah took me to the checkpoint where his father died, not far from his home on the outskirts of Kirkuk. Kakarash had gone out first thing in the morning, before breakfast, to get petrol before the queues built up. As luck would have it, I found several eyewitnesses who had seen the whole incident.

One of them was an Iraqi soldier who had been on duty at the checkpoint. ‘When the Americans are here we have to stop all the cars, but your uncle was distracted and kept driving,’ he told me. ‘The Americans shot a bullet into the ground to warn him – he didn’t stop but tried to turn away and the Americans started shooting at him, thinking he might be a suicide car bomb.’

A group of local men, clearly distressed by what they had seen, told me the soldiers kept on firing after my uncle had turned around and tried to get away. ‘They obviously shot to kill him,’ one man told me. ‘If not, they could have stopped after the first shot, they could have given him a chance to see what was he going to do next, but they just shot him dead.’

The increasing incidents of human smuggling and trafficking in the wake of the arrest of an M.P. belonging to the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) have become a major topic of discussion and pontification in public forums in general and the media in particular. Despite long hours of debates and discussions, clarity over the issue has been missing. For example, none of the so-called experts could answer why and how the number of human beings migrating willingly or unwillingly from one country to another has been growing at an unprecedented rate.

While 15 million or so people were taken, over two centuries, from Africa to Europe, North America and the Caribbean to work as slaves, around 50 million people were enticed during the fifty year span of the 1830s – 1880s from India and China to work in foreign lands as indentured labourers after slavery was formally abolished in the British empire in 1833 and in the USA in 1865.The entire system of indentured labour was based on fraud and the labourers were trapped in by false promises with the connivance of the British government. The gullible fell in the trap in the hope of realizing their fond dream of a better life. Almost all these indentured labourers came from the rural areas where life was extremely miserable.

Ever since those days human smuggling and trafficking have been on the increase despite restrictive immigration laws, punitive actions and hazardous journey. There are several reasons for this. Let us first begin with human smuggling, i.e., the cases where people try to cross over to other countries of their own volition. On the one hand, job opportunities in developing countries are unable to keep pace with the volume of demand. Nay, in a number of countries they have been shrinking in certain areas. Take, for example, India. With increasing flow of foreign direct investment in retail trade besides the entry of Indian big business, small shopkeepers and hawkers are becoming jobless. Similarly agriculture has ceased to give jobs and sustenance to people dependent on for ages. Handicrafts and small industries have been declining. In addition, the population increase has led to the entry of more people in the working age group. The spread of education has resulted in the formation of a veritable army of the educated unemployed who want better and more paying job opportunities and for that they try to migrate at all cost to the countries where prospects appear to be more promising. Unprecedented improvements in and expansion of information and communication technologies in recent times have encouraged the desire for international migration.

It is baffling that none of the ten points of the Washington consensus on which the ongoing globalization is based, talk of the free flow of labour across national boundaries while they want the removal of all impediments in the way of the free flow of goods, services and capital. UN Economic and Social Council’s report “Globalization and Labour Migration” has this to say in this regard: “Recent globalization trends have been characterized by the greater integration of global markets for goods, services and capital across borders while their impact on the cross border movement of people and labour remains much more restricted, regulated by immigration laws and policies that uphold the principle of state sovereignty.” This is nothing but hypocrisy and falsifies the claim of those who think that national sovereignty has become redundant. The declining employment opportunities and the growing pressure of population in developing countries act as a push factor while better prospects in developed countries, highlighted by the media and the tales of their prosperity told by relations and friends act as a pull factor. To quote the UN report again: “… globalization has … led to widening disparities of employment opportunities, income and living standards across the globe. In some countries, globalization has adversely affected jobs and livelihoods in traditional sectors. The failure of globalization to create new jobs where people live is a prime factor in increasing migration pressures.” It is obvious that the failure to find means of livelihood propels people to go elsewhere despite serious odds. Looking back, one finds that throughout history, “migration has been a courageous expression of the individual’s will to overcome adversity and to live a better life.” The migration of the Aryans to India, notwithstanding what the Hindutva ideologues may say, was a typical example of this. Discriminations of various sorts have neither stopped nor slowed this process. Recall the latest thesis of Samuel Huntington in America calling for stopping the immigration of the Hispanics or the vile propaganda by the Hindutva forces and the police brutality in India against the Bangladeshis in this context that have failed to act as deterrence.

In 2005, total migrants worldwide came to 191 million and most of these were induced by better job prospects. Five years earlier, in 2000, the number of migrants came to around 81 million. With their families they accounted for almost 90 per cent of total migrants. Refugees and asylum seekers accounted for the rest. In the years to come, international labour migration will go on increasing at an accelerated rate. Because of the difficulties in obtaining visas and work permits, the phenomenon of human smuggling has come into existence. There has appeared, to quote Moises Naim, editor of the Washington-based, Foreign Policy, “an organized wholesale trading business shipping bulk consignments of humans over long distances, and involving staggering amounts of money.” During 1988-1996, a Maltese of Pakistani origin, Tourab Ahmed Sheikh, gathered $15 million from this venture. Mandir Kumar Wahi from India entered into partnership with him and began gathering his cargo from India and shipping to Europe and America. He too became phenomenally rich in no time.

Over the years, a national network of pimps, travel agents, corrupt officials from passport issuing department and politicians with their clouts came into being. A number of politicians themselves with diplomatic passports and certain immunities and influence began ferrying people from India to Europe and America for hefty fees. The officials looking after the security of airports and air services began winking at this business. It is not that this phenomenon has not been known but nobody dared talk about before the recent incident involving the BJP M.P., Babubhai Katara, from Gujarat. Startling revelations have begun dripping in as a result of investigations. The M.P. had a number of, both genuine and fake, passports, used to smuggle the aspirants of both sexes out of the country for hefty amounts. The total monetary value of the turnovers in this business is not accurately known, but it is baffling. The facilitators bear little risk while the migrants have to put their lives and property in jeopardy from the very beginning of their adventure. They may be arrested any time during the journey or their vessels may meet with disastrous accidents as happened some years ago near Malta. Agents may ditch them and they may be deported back for their failure to secure valid documents for stay and work in host countries. If their mission goes haywire, they are sure to sink in debt and lose their landed property and ultimately reduced to begging.

Now, coming to trafficking. Through this process, human beings are taken out of the country forcibly or by employing fraudulent means. Children are taken to be converted into slaves for life or for entertaining the rich in the gulf countries as camel jockeys. Young girls are enticed or even kidnapped to be employed as sex slaves for the rich. The brothels get replenishment of prostitutes. In addition, human trafficking is used for satisfying the growing demand for human organs.

Rightwing nationalist Nicolas Sarkozy, is the next president of France. He campaigned on an anti-immigrant platform that veered uncomfortably close to that of Jean-Marie LePen, though he did make a provision for affirmative action. Sarkozy will try to break the unions, and his view of the immigrants who rioted in 2005 over joblessness as “scum” bodes ill for social peace. An Arab blogger’s view of Sarkozy’s police tactics is eye-opening.

Sarkozy’s message, that he wants to restore pride in Frenchness, wants to promote free market reforms, and worries that France has lost control of its borders all sounds Reaganesque. Just as Reaganism was a form of American (“white”) nationalism, so Sarkozyism is a form of French nationalism. And just as Reagan’s nationalism had a class location in the upper middle classes and the rich, so too does Sarkozy’s “French” nationalism.

But the United States and France are both founded on civic nationalism (open to everyone of any race or culture), not on ethnic nationalism. While Germany’s laws allowed persons of German heritage and language resident in eastern Europe and Central Asia under Communist rule to come to Germany as citizens after the fall of the Soviet Union, the United States would hardly make a law allowing English-speakers to immigrate at will. Citizenship in the US is open to all ethnicities and is about allegiance to the Constitution. The revolutionary ideal of France is similarly civic. The Republican French thought nothing of bestowing citizenship on some provinces of Senegal and actually allowing them to elect deputies to the French national assembly. French citizenship was never about race, about “Français de souche.” But I worry that Sarkozy’s trajectory is to privilege that kind of narrow Frenchness.

Sarkozy’s French nationalism (he uses the French equivalent of “France: Love it or leave it!”– a sentiment pioneered by LePen) will clash with the realities of French multiculturalism. France’s Muslims are estimated at anywhere from 4 million on up, but I favor the 4 million figure (the population of metropolitan France is about 60 million, so this is 6.6 percent).

The Muslims are only one immigrant group. There are thought to be 14 million French of immigrant origins (over the past century?)– including 100,000 Britons. The biggest group is the Portuguese.

Sarkozy intends to create an Orwellian “Ministry of Immigration and National Identity.” He rubbed the practicing Muslims the wrong way when he came out in favor of the Danish caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad, and he supported banning the headscarf for Muslim school girls.

Although it is often said that Sarkozy played a positive role in insisting that French Muslims form a Muslim Council and develop a “French Islam,” it is often forgotten that the council ended up being dominated by first-generation immigrants out of touch with French Muslims (many of whom are third or fourth generation), and by conservative religious groups–the “National Federation of Muslims in France (FNMF) and the Union of Islamic Organizations in France (UOIF).” Sarkozy himself is said to have favored the UOIF, which is to say the least made up of hardliners. One suspects that he was attempting to set up religous Muslims as a force in rightwing politics in France, on the model of the practicing Roman Catholics. (About 18 percent of the French are practicing Roman Catholics; most of these congregations have tended to vote Gaullist. Some 45 percent of practicing Catholics voted in the first round for Sarkozy, with only 11 percent voting Socialist. The rest must have voted for the centrist candidate, Francois Bayrou.)

Ironically, Sarkozy may have succeeded in setting up a rightwing Muslim Council, but failed to attract its loyalty to himself, given his subsequent record of anti-immigrant rhetoric and his positions on cultural issues important to Muslims.

In the first round, only 1 percent of Muslim voters embraced Sarkozy, with 64 percent voting for Segolene Royal. That French Muslims supported a woman socialist candidate so overwhelmingly shows how few of them have a fundamentalist mindset. Most French Muslim youth are relatively remote from the culture of their grandparents and the rioting was economic in character.