Getting Iraq Wrong

Seeing Iraq as it is (at least through the window of an armored vehicle).

Photo: Benjamin Lowy for The New York Times

By MICHAEL IGNATIEFF

Published: August 5, 2007

The unfolding catastrophe in Iraq has condemned the political judgment of a president. But it has also condemned the judgment of many others, myself included, who as commentators supported the invasion. Many of us believed, as an Iraqi exile friend told me the night the war started, that it was the only chance the members of his generation would have to live in freedom in their own country. How distant a dream that now seems.

Having left an academic post at Harvard in 2005 and returned home to Canada to enter political life, I keep revisiting the Iraq debacle, trying to understand exactly how the judgments I now have to make in the political arena need to improve on the ones I used to offer from the sidelines. I’ve learned that acquiring good judgment in politics starts with knowing when to admit your mistakes.

The philosopher Isaiah Berlin once said that the trouble with academics and commentators is that they care more about whether ideas are interesting than whether they are true. Politicians live by ideas just as much as professional thinkers do, but they can’t afford the luxury of entertaining ideas that are merely interesting. They have to work with the small number of ideas that happen to be true and the even smaller number that happen to be applicable to real life. In academic life, false ideas are merely false and useless ones can be fun to play with. In political life, false ideas can ruin the lives of millions and useless ones can waste precious resources. An intellectual’s responsibility for his ideas is to follow their consequences wherever they may lead. A politician’s responsibility is to master those consequences and prevent them from doing harm.

I’ve learned that good judgment in politics looks different from good judgment in intellectual life. Among intellectuals, judgment is about generalizing and interpreting particular facts as instances of some big idea. In politics, everything is what it is and not another thing. Specifics matter more than generalities. Theory gets in the way.

The attribute that underpins good judgment in politicians is a sense of reality. “What is called wisdom in statesmen,” Berlin wrote, referring to figures like Roosevelt and Churchill, “is understanding rather than knowledge — some kind of acquaintance with relevant facts of such a kind that it enables those who have it to tell what fits with what; what can be done in given circumstances and what cannot, what means will work in what situations and how far, without necessarily being able to explain how they know this or even what they know.” Politicians cannot afford to cocoon themselves in the inner world of their own imaginings. They must not confuse the world as it is with the world as they wish it to be. They must see Iraq — or anywhere else — as it is.

As a former denizen of Harvard, I’ve had to learn that a sense of reality doesn’t always flourish in elite institutions. It is the street virtue par excellence. Bus drivers can display a shrewder grasp of what’s what than Nobel Prize winners. The only way any of us can improve our grasp of reality is to confront the world every day and learn, mostly from our mistakes, what works and what doesn’t. Yet even lengthy experience can fail us in life and in politics. Experience can imprison decision-makers in worn-out solutions while blinding them to the untried remedy that does the trick.

Having taught political science myself, I have to say the discipline promises more than it can deliver. In practical politics, there is no science of decision-making. The vital judgments a politician makes every day are about people: whom to trust, whom to believe and whom to avoid. The question of loyalty arises daily: Who will betray and who will stay true? Having good judgment in these matters, having a sound sense of reality, requires trusting some very unscientific intuitions about people.

A sense of reality is not just a sense of the world as it is, but as it might be. Like great artists, great politicians see possibilities others cannot and then seek to turn them into realities. To bring the new into being, a politician needs a sense of timing, of when to leap and when to remain still. Bismarck famously remarked that political judgment was the ability to hear, before anyone else, the distant hoofbeats of the horse of history.

Few of us hear the horses coming. A British prime minister was once asked what made his job so difficult. “Events, dear boy,” he replied ruefully. In the face of the unexpected event, a virtuoso in politics must be capable of improvisation and appear as imperturbable as possible. People do want leadership, and even when a leader is nonplussed by events, he must still remember to give the people the reassurance they deserve. Part of good judgment consists of knowing when to keep up appearances.

Improvisation may not stave off failure. The game usually ends in tears. Political careers often end badly because politicians live the human situation: making choices among competing goods with only ordinary instincts and fallible information to go by. Of course, better information and factual criteria for decision-making can reduce the margin of uncertainty. Benchmarks for progress in Iraq can help to decide how long America should stay there. But in the end, no one knows — because no one can know — what exactly America can still do to create stability in Iraq.

The decision facing the United States over Iraq is paradigmatic of political judgment at its most difficult. Staying and leaving each have huge costs. One thing is clear: The costs of staying will be borne by Americans, while the cost of leaving will be mostly borne by Iraqis. That in itself suggests how American leaders are likely to decide the question.

But they must decide, and soon. Procrastination is even costlier in politics than it is in private life. The sign on Truman’s desk — “The buck stops here!” — reminds us that those who make good judgments in politics tend to be those who do not shrink from the responsibility of making them. In the case of Iraq, deciding what course of action to pursue next requires first admitting that all courses of action thus far have failed.

In politics, learning from failure matters as much as exploiting success. Samuel Beckett’s “Fail again. Fail better” captures the inner obstinacy necessary to the political art. Churchill and De Gaulle kept faith with their own judgment when smart opinion believed them to be mistaken. Their willingness to wait for historical validation, even if far off, looks now like greatness. In the current president the same faith that history will judge him kindly seems like brute stubbornness.

Machiavelli argued that political judgment, to be effective, must follow principles more ruthless than those acceptable in ordinary life. He wrote that “it is necessary for a prince wishing to hold his own to know how to do wrong, and to make use of it or not according to necessity.” Roosevelt and Churchill knew how to do wrong, yet they did not demand to be judged by different ethical standards than their fellow citizens did. They accepted that democratic leaders cannot make up their own moral rules, a stricture that applies both at home and abroad — in Guantánamo, at Abu Ghraib or anywhere else. They must live and be judged by the same rules as everyone else.

Yet in some areas political and personal judgments are very different. In private life, you take attacks personally and would be a cold fish if you didn’t. In politics, if you take attacks personally, you display vulnerability. Politicians have to learn to appear invulnerable without appearing inhuman. Being human, they are bound to revenge insults. But they also have to learn that revenge, as it has been said, is a dish best served cold.

Nothing is personal in politics, because politics is theater. It is part of the job to pretend to have emotions that you do not actually feel. It is a common spectacle in legislatures for representatives to insult one another in the chamber and then retreat for a drink in the bar afterward. This saving hypocrisy of public life is not available in private life. There we play for keeps.

But among friends and family, we also cut one another some slack. We fill in one another’s sentences. What we mean matters more than what we say. No such mercies occur in politics. In public life, language is a weapon of war and is deployed in conditions of radical distrust. All that matters is what you said, not what you meant. The political realm is a world of lunatic literalism. The slightest crack in your armor — between what you meant and what you said — can be pried open and the knife driven home.

In private life, we pay the price of our own mistakes. In public life, a politician’s mistakes are first paid by others. Good judgment means understanding how to be responsible to those who pay the price of your decisions. Edmund Burke, when first elected to the House of Commons, told the voters of Bristol that he would never sacrifice his judgment to the pressure of their opinion. I’m not sure my constituents would be happy to hear this. Sometimes sacrificing my judgment to theirs is the essence of my job. Provided, of course, that I don’t sacrifice my principles.

Fixed principle matters. There are some goods that cannot be traded, some lines that cannot be crossed, some people who must never be betrayed. But fixed ideas of a dogmatic kind are usually the enemy of good judgment. It is an obstacle to clear thinking to believe that America’s foreign policy serves God’s plan to expand human freedom. Ideological thinking of this sort bends what Kant called “the crooked timber of humanity” to fit an abstract illusion. Politicians with good judgment bend the policy to fit the human timber. Not all good things, after all, can be had together, whether in life or in politics.

In my political-science classes, I used to teach that exercising good judgment meant making good public policy. In the real world, bad public policy can often turn out to be very popular politics indeed. Resisting the popular isn’t easy, because resisting the popular isn’t always wise. Good judgment in politics is messy. It means balancing policy and politics in imperfect compromises that always leave someone unhappy — often yourself.

Knowing the difference between a good and a bad compromise is more important in politics than holding onto pure principle at any price. A good compromise restores the peace and enables both parties to go about their business with some element of their vital interest satisfied. A bad one surrenders the public interest to compulsion or force.

Measuring good judgment in politics is not easy. Campaigns and primaries test a candidate’s charm, stamina, money-raising ability and rhetorical powers but not necessarily judgment in office and under fire.

We might test judgment by asking, on the issue of Iraq, who best anticipated how events turned out. But many of those who correctly anticipated catastrophe did so not by exercising judgment but by indulging in ideology. They opposed the invasion because they believed the president was only after the oil or because they believed America is always and in every situation wrong.

The people who truly showed good judgment on Iraq predicted the consequences that actually ensued but also rightly evaluated the motives that led to the action. They did not necessarily possess more knowledge than the rest of us. They labored, as everyone did, with the same faulty intelligence and lack of knowledge of Iraq’s fissured sectarian history. What they didn’t do was take wishes for reality. They didn’t suppose, as President Bush did, that because they believed in the integrity of their own motives everyone else in the region would believe in it, too. They didn’t suppose that a free state could arise on the foundations of 35 years of police terror. They didn’t suppose that America had the power to shape political outcomes in a faraway country of which most Americans knew little. They didn’t believe that because America defended human rights and freedom in Bosnia and Kosovo it had to be doing so in Iraq. They avoided all these mistakes.

I made some of these mistakes and then a few of my own. The lesson I draw for the future is to be less influenced by the passions of people I admire — Iraqi exiles, for example — and to be less swayed by my emotions. I went to northern Iraq in 1992. I saw what Saddam Hussein did to the Kurds. From that moment forward, I believed he had to go. My convictions had all the authority of personal experience, but for that very reason, I let emotion carry me past the hard questions, like: Can Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites hold together in peace what Saddam Hussein held together by terror? I should have known that emotions in politics, as in life, tend to be self-justifying and in matters of ultimate political judgment, nothing, not even your own feelings, should be held immune from the burden of justification through cross-examination and argument.

Good judgment in politics, it turns out, depends on being a critical judge of yourself. It was not merely that the president did not take the care to understand Iraq. He also did not take the care to understand himself. The sense of reality that might have saved him from catastrophe would have taken the form of some warning bell sounding inside, alerting him that he did not know what he was doing. But then, it is doubtful that warning bells had ever sounded in him before. He had led a charmed life, and in charmed lives warning bells do not sound.

People with good judgment listen to warning bells within. Prudent leaders force themselves to listen equally to advocates and opponents of the course of action they are thinking of pursuing. They do not suppose that their own good intentions will guarantee good results. They do not suppose they know all they need to know. If power corrupts, it corrupts this sixth sense of personal limitation on which prudence relies.

A prudent leader will save democracies from the worst, but prudent leaders will not inspire a democracy to give its best. Democratic peoples should always be looking for something more than prudence in a leader: daring, vision and — what goes with both — a willingness to risk failure. Daring leaders can be trusted as long as they give some inkling of knowing what it is to fail. They must be men of sorrow acquainted with grief, as the prophet Isaiah says, men and women who have not led charmed lives, who understand us as we really are, who have never given up hope and who know they are in politics to make their country better. These are the leaders whose judgment, even if sometimes wrong, will still prove worthy of trust.

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Battle Over the Banlieues

Unwelcome Mat One of the many housing projects, or cités, that fill the suburbs
throughout France, alienate their working-class residents and fuel the debate over
French egalité. This one, the Pablo Picasso, is in Nanterre, west of Paris.

By DAVID RIEFF

Published: April 15, 2007

“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.”

Enemies of the State? French Muslim hip-hoppers at the Chene d’Or cité in Cergy, north of Paris. One presidential candidate has pledged to establish a Ministry of Immigration and National Identity.

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.

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Patient Privilege

The Ethicist

By RANDY COHEN

Published: April 15, 2007

When I went for an examination, my surgeon asked if two residents could be present. I felt uncomfortable being undressed in front of extra people, and so I declined. My surgeon scolded me, saying I was preventing the next generation of doctors from being trained. Why is it my responsibility to provide training for medical students? — name withheld, Beit Shemesh, Israel

Forum: You're the Ethicist

Your surgeon’s request was reasonable; her brow-beating you was not. She’s right that a new physician’s education must include work with actual patients, under the supervision of a wily veteran like herself. Because you, like all of us, rely on the skills of physicians trained in this way, you have a general obligation to reciprocate, to assist the next generation of patients as the past generation of patients has assisted you.

Happily for you, this training needs the participation of many patients but not all. Some are profoundly uncomfortable when being examined, particularly by strangers, particularly when those extra docs are not medically necessary. Feeling as you do, you may decline your surgeon’s request, a decision she must accept graciously: no scolding, no eye-rolling. Her primary obligation is the well-being of her current patient, not the training of her future colleagues.

But if you demur, you should find another way to do your fair share for the health-care community of which you are a member and from which you benefit. Give blood, sign your organ-donor card, arrange to donate your body to science, give money to your hospital. There are many ways to contribute; I’m sure that your physician herself can suggest some.

I am a volunteer firefighter. I responded to an accident involving someone I knew to be infected with hepatitis C, a contagious disease. As we cut the roof off her car to remove this injured and bleeding woman, two police officers approached to administer first aid. They were not wearing protective gloves, so I offered each a pair; they declined. Should I have revealed her medical condition? Should I inform those officers now so they can be tested and perhaps treated? — Ryan Thomas, Oakland County, Mich.

Your concern for the privacy of your injured acquaintance is admirable, but yes, you should have alerted those police officers to their serious, imminent danger. Their peril superseded her claims to confidentiality.

These officers were — what’s the word? knuckleheads! — not to have donned their gloves already. Surely they were trained to. Had they observed this protocol for administering first aid, they would have shielded themselves from the blood-borne diseases any victim might carry and dodged a clash between their safety and a victim’s privacy.

You should have warned them (avoiding the word “knucklehead”) by offering the minimum information necessary, i.e., by declaring that you knew her to have an infectious disease. If those doofuses still eschewed protective gear, you could then have said that she’s a vampire. O.K., not a vampire, but you could have progressed gradually but swiftly from the general to the particular, mentioning her specific condition only as a last resort.

Having failed to do that, you must now urge them to get tested, which means revealing what they must be tested for.

UPDATE: Thomas spoke to the victim, who volunteered to notify the rescue workers herself.

Send your queries to ethicist@nytimes.com or The Ethicist, The New York Times Magazine, 229 West 43rd Street, New York, N.Y. 10036, and include a daytime phone number.

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The Stranger

Interview By DEBORAH SOLOMON

Published: April 15, 2007

Q: Your new novel, “The Reluctant Fundamentalist,” ascended to No. 1 on the Barnes & Noble best-seller list virtually the moment it was published in this country. What do you make of that?

Now perhaps I can quit my job. Three days a week, I do some consulting for a little branding firm in London.

Is it fair to describe your second novel as a Muslim’s critique of American values?

That’s oversimplifying. The novel is a love song to America as much as it is a critique.

I didn’t find it so loving. It takes place on a single evening at a cafe in Lahore, as a charming, well-educated Pakistani in his 20s recounts his life story to an unnamed American stranger, who seems suspicious of him.

The American is acting as if the Pakistani man is a Muslim fundamentalist because of how he looks — he has a beard.

And the Pakistani man also brings certain fears and preconceptions to their conversation. In an act of reverse ethnic profiling, he suspects the American is an undercover agent who might arrest him.

Yes. But he could be just as freaked out as the rest of us are in this world when we see an American with that kind of build and imagine he is a C.I.A. agent. The novel is not supposed to have a correct answer. It’s a mirror. It really is just a conversation, and different people will read it in different ways.

Like your novel, this interview is a conversation between an American listener and a Pakistani man with a beard. Are we also doomed to misunderstanding? Do you think I’m a C.I.A. agent?

If you had short hair and a bulge in your jacket, I might assume you were.

Do you think I am mistaking you for a fundamentalist?

I don’t know. But you are doing me the honor of trying to understand me.

I don’t know if I trust you.

Put that into the piece!

It was unsettling to learn that your protagonist felt a rush of genuine pleasure when the World Trade towers were attacked.

Some part of him has a desire to see America harmed. In much of the world, there is resentment toward America, and the notion that the superpower could be humiliated or humbled or damaged in this way is something that gives satisfaction.

Is that how you felt when the towers were attacked?

No. I was devastated. A wall had suddenly come up between my American and Muslim worlds. The novel is my attempt to reconnect those divided worlds.

Much like the narrator of your book, you grew up in Pakistan and were educated at Princeton.

I was one of two or three Pakistanis in the class of ’93, and I didn’t feel homesick for a second. I took two writing workshops with Joyce Carol Oates, and I wrote the first draft of my first novel in a long-fiction workshop with Toni Morrison, both of whom encouraged me.

Nonetheless, you went off to law school. What were you thinking?

I went to Harvard Law School and decided I didn’t want to be a lawyer. It bored the pants off of me.

Your novel suggests you have read a lot of Camus, particularly “The Fall,” whose protagonist, not unlike yours, pours out his story to a stranger in one long philosophical rant.

Yes, Camus taught me how to have a conversation that implicates the reader.

In your novel, the Pakistani man is the sole speaker. Why did you choose to silence the American?

For me, in the world of media, particularly the American media, it’s almost always the other way around.

But no one is silencing you. To the contrary, you’re scheduled to visit Miami and Cambridge and Washington this week to promote a novel of which there are already more than 100,000 copies out there.

But there are not many of us from the Muslim world who are getting heard over here. And the ones who are mostly seem to be speaking in grainy videos from caves.

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Who’s Watching the F.B.I.?

By JEFFREY ROSEN

Published: April 15, 2007

In “A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy,” Woody Allen shows up at Mia Farrow’s window on a flying bicycle and urges her to hop on. “Andrew, we’ll get killed,” she protests. “Trust me,” he replies, “it’s me, Andrew.” She looks skeptical, and he tries again. “Trust me anyhow.”

In the latest and most serious post-9/11 civil-liberties abuse to emerge from Washington, the Bush administration’s “Trust me anyhow” defense has finally collapsed. The scandal involves “national-security letters,” which the F.B.I. has secretly used to scrutinize the financial data, travel records and telephone logs of thousands of U.S. citizens and residents. In March, a report by the inspector general of the Justice Department described “widespread and serious misuse” of national-security letters after the U.S.A. Patriot Act of 2001 significantly expanded the F.B.I.’s authority to issue them: between 2003 and 2005, he concluded, the F.B.I. issued more than 140,000 national-security letters, many involving people with no obvious connections to terrorism. The Bush administration was fortunate that, shortly after the F.B.I. scandal broke, the tempest over the Justice Department’s firing of prosecutors bumped it off the front page.

National-security letters are especially susceptible to abuse because they’re not subject to independent review by a judge or magistrate and because the recipients are forbidden to discuss them. In an op-ed article published anonymously last month in The Washington Post, the president of a small Internet-access business described the “stressful and surreal” experience of receiving a national-security letter. Under threat of criminal prosecution, he wrote, he was forbidden to discuss any aspect of the case with his colleagues, his family, his girlfriend or the client whose data he had been ordered to reveal.

National-security letters were authorized in 1978 as a narrow exception to federal privacy laws, and their reach was expanded in 1986 to give the F.B.I. easier access to the records of suspected spies. The F.B.I. could issue the letters only if senior officials in Washington had a factual basis for believing that the records pertained to a suspected spy or terrorist. But the Patriot Act diluted these requirements, allowing F.B.I. field agents to issue the orders on their own say-so merely by asserting that they were “relevant” to a terrorism investigation.

Critics warned that these changes would let the F.B.I. collect the personal data of Americans with no clear ties to suspected terrorists, but few predicted the magnitude of the F.B.I.’s incompetence. The inspector general’s report found that the F.B.I. wasn’t even following its own internal guidelines and in some cases had violated federal law. The bureau wasn’t keeping signed copies of all its national-security letters and, as a result, couldn’t properly track the data it got. In the spirit of the Keystone Kops, it didn’t realize when it received data on the wrong person. When an F.B.I. official complained to his superiors, he was ignored.

It is too simple to attribute the F.B.I.’s abuses to plain carelessness. They also reflect the bureau’s struggles to reinvent itself as an agency devoted not merely to prosecuting past crimes but also to preventing future ones. The prevention strategy is based on the idea that the best way to avoid future 9/11’s is to collect information on lots of people who aren’t obviously terrorists and prosecute them for minor crimes before they have an opportunity to blow up buildings. This necessarily encourages dragnet searches of millions of people who turn out to be innocent. But even if F.B.I. agents clear the subject of a national-security letter, they store the information gleaned from it in digital databases that include more than a half-billion records, are not purged for at least 20 years and can be shared with state law-enforcement agencies or with private businesses for data mining.

Because of the amorphous nature of the terrorist threat, the F.B.I. may be right that it needs the power to investigate people who it isn’t sure in advance are terrorist suspects. Predicting who might be a terrorist in the future is much harder than prosecuting known spies who committed crimes in the past. But dragnets have their price.

Fortunately, some in the new Congress have indicated that they intend to revisit the Patriot Act. The broad outlines of the necessary reforms have long been obvious. Congress needs to restore independent review by judges in cases where the Patriot Act eliminated it, ensuring neutral oversight of secret searches. Those searches should be focused on the associates of suspected terrorists, rather than sweeping up any citizen who has information that might possibly be relevant. And Congress should restore a degree of transparency by lifting the gag orders in secret searches after a reasonable period of time.

At a hearing before the House Select Intelligence Committee last month, Justice Department and F.B.I. witnesses, sticking doggedly to their script, said that putting courts in the middle of the process would slow it down. This time, however, the “Trust me anyhow” defense had few takers. “I think self-policing has failed horribly,” said Representative John Tierney, a Massachusetts Democrat. If Congress continues to focus on the F.B.I. abuses, many Americans may come around to the same view. Unlike the National Security Agency’s warrantless surveillance of suspected terrorists abroad, which supposedly involved them, the F.B.I.’s domestic surveillance clearly involves us.

Jeffrey Rosen, a frequent contributor, is the author most recently of “The Supreme Court: The Personalities and Rivalries That Defined America.”

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