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Yesterday—Sunday—the streets of Paris were free of the typical brutal traffic. “The car-free day comes as the city wrestles with an air pollution problem that has led the city to experiment with a number of policies to clean up the air, including turning policies to make the city more friendly for pedestrians and cyclists.”
As Dick and I were walking to Notre Dame Cathedral, it dawned on us that something peculiar was going on. The usual cacophony of car honking, motorcycle revving and brake screeching was replaced by Parisians roaming the streets on foot, bicycles, skateboards, and scooters. It was splendid to see families, especially children, out and about the streets of Paris. Crystal blue skies and a perfect temperature just added to the surrealism.
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 Brent Scowcroft warned that if the United States went into Iraq, it would turn the Middle East into a caldron.
Scowcroft conceded that Saddam might well be a despot and untrustworthy, but he noted that it wasn’t because of terrorism that the Iraqi leader was a problem. He predicted that if the United States went in, it would turn the Middle East into a “cauldron.” Given the United States’ priorities and the costs and benefits of any invasion, he warned that an attack on Iraq would be “premature” and “counterproductive” in the absence of genuine progress on the Israeli-Palestinian issue and without the establishment of a UN inspection regime that could review Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons systems. Saddam Hussein was “not a man who will risk everything on the roll of a dice,” consistent with the fact that “during the Gulf War, he didn’t do everything he could have done,” Scowcroft noted, such as planting chemical weapons in New York or releasing nerve gas.” Later that Sunday, the CBS Evening News showed clips of the interview, and a story in Monday’s London Times repeated Scowcroft’s arguments.
Curiously, no one in the Bush White House responded to Scowcroft’s comments (although on the evening of Monday, August 5, Powell had a long—and what he regarded as a very successful—conversation with the president at the Residence, Bob Woodward reports in Plan of Attack). Neither Rice nor any other White House official released any statements or try to contact Scowcroft once the media picked up the story. Perhaps they thought the story would simply disappear. Scowcroft explained their inaction by pointing out that they already knew of his position, so there was no reason for them to contact him or respond to his criticisms. (Hadley recalls that in early 2002 when he stopped by the Scowcroft Group’s offices for lunch, Scowcroft joked that the deputy national security advisor was meeting with “the infidels.”)
National Security Advisor Rice did not insist that the president consider the “potential consequences of his actions.”Brent Scowcroft
Brent Scowcroft and the call for national security – The Strategist: Brent Scowcroft and the Call of National Security
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Michael Scheuer, former CIA bin Laden unit chief writes, “by sheer and unmerited good fortune, the United States has one last chance to pack up and voluntarily get out of the Arab world lock, stock, and barrel, before we are disgracefully driven out by the mujahedin. Safely back in North America, the bankrupt, authoritarian, incompetent, and lawless U.S. government can watch the exorbitant price of unnecessary overseas interventions and wars be paid for in the funds and soldier-children of other nations.”
Mike concludes, “There is not much chance that the current bipartisan governing class will learn a lesson and act appropriately, but an observant American public will watch and recognize that from the beginning of the war in Syria to how and whenever it ends, the genuine national interests of the United States were never once at risk. They can then use that knowledge and vote for the most genuinely America First candidate they can identify in 2016.”
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Yesterday we visited Reims and the beautiful Champagne valley with a guide from O’Chateau, a wine bar in the heart of Paris. Dick and I had attended a wine tasting there several years ago while on a tour with David Lebovitz (davidlebovitz.com). David, former pastry chef for Alice Waters in Berkeley California and author of The Sweet Life in Paris and My Paris Kitchen, has lived in Paris for several decades.
We began our Champagne tour with a stop at Taittinger, the renowned champagne producer and owner of one of the most historic and beautiful limestone caves in Reims. A spiral staircase of 83 steps led us to the subterranean area where we saw the ruins of the 13th century basilica—Saint Nicaise Abbey, destroyed during the French Revolution.
Going deeper down an even steeper staircase, we arrived at the site of a Roman chalk quarry that dates back to the 4th century. The monks had expanded this old Roman quarry to cellar their own wines. In what undoubtedly is an amazing engineering feat even to an untrained eye, the Romans used inverted pyramids to reduce the area of hard ground. This allowed them to maximize the amount of soft chalk that could be extracted and use the columns of solid earth that to this day support the crayères.
Only Taitt’s highest cuvée, the Comtes de Champagne, aged up to 10 years, rest horizontally here in the chalk caves. Each bottle is hand-turned, quarter-by-quarter turn, and inverted to allow the sediment to sift towards the neck of the bottle, where eventually it will be frozen and expulsed.
 Except for a few empty spots in an otherwise perfect structure, Champaign bottles were stacked 20 meters deep to hold over 72,000 bottles. To help avoid breakage, each magnum and jeroboam (3 liters) is wrapped in plastic before being stacked. Bottles that are larger than Jeroboams are created to order, and filled from magnum bottles.
Reims (rhymes with France) has a crucial link to the Western Front in that twice German forces invaded it. The underground champagne cellars served as lifesaving shelter for both the civilian population and Allied soldiers. Along the tour on both levels, we saw numerous etchings on the soft chalk walls—graffiti from Roman slaves and Medieval monks, as well as injured WWI Allied soldiers. Historic indeed.
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The American Conservative’s Daniel Larison explains to readers, “The U.S.- Israel relationship is already a net liability for America.”
Larison writes:
There are a few obvious reasons why the U.S. shouldn’t do this. First, the U.S. already has far too many formal security commitments around the world, and adding another would needlessly add to U.S. burdens overseas. Second, Israel is already more than capable of defending itself, and has no need of a U.S. security guarantee. Besides, I doubt Israel would want to be obliged to the U.S. in this way. There is certainly no reason why the U.S. should want to formally commit itself to defending a country that has been involved in numerous conflicts with its neighbors and will likely be involved in more in the years to come. A formal alliance between the U.S. and Israel virtually guarantees that the U.S. will be pulled into many more unnecessary wars in the region, and in practice it would gain the U.S. nothing. The U.S.-Israel relationship is already a net liability for America, so it doesn’t make sense for the U.S. to bind itself more closely to them and become even more closely identified with them in the eyes of the region and the rest of the world.
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One of the best things about retirement is being able to do the things you want to do. One of my clients spends his time seeking ancient treasures. Here’s a recent email string from him:
Interesting week. We had one search for a family of four who had managed to lose the route and ended up in an adjacent canyon. We used a night plane flight to locate the couple and their daughters (their flashlights) and evacuated them the following morning using a chopper out of Moab.
Below is a ruin I stumbled on while on a canyon patrol. It held a magical find – a completely intact ceremonial kiva. It had an intact roof and still had its ladder, although the leather holding the rungs had either rotted or been eaten by insects or rodents. The rungs had all fallen to the bottom of the ladder rails. It took 2 hours to route down to the bench from the rim above.
 
EJ,
This is another ruin I located high in the drainage of a vast mesa top.
Amazingly intact pueblo complex. Much of the roof structure was intact and the attached kiva was complete w/access ladder. The ladder rung binders – likely leather – had rotted or been eaten and the rungs were laying at the bottom of the ladder posts.
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The American Conservative outlines for readers that Putin referred refreshingly during an interview with Charlie Rose to terms of Realpolitik, such as “national interest.” Also noted: “There was little if any of the Wilsonian globaloney favored by members of our foreign policy establishment—Democrats and Republicans alike—who seem to share the belief that the only thing missing from the region today is American ‘leadership.’”
“[N]o one is going to come out as a winner from Russia’s new intervention in the Levant,” concludes the American Conservative.
Over the last year, I have been posting on the “national interest” thinking of Alexander Dugin, Russian political writer and advisor to Vladimir Putin. Today’s interest by Vladimir Putin in Syria squares well with Dugin’s expansionist thinking.
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According to Tesla CEO Elon Musk, the new Model X has a filtration system capable of protecting passengers from a bio weapon attack. The car is equipped with a button for “biodefense mode,” to go along with its previously reported “ludicrous speed” mode. The New York Times reports on these and other features here:
The most distinctive aspect of the vehicle, which seats seven people, is roof-hinged rear-passenger doors that flap open like bird wings. The so-called falcon doors, Mr. Musk said, provide access to a third row of seats when child seats are installed in the second row.
In response to concerns about how the doors might open in a parking garage, Mr. Musk said the car was equipped with sensors that calculate the height of any ceiling and open accordingly. “They also look cool,” he said.
The Model X has a range of 257 miles and a top speed of 155 miles per hour. The base model can reach 60 m.p.h. in 4.8 seconds. Another version of the car, with something called Ludicrous Mode, is even faster.
“This goes so fast it’s wrong,” Mr. Musk said. “This is an S.U.V., and it will do zero to 60 in 3.2 seconds.”
The car’s air filter also have a “biodefense” mode, which, according to Mr. Musk, keeps out viruses, bacteria and spores. “We try to be a leader in apocalyptic defense scenarios,” he joked.
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 Vladimir Putin took to the floor of the U.N. for an address on a U.S. foreign policy that, as Pat Buchanan notes, “has produced a series of disasters in the Middle East that we did not need the Russian leader to describe for us.”
From Putin: “An aggressive foreign interference has resulted in a brazen destruction of national institutions… Instead of the triumph of democracy and progress, we got violence, poverty and social disaster.”
Mr. Buchanan asks,
Is Putin wrong in his depiction of what happened to the Middle East after we plunged in? Or does his summary of what American interventions have wrought echo the warnings made against them for years by American dissenters?”
Perhaps it is time to climb down off our ideological high horse and start respecting the vital interests of other sovereign nations, even as we protect and defend our own.
Putin and Pat make good sense, but underlying the common sense laid out here by both P & P is the magnetic pull of one Alexander Dugin, the bee in Putin’s war bonnet, targeting the U.S. and the West as Russia’s supreme enemy.
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