"Grand Strategy" Discussed

My take on the "riots" is simple: If they don't look like a riot they aren't. If there's not irrational mayhem and destruction it's not a riot, it's a discipline. If it quickly spreads widely it's not the enragement of an aggrieved neighborhood but a movement. It is a clash between cultures. In the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War the pattern was similar, outbreaks all over, but without restraint or planning or anticipation; and the motivation was different, political not cultural; and the goal was different, not the control of banlieus, but of the nation. But it was civil war.

A word on "restraint". It is reported now that "scores of churches, schools, police stations, factories" have been torched. I'll note two things:
This did not happen at the outset, it happened later. In any large violent movement discipline will break down, and may anyway be ignored by those not fully apprised of the strategy:
But:
Those buildings burned are exactly what the Islamicists would not want in their neighborhoods: Western schools and churches; French police stations; and more problematically, Western factories.
Yet still, very few deaths. The reason for this is simple: Too many deaths would bring in the military.

Note too, that though I may have seemed to imply it I am not arguing a grand conspiracy on the pattern of centralized control. Arab/Islamicism does not need Al Qaeda. It's a mind set. There can be any number of "affiliations" that are equally in opposition the West. The controlling groups within the present disturbance are probably what we call gangs, or "the criminal element;" or in fact, the governing force of within those neighborhoods. (I suspect most of the torching of buildings has occurred in outlying areas, at least early on, those with smaller Muslim populations, thus with more police presence, thus with less control by the governing "criminal element", and thus in expression much more like an ordinary riot).

And I do not think the French are capable of an intelligent response because I don't think they're capable of recognizing just what a nullity they are to Arab eyes. To the Arab/Islamacist mind the French only exist as an annoyance. If they're not present they're not there. "French culture" to this mind does not even breach the consciousness as a concept to be rejected. It's nullity. This mind has no desire to "understand their enemy", other than to know his weakness.

And I do see the "Arab" part of this distinction to be important; it's the Arabs who define themselves in reference to their past glory.

And even if the French had the particular dispassionate intelligence to recognize that these people are an implacably alien presence, what do you do? You can't really readily deport six million people.

De Villepin has said: "We must be lucid: The Republic is at a moment of truth." Don't bet on the lucid part. There is no chance of clear sight from Villepin, he's incapable of the first necessary dispassion, which is to recognize that to the disaffected population brought into France merely to perform menial labor, France, and the glory of French culture, is just so much dirt casually to be trod under the sandal.

(Incidentally, this dismissal is because French secular culture is a Christian culture. This is automatically understood by the Islamicist but impossible to be understood by the secularist. But this is for a future entry.