If you're not clear about that sort of objective, you're not going to be able to implement it when the time comes around.

In Beirut when the civil war began, you had electricity 24 hours a day and running water all the time, and the air conditioning was working, and so were the elevators. In the case of Baghdad, it looks like Beirut after 10 years of civil war.

In French doctrine, nuclear weapons are meant to deter attacks against 'vital interests,' to create uncertainty among potential attackers about what these interests could be. But here, things get defined. That's a change.

It sounds very banal, but people have greater trust when politicians do politics and operational guys do operations.

Russia does not want to have another nuclear power in its region,

When a government starts losing the trust of the people in the heat of a crisis, anything can go wrong. And this is what happened in Madrid.

What triggered it was the attack against the trains in the Madrid suburbs,

We don't know of course what the Americans will want from the allies, whether they will see (us) as desirable participants or whether we'll be seen as people who are best put in the back row.

Merkel has a tiny window of opportunity at the EU summit in June of 2007, but even then it is very small.

French society was a lot more violent in the 1960s and 70s,