Brief notes: Paul Bremer, France...

12 Feb  — Although Paul Bremer was from the State Department, I believe, most of his staff for the CPA were recruited by an office in the Pentagon run by James O'Byrne. Congressman Waxman pointed out that when they asked to speak to this office, they were told that they did not normally speak to the minority group. They said that the Democrats were now the majority, but they still didn't get their briefing.  (US Congress, Iraq Reconstruction - Oversight & Government Reform Committee, Tuesday, 6 Feb, broadcast on C-Span / BBC Parliament; Cf. 'House Panel Questions Monitoring of Cash Shipped to Iraq', The New York Times, 7 Feb) As well as Paul Bremer, Stuart Bowen, Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, was questioned by the House Committee.

13 Feb Bernard-Henri Lévy interviewed on France Inter this morning. How he will vote will be determined largely by issues such as Darfur and Rwanda (getting the whole truth about what happened in 1994). He has 'shared a table' with Ségolène Royal and managed to convince her to some extent about the importance of atrocities in Chechnya and the question of Anna Politkovskaya. (A shame Sarkozy is managing to maintain his lead over Ségolène.)

For BHL, liberty and equality must march together, must be our twin emblems (devises). People like Bourdieu (?) and Harold Pinter care only about equality and don't give a toss about liberty (a purely formal, bourgeois value).

Reaction to André Glucksmann's article of a couple of weeks ago ('Pourquoi je choisis Nicolas Sarkozy') continues to rumble on: he has not been 'on the left' for some time, someone says in a discussion on 'the role of the intellectual' (including BHL) that followed the aforementioned interview.

But the part of another interview by BHL that I caught, on Europe 1 last week, was in a way more interesting. The Iraq war? Of course it was a connerie, but anti-Americanism is always pestilentiel.