-Best viewed listening to Bruch's second or third violin concerto,
or to Johannes Brahms Requiem's second movement-

It has often been argued we don't possess a definition of terrorism, so that the vaguest categories may fall in its scope, also wartime sabotage, till the point we'd eventually discover that whoever could have been labeled such.
I suggest this:

Terrorism is an action [1] designed to induce at least the expectation of casualties, [2] carried out away from any theatre of hostilities, [3] targeted towards subjects who are regularly disarmed, [4] with the intention to extend the hostilities.

Yet that definition is still flawed by an irredeemable defect: it is still a technical description, whereas living terrorism is inhabited by a more substantial spirit.

In fact that definition too, like any other, still disguises what terrorism basically is: an highly dysfunctional, impaired practice whose real goal is to make sure never to attain the objectives it declares but, on the contrary, to perpetuate the miss of the allegedly desired goal, in order to go on demanding and expanding the contours.
Terror is terror insofar its objective is not negotiable, or vague enough to be kept such indefinitely. Hitler was an example of Terror: he did not want simply Chekoslovakia, though he alleged so, and it was this trait of his what made him look truly terrifying.
Terror means: actually insatiable.

Terrorism seems at times so pointless because it is basically goal-less: it doesn't know what it wants because, fundamentally, it wants the impossible, it wants all.
Perpetuating the expectation of violence, in fact, is the hallmark of an irreconcilable intention that envisions only truces, and never lasting peace, as possible.

This is why it is so often felt and said that you can't deal with terrorism.
It is not, therefore, because terrorism resorts to blackmailing; such consideration, though often brought forth, cannot be the reason although it certainly plays some role: it can't be, in the sense that it is since ever that men, women and politicians can be subject to blackmailing, and yet they yield, and not so infrequently, without being daunted by too harrowing qualms - if not for anything else because, as very acutely Raymond Chandler noted, «blackmailers do not shoot».

The deeper reason you feel you can't deal with terrorism is that there is no deal that can be sensed as rationally possible with a project whose implicitly received message and symbolism funnelled by its actions, is that of being implacable and unmoved by whatever degree of immolation on whatever altar: such counterparts whose business is that of such feats, either are never going to say "enough" really meaning it, or their "enough" coincides with elation into a cosmic totality.
Terrorism is founded upon the roots of its own fated failures - which of course won't prevent it from being destructive, rather the contrary:

«Then God forgive the sin of all those
That to their everlasting residence,
Before the dew of evening fall, shall fleet,
In dreadful trial of our kingdom's king.»
[Shakespeare, King John]

The idea that persons and peoples would infallibly know where their interest resides and gladly would dwell with it; that they would pursue it consequently and consistently in a rational way; that they are fit to implement process optimization and maximization of the outcome all the while: all this isn't but a futile stereotype we lull ourselves into when reality escapes our analytical capabilities and threatens to leave us alone before our bare impotence and incompetence.
But persons not only have utter misconceptions about their own interests, but they also host thorough misrepresentations of them.

This futility fully partakes of the ritual propitiatory invocation to International Legality -and to its more apparent mundane avatar, the United Nations- which, not much unlike a rain dance, we hear besought any time the definition of our interest is elusive enough to desert us, or when the consequences of upholding it are so direfully strict to scare and eject us out of its scope, and we are left forlorn with the desperate need of a patch to delude ourselves into the certainty we have found what it took and what behooves.
This "Medicina Catholica", this magic Elisir that cures all the woes, this Holy Graal that heals all the wounds, even the incurable ones, is what we present ourselves with whenever the challenge trascends our preconceptions so much, that we are lured into frigid statements whose only consistent result is not of revealing the encompassing range of our visionary solution but of betraying that of our concrete abdication.

«On a few gravestones' inscriptions [you can guess] the confession that the good loved one hadn't been but a man with no scruples: which expeditiously dispatches the funeral cortege into the kingdom of truth.
When you praise the remarkable lack of prejudices of a man of age, what must be understood is that his life has been a succession of infamies. He has lost his ability to indignation. The breadth of a soul introduces itself like longanimity that forgives all, because it understood all even too well.
At the end of so long a life, who can tell any longer who has done something to someone? In the abstraction of universal injustice, vanishes any objective liability. Every brigand knows how to turn things as if he himself would have been the actual victim: "oh my boy, if you'd only know how life is [evil]" (...)
Some persons can't give any other expression to their love, but their hatred for those unfit to receive such love; others are, conversely, tolerant: their love for mankind as it is, sprang from the hatred for mankind as it ought to have been.»
[Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia, my translation]

Not only any given individual can maximize and optimize his/her utility only within the arch of his/her personal capabilities, often very modest ones indeed - and not at all within the stretch of a formally consummated rationality; and not only any given individual can come to treasure misleading and often convenient visions about where his/her interest would be located; but most persons (which of course includes me and you) are invariably susceptible to be the passive hosts of induced interests that are not autochthonous in the least.
And thus any actor can unleash destructive forces, pursuing under the banners of unintentional ideological cover-ups, goals that have never belonged to him or to her: while we are saying we're doing this because of that, we're compelled by forces that are beyond this and that at once.

Yet, if you could glimpse with a ravishing insight at the underlying forces the actor itself is unaware of hosting, the game reverts to some outstanding degree of formal obviousness: because an underlying driving force can afford to act out its interests with more mechanical inexorability than any overt drive you are aware of, exactly because a latent force is trammelled by less qualms; conscience has become but the proxy of inoculated beliefs and intentions that never belonged to the actor in the first place; conscience has become subservient to a cruel play, endorsed elsewhere, that delivers of its own ethical burdens by discharging them onto the conscience as a moral dump, leaving to it the toil of the vain struggle against the engendered misgivings and riddles.
It is up to you to find a rationalization for what compels you beyond reason, and if you can't find it, that's too bad for you, and not for what dominates you and pursues its objectives through you. This is why you find so many actors persuaded of what they never believed in and they never collected any credible record for: like peace.

The apparent contradictions that get enacted in this clash when such a bipolar pattern is in action, patent and latent interests breaking asunder portions of the self, can all get recomposed as soon as you can see within rather than just without: everything then attains glaring clarity, because what couldn't be justified from without, couldn't be justified from without because it drew its justification from within.

Either you don't bargain with terrorists because you declare them such, and then you have implicitly denied them any status of legitimate characters suitable to be admitted within the international legality, and consequently you invoke no longer international legitimacy in order to cope with them, or you accept to barter with your own blackmailers, and by doing so you have implicitly conferred them with the status of valid international legality-endowed characters; in this latter case you have acknowledged they are subjects susceptible to arbitration, and thus you've qualified them as fully responsible, acceptable components of an international legitimacy that is now made of such a fabric to be coexistent with them.
You can then consistently invoke international legitimacy to deal with them: but only to discover that, truly, you didn't need it any longer, because you yourself had already compromised it.

But if you are in the throes of the contradiction after which on the one hand you refuse (rightly, I'd dare say?) to consecrate terrorists with any legal status whatsoever, and on the other hand you invoke the restoration of the international legality as necessary to deal with them, then you're at a crossroad where you can't stand: either you are invoking such restoration as a task upon your blackmailers, which patently makes no sense because they raised as blackmailers precisely insofar as they proved impervious to the legality you invoke, or you're crying for the restoration of the international legality as a task committed upon yourself, who violated it not, and then either you wield the weapons it takes to restore what you invoke against your blackmailers, or you prove you've simply ushered yourself to the fore mentioned abdication.

Winston Churchill on 1942

Between collusion and conciliation there is a third option: just accepting to play, and thus meeting the challenge on its proper ground and with its own weapon of choice.

It is possible to argue that wielding the weapon chosen by your blackmailer would pollute the environment even more: yet if you don't, the environment is still as polluted as before.
It is possible to argue you don't want to pollute it even more: yet if you don't clean it too, it will just go on being polluted more and more.
Between compromise and connivance, it is still possible just to accept and play rather then bargain or collude.

And if the situation has come to the point where faith takes over, because so much your opponent has radicalized the variables that you are impelled to coagulate upon your nec plus ultra, and only the outcome of the confrontation has grown out or has been implicitly declared as fit to determine who's right and who's wrong, then giving up the fight that lies before your eyes just because you can't believe the ominous symmetry you are gazing at, means you have simply already lost the battle you fought anyway, for you endorsed your defeat in such fight by defecting the battlefield.

Jerusalem, Jerusalem who kill the prophets!
Pacifism pacifism, who worked out well only when Gandhi used you against Great Britain, a civilized opponent, not against terrorism or barbarians!
International Legality, International Legality, who are like the United Nations who go to bring peace only "if the situation allows" namely where it is not challenged by war: you can be invoked only upon those who are capable of respecting you already!
United Nations, United Nations, cover up for those who are left with nowhere to run and only political dreg to scrape from the bottom of the barrel!

«The trouble with these rights has always been that they were invoked only as a last resort by those who had lost their normal rights as citizens.»
[Hannah Arendt]

The distinction outlined by Arendt was that between those (the French revolutionists) whose foremost concern was establishing the purity of a set of ideals and of rights, and those (the American revolutionists) who accompanied them with the foremost concern for constituting the body political within which they could thrive.
The former are unsubstantial rights, for they are unsubstantiated.
They abandon and neglect the effort for the substance, for they fear that whatever political substance could be envisioned would eventually establish itself as a new tradition, embodied in a Constitution: and how can a Tradition go together with the purpose of a Revolution, whose essence consists in trashing a tradition?
This is why many revolutionists call the Law "bourgeois": for them every law is just the last threat sneaked in by a diehard Tradition.

As Hannah Arendt puts it, the most striking feature that made of the American Revolution the only revolution that was not followed by terror and crime, and that made it so unique without ceasing being revolutionary was this, that:

«In no case was the course of the American Revolution ever followed or repeated: constitution-making was never again understood as the foremost and the noblest of all revolutionary deeds.»

It is not that revolutionists don't enact laws: it is that either their laws are meant for the revolutionary purpose and do not subsist beyond its lifespan, for revolutions cannot have an afterlife but must endure permanently, or they enact them and yet being enormously wary of them: because law spells legality to them, and legality spells the doom of revolution in their conception because legality founds authority: and Revolutions are such also insofar as they trample authority as a principle not only as a specific institution.

Thenceforth derive those legislative approaches where arbitrary decisions are the true protagonists, because legality is secretly despised all the while it is announced, and the law must be only a cover up subdued to revolutionary exigencies that do not really accept anything above themselves. Revolution must be uber alles, and is never sensed as really compatible with the Law.

As for which men will have the venture of embodying the "true" revolutionary afflatus for the time being, and therefore will enjoy the arguably temporary privilege of relishing the enforcement of these abuses perpetrated by Laws that are not believed, this is a matter largely left to the decisions of the only tools left at hand: sedition, infighting, treachery, and civil strife.
This is the alternative lent as preferable to the bourgeois logrolling of the "free market". And yet a power absolved from law is only another absolutism - precisely.
In fact, what is most hated by the purist revolutionist: a constitution whose traded frameset evokes the perils of the game of the interests that pollute revolutionary discipline and doctrine with potential egoism and that thwart idealism with suspicious pragmatism, or do they detest more that dealing implied with constitution-making which infringes upon the absolutism of the only interest allowed: the revolution itself?

This let alone that that constitution-making trading is not such, as eyes obfuscated by abosultism see, but is balancing power with power so to produce more power:

«For Montesquieu (...) the discovery spells out the forgotten principle underlying the whole structure of separated powers: that only 'power arrests power', that is, we must add, without destroying it, without putting impotence in the place of power.
When Jhon Adams wrote

"Power must be opposed to power, force to force, strength to strength, interest to interest, as well as reason to reason, eloquence to eloquence, and passion to passion"

he obviously believed he had found in this very opposition an instrument to generate more power, more strength, more reason, and not to abolish them.
(...) What the founders were afraid of in practice was not power but impotence.»
[Hannah Arendt]

The unfettered quest for an absolute good that Revolutions turned awry covet, and about which intransigent "idealistic" pacifism is only another incarnation, leads only to absoultly unshackled evil: the firm belief in a definitive good which must manifest itself in its astounding innocence, leads only to an endless pursuit where the more this absolute refuses to reveal itself (so absolute it is that we can't find it but in its relative versions), the more we must devastate with our excavations to reach out for it even deeper.

And if we have not found it yet, it must be simply because there must be an endless conspiracy: and how could you ever doubt such a conspiracy is not there from the mere fact you don't have enough evidence about it, when you know all too well -don't you?- that it is in the nature of every conspiration of being hidden?
Thus it must be there anyway!
If this absoulte good has not been carried off yet, it must then simply be becasue we have not killed enough unbelievers yet, because we have not "dug" enough yet, till this absoulte principled good will finally spring in its expected absoluteness, that is: never, because:

«The absurd hope that man, whom Christianity had held to be sinful and corrupt in his nature, might still be revealed to be an angel (...)
The great maxim of all civilized legal systems, that the burden of proof must always rest with the accuser, sprang from the insight that only guilt can be irrefutably proved.»

Thus, whatever fight for a good which is not absolute, is automatically perceived as an unacceptable betrayal of the Revolution, and it is implicitly alleged that since what is sought for is not an absolutely pure and intransigent good, then it must be vile interest: and we arrive to the following point, to allege the meaning of the image on the left (which is a blasphemy) and prefer to it the meaning of the image on the right (which is still more of a blasphemy, in another sense):

It is argued that what doesn't partake of the absolute good is tarnished with interest. Yet who is him or her who draws these conclusions, if not somebody who has no clear ideas about what trading means and what market categories imply? Who judges them badly, is often he or she who is deluded by his or her own personal misinterpretations of what a market is, and not by faults objectively perceived within it.
In fact, take an expression by a recent terrorist proclaim: «Your security is not in the hands of Mr Kerry or Mr Bush... Your security is in your own hands. Any (presidential) mandate which doesn’t play havoc with our security would automatically ensure its own security».
He's trying to trade, actually.
What he sells is terror. But therefore there is no trade any more, and the syllogism crumbles: he doesn't sell merchandise, he just says he would not issue what you would not buy anyway if he gets something he would buy anyway. Which by all accounts is a non acceptable position for trading anything, anywhere.
Thus the questionable position is not that of the market, it is that of those who try to enter the market with conceptual categories that do not belong to any market.
On these grounds, you can neither trade nor expect to issue any credible critics of the market in which you don't belong.
It doesn't matter whether interest is not as innocent as the pure good in whose name Auschwitz was raised as a cleansing vacuum of impure races: it only matters whether it's not criminal.

Trying to test innocence is pointless, for innocence cannot be «irrefutably proved»; and this either because it does not exist or because the stratified experience of millennia has persuaded us that it can't be conclusively or positively found.
Only guilt can be proved. And the way to prove it is not that of saying that you're guilty for you're not innocent enough: in fact, how much innocence amounts to innocent enough? Guilt is not measured abiding by an ideal good, but assessing facts. You could be delcared guilty immediately otherwise, depending on the arbitrary degree of intransigent devotion to an absolute good in whose name all must live up to it, or perish in merciless agony.


And when we have killed all the unbelievers, all the anti revolutionists, and fraught ourselves with the burden of all the worst sins in the name of the purest good, we will start killing our former comrades, till only one being will be left, leaping on the deserted soil: we ourselves, finally alone, left wondering in puzzlement: Oh You Absolute Principled Good, You Great Heaving Peace Of Mankinde, why you don't show up yet now that I, undoubtedly your most firm believer and apostle, am the only one left? Where are you now that all of your hideous enemies have certainly been extinguished? "But You Oh Lord, till when...".
But the Lord is not there, and the absoultely good bolshevik neither.
Where are you, Adam? - a biblical, even protocanonical, phrase that justly impressed Heinrich Boll too, to the degree he used it to title a book of his.

What Arendt didn't mention was that likewise we can have void principled absolutes, left without the constitution of the body political to make them meddle with reality, analogously we can have a void body political whose purpose is not that of supporting our void principles, but that of representing our inadequacy to pursue them, our definitive inability to pursue what was impossible since the beginning because we ourselves deprived it of all the real meanings it could have had in order to go after that only absolute good we declared uniquely fit to quench our despotic, unyielding thirst.

A void absolute that refuses all incarnations, is complemented by a void incarnation that ideally represents all the absolutes.

I don't mean the UN was meant to be this: but I mean that there exists a revolution uber alles expectation that interprets it precisely this way, and sees in it precisely this old venerable type of messiah.

But you, real Statesman, we will tell you simply by this: first, you just accept the game, and play.

What I am going to deal with here, is insanely an attempt to draw a definition of National Interest, and then matching it with a definition for an entirely new construct never named before, which I am to name International Interest: the ideal is to focus these concepts leaving as little leeway as possible to disagreement.

The project appears ambitious enough, a miltonian flight.
I do not personally contend that analytical efforts meant to define National Interest may exist. I only dare say that no such topic appears listed, devoting to it a consistent amount of pages, in any summary of any manual, book, or scholarship textbooks; it is conversely possible, if not certain, that such topic has been dealt with in a variety of articles or casebooks already; yet the point I am arguing here is: to date the possible conclusions about these debates apparently never gained their way into the consolidated epiphany of a full blown Chapter in an University widespread schoolbook.
I set upon myself picking this challenge.
I have no doubt whatsoever, with no complacent sarcasm in the least, that a great deal of persons could make a much better job than mine at coping with this issue. Yet since the ignorant are used to reject whole treatises with a remark, more typically the mere snub of a profane insult, I hope that all the ladies and gentlemen who are going to sift out my many faults when I tackle such ambitious a plane entirely alone, will also exhibit the courtesy to criticize me only after they have done a job at least comparatively better than mine and not, as they normally do, before they have done it. And since doing it is so easy a commitment because my own is so inferior, one more reason to knock the arrow after you're sure you have it in your quiver.
And of course, possibly, also without forgetting that if there are so many ways to do a much better job than mine, there were a great deal to do a much worse one too.

I am stirring an huge pot here.
I will never delude myself into believing I will solve all such powerful riddles as I present them here.
What I truly set upon myself is just to stir this pot; and to send living sparkles all around in the hope a few of them will prove fecund by falling on fertile, and not barren, mental soils; or that they will keep smouldering enough beneath the fallen leaves so to finally ignite the big fire of the resolving insights.
At times I may lack of clarity because I simply lack it and my vision is blurred; other times it will be sensed I don't miss it but I am just overflowing. This room is truly enormous, yet not infinite. The solution stalks among its walls.

We could wonder why such a gap, namely the absence of chapters devoted to National Interest, has never been duly filled in.
The answer dwells with the delicate threshold upon which National Interest as a concept posits itself. Leaderships used to temper themselves at the mild latitudes of consolidated and affluent democracies, grow familiar with bargaining votes about basically minor issues (disregard the fuss that wants democracy being imperiled at every new electoral round, as all the contenders invariably decry), whereas National Interest affects vital issues.

Populations, specular to such leaderships, beget generations for whom the nearly immediate availability of an immense range of goods (sugar, salt, water, milk, meat, chocolate, bread, cellular phones, seasonal clothing, fashionable snickers) simply on demand (entering the shop and purchasing them, picking from shelves of different prices) is a daily reality from the cradle to the grave, and as such expeditiously regarded as a granted reality too - which it is not. This shapes a mindset.
Luxury may not be for everybody, areas of indigence may certainly exist. And yet when what we're opposing to our conception of welfare is our personal regret that what we can't afford is luxury, or when what we're complaining about is that a few choices have to be made so to square a monthly balance that allows for much or for enough but not for whatever, or when we bemoan that we are left to deal with that temporary destitution named physiological unemployment rate, when all of this happens we are already speaking of a population whose criteria of social/economical outrage is lingering at high stations: a bruise is enough to raise a debate, because democracy is quarrelsome.
Let me stress it now: I will not neglect in this essay the reality that Democracies can fail and force into marginality also reasonably good talents: I am one of them, and I live on canned food. This to be clear where I stand: in a position where communism should have appealed to me.

In this context of such leaderships and populations, National Interest does not appear as a concept worth of being focused or elaborated, because National Interest implies a moment when all that which was assumed as granted is on the verge of waving good bye.
I think this is why we have this doctrinal gap.

It will prove conducive to our enterprise to define the political structural characters that a Democracy (autocracy provides no difficulty; this is why every serious political science has to deal with Democracy as its true paragon) must have to be such. I propose the following ones:

• There must be procedures for producing an elected government which are shared as legitimate by the near totality of the population: all political conflicts are regarded as fit to be accommodated within this frameset, and thus the setting can coexist unaltered with dissent.
• There must be division of powers: executive, legislative, judiciary.
• There must be free vote with universal suffrage.
• Such votes must recur at regular intervals of time (a comparative study may set the vote for the legislative power no later than every 5 years and that for the executive no later than every 7 years).
• Such votes must allow for unfettered and valid access to the competition for whomever wants to compete for whatever seat, provided as possible limits a maximum amount of mandates or norms for non cumulative mandates or roles (such as those who would infringe upon the above mentioned division of powers).
• No constitutional body shares power officially or surreptitiously with other bodies, whatever they are (instance: councils of "guardians" of the revolution and the alike).
• All the constitutional bodies have full authority within their own branch to produce new policies and to exert their own powers.
• No body who attained power can implement laws whose outcome is that any of the above applies no longer, even if this last rule has to be enforced against generalized popular will.

The last point is the most remarkable one for it denies that sovereignty belongs to the People, to which as a matter of fact it belongs indeed; but it says it can't belong to the extent that the People can dispose of it in such unlimited (or insane) a fashion that the People could decide to give up sovereignty and abolish any or all of the rules above.
This dangerous but existent terrain, where sovereignty escapes those who own it, is the only terrain that seems qualified to host National Interest criteria too. This because National Interest is an interest beyond which no other interest exists any longer.

«By the easiness with which a spirit gets contented, you can measure the greatness of what it lost» [Hegel]: the things that most matter are often susceptible to be given away with a sense of relief among cheering crowds.
National Interest is the entity that should be drafted to act as a rampart against such contingencies: no one can go beyond National Interest and forsake it, for it is the Alpha and the Omega.

The fact a dictatorship too could envisage a similar National Interest conception by crushing a people wanting a sweeping change, does not invalidate the assumption: not only insofar as a tyranny lacks the element of regular checks of the popular consent with the procedures of the system (for we predicated a people could be lunatic enough to wish exactly forsaking this), but insofar we are posed not like absolute conceptions where ours is better than any other, but like two concurrent conceptions and inconciliable systems, Democracy and Tyranny, that entertain mutually exclusive (and not at all relativistically similar) visions: it is not a hierarchy of innocences or of guilts, it is a fight.
And anyway a National Interest that coincides with one person's or one group's oligarchic exclusive interest, is no longer National.

This radical differentiation between Democracies and Tyrannies is why the radical party member Emma Bonino (also Commisioner of humanitarian affairs on behalf of the European Commission) recently proposed an interesting reform of the UN (the third phoenix I might have dubbed it) where a new diagonal identity should line up the nations: the area of the Democracies and the area of the non-democracies.
As Emma Bonino says:

«It is exactly the lack of a [new] praxis what makes possible such clashes [between 'old' and 'new' Europe]: The military actions that divide the public opinion, are the result of decades of mistakes: decades wherein all has been done but the only thing an international organization of Democracies ought to be meant for, namely the active defense of the international norms and of fundamental human freedoms. (...)
A victorious defence of the United Nations, I insist, is that one which seizes many of the arguments that its critics fling at it -particularly in these last times those of the United States- raising before itself the problem of overcoming them with pragmatic solutions [that acknowledge them]. (...)
A sort of League of the Democracies acting under the Security Council mandate (...) It seems by now almost natural that nations under dictatorial regimes can have a voice within issues that affect human rights. So that the United Nations are today living an authentic paradox: they basically deliver the implementation of fundamental human rights to Countries which are themselves the main violators of such rights and that, as such, should no longer be accepted as members of the so called "international community". (...)
Admission and permanence should depend upon the respect of defined democratic standards. To provide an example, the countries that belonged to the ex soviet european bloc, had to rearrange their legislations to such standards to be allowed into the European Community. (...) The result is that for all the emphasis that the europeans put on the role of the United Nations, they eventually profile themselves as defenders of a static UN arrangement that clearly does not work.»
[excerpts from an Emma Bonino interview given at the quarterly Aspenia #22 - my translation]

As a matter of fact, we're risking of seeing the United Nations dispensing legitimacy as the Holy See dispensed indulgences. The United Nations are the vestals of a frigid legitimacy.
The United Nations are invoked to lend legitimacy, but whereas they provide the formal requisite of this legitimacy, they abstain from withdrawing this legitimacy too, and by accepting every country they seem to give the patent of legality to whoever just asks it, just to deny it later to the United States when it forcibly overturns a dictatorship that was accepted without a peep as an organic part of the United Nations themselves.
This is objectively a paradox that Emma Bonino magnificently highlights.

Nothing is undebatable. And yet there are things which are necessary, though debatable.
When things which are necessary are presented as undebatable too, this is not because they are really regarded as not liable to be criticized, but because it is necessary to consider them as if they would be undebatable, because you gain more by observing their necessity than by debating them.
When Russia was allowed to maintain its seat at the Security Council when it took over the legacy of the Soviet Union, this passage could have been debatable: in fact why leaving Russia enjoy this seat and Ukrainia, which belonged to the ex USSR that previously enjoyed it as well, had to forfeit it?
Yet it was so necessary to let the wider Russia, from which also the independence of Ukrainia depended, to strip its soviet robe and don the one of a growing Democracy, that this necessity was enough to persuade us into considering the passage as undebatable though it was not. There was nothing to discuss, though it was formally unjust because incomplete.
But it makes no sense holding as undebatable a formality.
National Interest is that set of objectives that could also be debated, and yet are so necessary and substantial that debating them makes less sense than abiding by them: they thrive on a ground that spreads on pre-legitimacy concerns, because without such ground not even the concept of legitimacy can be envisioned anymore if not as an empty bag to cover a corpse: «perished [, but] within the glory of the Lord».

As such the reason because National Interest has no contenders, is that it cannot be contended. If a conflict arises between the United Nations and National Interest only the vile hesitates, because Leaders are not elected by the World but by a localized community, and thus are -must be- more responsible before the latter than before the former.

I can certainly argue that my National Interest coincides with improving the United Nations, provided this doesn't conceal quite another agenda as George Orwell's pacifists did: for National Interest does not lie; but if so do improve the United Nations, do not just invoke it: give it teeth, not tongue, and make it bite, not present condolences & complaints.

I define National Interest like that set of shared goals that persist unchanged regardless of the varying ideological embodiments and different vicissitudes that the governing placements [executives] may endure.
So National Interest is not that set of politics which are bipartisan, but that set of goals that just are, independently of all the rest.

I have already provided an element about what they are: avoiding that whatever, popular will included, may put the nation in a condition where a legitimate or illegitimate access to power may harm the possibilities to change the pro tempore elected rulers.
As such National Interest enlivens only insofar it gets threatened: National Interest is that thing which can be threatened.
And threatened is enough, because it implies you ought to act a little prior to the unfolding of the extreme factual consequences of the looming threat, and thus implicitly predicates a duty to act as soon as the threat has loomed.
So National Interest self defines its own categories.

This is also why before National Interest, nations may occasionally seem so lonely: National Interest is self sufficient.

Let me stress here a few things about the recent idea that the USA "are alone" or have gone to war "alone" or that a war "makes impossible to be loved".
Actually, you don't wage a war in order to be loved: you wage a war as a consequence of the fact love between the two actors has been already declared impossible.
And as for being many rather than alone, this has never been in the last two centuries a warrant about being right too: you don't define a great statesman/woman as he/she who makes sure you make friends out of as many guys in town as possible. There is a basic difference between genius, also political genius, and quantity or followers:

«(...) and he quotes half a dozen of egregious men that would currently embody this stream.
Half a dozen are too many. [Great men] are born one at a time, and often more than one generation elapses between them. It would have been better quoting just one name, provided that name had furnished something truly new to the doctrine and to the critics.
Unfortunately, that only one, in that field, is nowhere to be found, and are rather to be found precisely the half dozens, which pretty soon, with the blessings of the Almighty, will multiply themselves into the dozens and into the multiples of that dozens, and which none the less, summed up, will still amount to zero.»
[Benedetto Croce, Pensieri, my translation]

But indeed in the Usa unilateralism, as it has been recently and abundantly blamed, there is a far seeing background: the USA have gone for it lonely because they somewhat bravely acknowledged they are lonely.
And they are lonely for many reasons.

For technical reasons, because whoever wishes to deploy whatever peace military contingent, UN first of all the rest, deploys nothing without taking avail of US troops too. France can't, and the UK can at most fight for the Falkland atolls when it comes to go far away and spread over vast territories in a credible and effective way.
Even Europe as a whole has no means to undertake such a task.

But most of all the USA are alone because there is no Europe.
Setting up an European Union with an economical union first rather than with a political one, means that the priorities are reversed back to front and that the underlying belief is that we believe in an idyllic world where you can postpone the prussian concept of politics to attend that of economics first.
The "end of History" which Francis Fukuyama mentioned (a concept borrowed from Hegel, actually) means that in Europe we assumed that conflicts are over and that a phase where politics will no longer be grand politics but mere ordinary administration has taken over; therefore you can afford looking after the economy first.
Wrong.
We see today this presupposition was not true, not yet at least. And as a consequence we find ourselves with an Europe that started with the wrong footage, and with the additional fault that the Maastricht Treaty provided economical parameters for the capitals (public debt limitations) but no limit to the allowed unemployment rate: namely the European Community, when having to decide what made a country European, arranged membership parameters designed to desert men for things, preferring capitals to talents.

The USA never went thus far with a socio-political blunder: in fact whereas president Bill Clinton too shared the belief that "it is the economy, stupid!", he never was so myopic to narrow that restricted scope even more to the point of believeing that such economy had also to be that economy which was electively unmindful of employment and identified with the capital alone - which by the way is exactly the type of blunder that european communists praising Europe would expect having been committed by the USA and not by Europe as it was. Under Bill Clinton we had the stronger economy of the post cold war era and the higher employment rate as well.

Celebration of Victory by Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It still makes a difference celebrating for the victory you fought for, or for the one you picked from the ground.

Yet if the USA are alone, Europe is alone too. But without USA's broad shoulders. Al Qaeda got it, the USA too.
Only Europeans and Zapatero didn't, and the latter walks on maimed corpses sporting bright smiles for the "Victory".

But this kind of leaders are not leaders, they are actually followers, for they are not opinion makers, they are opinion followers: searching for votes persuaded them into the delusion that they must always pursue rather than create, and that the task of the default politician (which probably they are) and all of its cunning would have consisted in foxily spotting an available electoral basin and exploiting it to the dregs (when not awaiting that it rains in their arms), rather than in making one accordingly to what they deem the fair or the most far reaching solutions to the issues of our time.

A nation that cannot stand against all foes, has no National Interest worth the name.

There are persons that seem to conclude, when they ear a patriotic proud sentence like "We are America", that the predicated complement would have been: "and you are not". This inference can be made, but cannot be positively ascribed but to the inferrer.
Upon this basis they differentiate themselves, because they seem to read the latter which has not been said rather than the former which has been stated.
An absence of National Interest relies upon a lack of identity, and who has no indentity to be sure about can afford claiming victory continuously - thence those practices of fundamentalists (and as a matter of fact typical by latin cultures too, which I can cite being a latin myself) that portray even the most tragic events and failures, or even the most hideous crimes, as outstanding triumphs to strut around.

These mental framesets, also when compelled to admit a defeat, are unable to rest on this consideration and thus metabolize the frustration and go beyond it: perpetually haunted by it, they immediately envision a forthcoming victory that must be infallibly in store and ensue - and in this you will certainly recognize a well known bolshevik pattern (for communist doctrines, defeats are never such, but they are just a «strategical withdrawal», as they are dubbed by bolsheviks themselves), as if there were a world compass that subsumes in one embrace of shared mental attitudes latin, slav, and arab cultures.
This happens because these groups have a messianic seed in them. To be sure, if we consider studies like Taubes Jacob's «Western Eschatology», this has been also a legacy of anglo saxon environments (think of Oliver Cromwell) in the past, which of course doesn't make them any better.
Messianic groups in the 21st century live in a perpetual wake for an apocalyptic event, be it a revelation an advent or a doom; as such they are out of history, and actual men and women are seen as chattels of duress that hinder the vision of an imminent rescue from the wreckage; a salvation which may well never come, especially because there is something deeply wrong when the bugfix to a banal mistake has to be a theophany [*], but that none the less the group keeps announcing: therefore facts do not matter any longer.
So:

«The function of literature is that of delivering the next man, a new comer, from the danger of falling into an old trap; or to help him understand, if he had the venture to fall in that trap anyway, that he has been hit by a tautology. He will be thus less alarmed, and somehow more free. Understanding the rules of the play, the meaning of what life has in store for us, of understanding what's happening to you, has effects that set free. (...)
However, if we want to have a more important share, the share of a free man, then we must be ready to accept, or at least to imitate, the way a free man is defeated. A free man, when he is defeated, blames no body.»
[Iosif Brodskij (nobel prize for literature 1987), my translation]

Self criticism is a good thing, yet in the interest of the good thing we want to discuss, we ought to criticize in order to rescue the good thing not in order to deface it. And there comes a time when, if we are capable of National Interest, we are also able to assume our own responsibilities, even at risk of going for it alone, without finding external entities to blame. That the fate of one's job in Middle East is decided in Idaho, or that a local and probably legitimate grievance in arabia has its root causes in Nebraska, is only an illusion.

«Avidity is an imperious and insatiable wish that goes beyond the needs of the subject and beyond what the object can give both.
Unconsciously, avidity mostly mean to completely empty and drain the breast and swallow it: its goal is destructive introjection; on the contrary envy not only seeks to rob, but also to put what is bad in oneself inside the object itself so to destroy it by discharging one's bad parts: which in the deepest sense means destroying one's own creativity and power of enjoyment. (...) Avidity is connected with introjection, envy with projection. (...)
As for jealousy, it is a transposed envy. (...)
A failure of one's aspirations is often given by a conflict between the impelling [guilty] need to refund the object destroyed by envy, and an upsurge of envy itself. The envied object, often the penis, must be destroyed and those who own it deprived of it. (...)
A kid who under the impetus of envy grew unable to discern between hate and love, unable to keep them duly separated and therefore discriminate between the good object from the bad one, is liable to feel confused whenever he is called upon judging what is good and what is evil. (...)
When this envy is intense, it is likely it will emerge in all subsequent objectual relationships (...) Whenever the destructive impulses, envy and paranoiac anguish, are too intense, the child grossly alterates and exasperates every frustration coming from the external world; the breast becomes a persecutor. So that even real gratifications are no longer suitable to soothe the persecuting anguish.»
[Melanie Klein, Envy and Gratitude, my translation]

The last passages by Klein are very fit to define when something can be defined as having attained intensity: when it invests all the external objectual relations, deeply contaminating all of them in various degrees with the same misunderstanding.

Whenever we are permanently "already dissatisfied with whatever solution is lent" [Virginia Woolf], and we always deem someone other than ourselves is intent on fostering our grudges, it is the very same attainment of our longed for goal, what we deem our most implacable enemy. Thus nothing, simply nothing, will ever satisfy us.

By the way, I have to record an objective anecdote: I have never witnessed in my whole life a Middle East or North African citizen who was not complaining about something: they seem to be perpetually ungratified, perennially unsatisfied with everything, continuously outraged, constantly disappointed, and I have never seen anybody from those fair geographical areas appearing on a Tv and saying he is finally satisfied and happy with whatever: it is as if there is something that impels them to bar enjoyment itself as an allowed option.
At these stages, National Interest can't be defined because National Interest can't be in conflict with itself: its goal is clear, its goal exists; and so its satisfaction is not open to moot interpretations. National Interest is not greedy. When all is equally bad, National Interest has vanished already.

So National Interest is the gravitational fulcrum that can summarize and maintain the cohesiveness of all the elements making up a nation, preserving the nation from all the factional or tribal or ideological centrifugal drives.

Linda Polman, her book on the United Nations We did nothing; excerpt from chapter "The UN in Somalia": «The italians pay Aideed protection money to leave them alone, only they won't admit it. Our suspicions were confirmed when a nigerian unit had to take over an italian post in the city. Aideed's men promptly arrived to collect their money but the nigerians sent them away, arguing the United Nations is neutral and can't justify deals with individual clans. Whereupon they were attacked and seven nigerians were killed.»

All nations that failed finding or defining their own National Interest, or found only a temporary one that was unfit to recapitulate a persisting identity against all transient chances and challenges so that it was just a contingent communality of goals with the intention to deal with a civil war at a second time, are all invariably failed nations.
A nation uncapable of feeling the love and urge that National Interest inspires can't stand, so that a failure in National Interest is basically a sentimental failure.

The theorem accordingly to which what is decided at the United Nations must have priority upon what is decided at your homeland and upon what affects your homeland, means you're committing prerogatives that are up to you to someone else.
Speculating that this type of approaches can contemplate or include National Interests is threading on immensely disputable ground. See how much.

Consider Zapatero, and consider I do not contend the decision in itself but the amazing stream of contradictions that consequentially have been put forth to justify his early politics: first he says he is to withdraw spanish troops from Iraq if no coverage of the United Nations is provided within June 30. Then he actually withdraws spanish troops much earlier declaring he has no "confidence" that any such agreement can be reached within that deadline - a mere personal assumption at that time. Then he says he is withdrawing them because that is part of his electoral mandate. Then he says he is withdrawing his troops to put "political pressure" on the United States. Quixotic Zapatero: he needed none of these excuses because he was already elected, so one version would have sufficed.
National Interest hasn't manifold contradictory versions of itself.
Perhaps you may argue these contradictions can coexist, but indeed there is only one element that they all share: contempt for the United Nations they allege they highly regard.
Formal statements exploiting international legality do not make international legality any stronger but actively contribute to trash it:

«If I enter a shop and I pay for some merchandise, of course this is a way of giving as well.
But I am not paying the merchandise for the pleasure of paying. If I could have had the merchandise without paying, I would be satisfied as well. So paying is the means not the end.
Munificence that wants to be acknowledged as such, a benefit that awaits its thanks, a sacrifice that awaits its reward, these are just like any other business (...) Giving in this way means taking. (...)
Benefiting others it is not giving to the others what we assume they believe they want; alms to the poor, healing the sick, providing with food, quenching thirst, clothing: this is letting the others take; it is not giving but enduring.»
[Carlo Michelstaedter, La Persuasione e la Retorica, my translation]

We often speak of International Legality as a game that we can raid, if only we make it hypocritically enough pretending a disinterest we don't harbour.
I prefer a National Interest well defined in its goals, that if necessary can prescind from international legality, rather than a confused one that conceals its contradictions behind the rags it throws at International Legality saying it is serving it while it is using it.

An International Interest can exist, but there is no predefined body that can embody it without variations, by default.
When a convergence of National Interests meet in a point, that is International Interest.
Upon that basis you can build a multilateral institution, and not vice versa; first comes the factual convergence, then the institution that embodies it.

In fact we witness that multilateral institutions work better if they are finely tuned around specific interests, not around all encompassing concepts still void of factual contents: International Interest cannot be predicated, it must be picked as a fact.
This is why NATO worked so well for so many decades: it never laid any claim to embody the National Interests of the members wholesome and by default, but only to incarnate them as far as a well limited and specified set of issues were concerned: military defense.

If you have National Interest, you're ready to go for it alone:

«Whatever the goal towards which the world is headed may be, that goal is going to be repleted with men, and is going to be for real only in the thoughts, feelings, and actions of men, and will be endowed with that reality that we will provide it with. Do not worry, therefore, about where the world is going, but only about where it is necessary that you set off for. (...)
Those busy with forecasts, sociologists, so called unconcerned observers, cold critics, or whatever you may want to name them, all of them gained their proper name during the war: defeatists.
What does it mean ascribing to an individual or to a People a strength of 100 and to its adversary that of 80 or of 120?
What does it mean, after such measurements, drawing conclusions about victory or defeat, when these forces only in the act of battling unfold themselves, and the predicated 100 can drop to 50 or to zero and the imagined 80 can dilate so that it can prevent the others from popping up?
This is why the fearful, the egoists, and the inert and the inept, are always attempting to make forecasts, whereas men of ethical conscience have more simply just faith in their own cause, namely rely upon themselves alone.»
[Benedetto Croce, Pensieri, my translation]

A free man just plays, and all the while blames nobody.

Saddam Hussein once indicted elections and he won them with no less that 100% of the votes, thereafter declaring it "an exceptional example of democracy".

What distinguishes these approaches is, as I noted elsewhere, the misconception that voting is only a blundering that democracies commit in the pursuit of an ideal goal, unanimity, which could as well be attained by shorter routes.
Elections are thus basically viewed as an optional feat, highly dysfunctional to the objective, and voting is a courtesy act of good manners just like washing one's hands before sitting at the table and start feasting.
I remember that Mussolini reproached Giolitti that "also your men like eating", and that Giolitti answered: "true, but at least they knew how to behave when at table".

They are in this line, those who today keep threatening a "revolution" in Iraq that they never dared even to mention under Saddam Hussein; so that it is somewhat tragic and comic at once seeing today persons who declare themselves patriots against "american oppression" when they spent 35 years failing precisely on this account against Saddam Hussein - who wantonly killed them daily.
What kind of revolution and statehood may ensue from these guys who are making a show of this contradictory and absurd record?

Every sect is now attempting to crop spaces for itself by exerting violence because they think that free elections would never grant them with the disproportional power they covet, but only a power proportional to their votes namely to their effective following.

«It is not Montaigne, nor Locke, nor Bayle, nor Spinoza, nor Hobbes who have carried the torch of discord into their countries; it is in the main theologians who, having begun by aiming at being heads of a sect, soon aimed at being heads of a party too. (...)
What becomes a Revolution in England, is only a sedition in other countries. In Spain, in Turkey, a city takes up arms to defend its privileges; at once it is subjugated by mercenary soldiers, punished by executions, and the rest of the nation kisses its chains. (...)
The chiefs of these savages who have ravaged France, Italy, Spain and England, made themselves monarchs (...) Hence these margraves, lairds, barons, sub-tyrants who often fought against their King for the spoils of the nation were birds of prey fighting an eagle over sucking the blood of doves.»
[Voltaire, Letters On England]

Of course, there are many ways to maim Democracy, and also within democracy we can find persons that never truly reconciliated themselves with democratic rights: what Arno Mayer called "The Persistence Of the Ancient Regime" exists, and too many alleged pacifists simply woo with totalitarianism.
As I stated elsewhere (modernity and its enemies) the answer to the question "Why are the USA 'hated'" is much less appealing to the petitioners than they argued it should have been: because the USA are an objective symbol of modernity, and by rejecting the USA what is implied is very likely to be a rejection of modernity altogether; this also to account for a recent The Guardian's article: for it is centuries that this battle between feudalism and modernity goes on, and quite simply feudalism has its supporters.
It is a misconception believing that Peoples want to be free: Europe's history teaches to us precisely how much they coveted their feudal chains in their more coruscant versions.

You do are a supporter of feudalism when the whole of your approach is focused upon attacking the USA, feasting upon whatever debris you find that can be wielded to belittle it: modernity is not perfect, it is simply infinitely better a system than any of those envisioned and enlived by they who belittle it.
No modernity can coexist with any surreptitious or hidden agenda meant to disparage, dismantle, or inspire enduring loath for one of the more striking and undisputed paradigms of modernity.

Once you jeopardize that paradigm, you don't prove any critic spirit (in fact see how unilateral pacifist criticism is), but you prove an unremitting underlying enmity towards modernity, expressed in what should be called by its name namely hatred, that spells nothing good about your intentions -and capacities- to bring about a different modernity you probably didn't really care one thing about.
Modernity is one, freedom of choice as a principle too, and its kernel is not open to the vagueness of one million interpretations: for in the last run the quest for a different modernity is just like the chase for a "socialism with a human face": it ends up on feudalism as well as that race invariably ended up in real socialism as well, it ends up on shores where modernity is so much different to be no longer.

This does not mean you can't find limits to amend in modernity: but it does means that you can't, under the disguise of amending modernity, pursue a plan whose eventual intention is to brush modernity aside exploiting those issues, or to flirt or justify those whose intention is such: september 11 as a paradigm means that by now on these attempts to pursue a battle in disguise (a model well embodied by terrorism as a paradigm) will be regarded as what they truly are: factual & overt war, moreover waged in order to promote the persistence of feudalism: as Timothy Gusinov stated, many "don't fight for the future, but to perpetuate their fedual past".

When an association has pledged itself to provide combat striven regions with medical care, it is still liable to be simply the convenient incarnation of a hidden political agenda that, like von Clausewitz defined "war as the prosecution of politics by other means", merely incarnates the prosecution of a politics by other (medical) means, and consequently it is not medical care but still again war by other means.

That such associations do not even lend a medical care that could produce at least lasting effects but only those opportunistically and temporarily accessory to the political goals, is proved by the fact that these associations rush to Iraq attracted and lured by 600 victims in one month, but in the very same months they do not rush to Sudan at all (only exception: Human Rights Watch), though there there are 6000 victims a day.

It is therefore legitimate wondering about a choice that is so openly inconsistent with the alleged intentions and even the statutes of these associations.

Running into Sudan would have been the most logical and productive allocation of a private association's limited resources and funds.
Scrambling for both Iraq and Sudan would have made sense too.

But electing Iraq only and completely neglecting the concurrent and coexistent death cry of Sudan makes one suspect that the reason Iraq is chosen with so deep a determination and Sudan not even considered, is that only Iraq allows the chairmen of such associations, as mr. Gino Strada in Italy, to appear on Tv shows every day blaming the Usa for whatever endowed with bad smell they can pick from the reeking ground they like revelling unto as vultures - Usa blaming which Sudan clearly would not afford, regardless of the daily and incomparably much higher amount of war casualties and grief it does affords.

True, in mr. Gino Strada's case, he was in Afghanistan under the soviet rule too - and under the taliban regime too.
But what strikes is precisely this: he started talking on Tv only when he could complain against the Usa, though needless to say "western" media would have been happy and pretty prompt to provide him with their attentions if he would have spoken against the USSR, since they provide him with attention even now he speaks against the USA.
But, simply, mr Gino Strada was nowhere to be seen on any medium then, so to blame the soviets and the talibans in the name of those very same human rights he so passionately defends now because now he can quote the USA in his verbal attacks. And this all is objectively very asburd.

And so Sudan, Rwanda, Chechnya and the alike get downright ignored by those who say they are disquieted by human rights and involved with peace worries.

Or, which perhaps is even worst, such other unfortunate countries receive just the ancillary verbal consideration of a desultory premise constructed with nearly military tactics so to better prepare the terrain for the much wider, longer, articulated, constant and lasting thrusts against the Usa.
Such speeches, authentic rhetorical patterns of academic anarchists, invariably provide the premises with an impartiality of concerns achieved by the mere mention of issues whose compelling importance they absolve by footnotes moved to the top, and then soon repudiate these forewords dismissing them with the flood of the incomparably higher amount of verbal attention and massive physical actions bestowed upon anti Usa theaters. The endless declamations following the phoney and hypocritical prefaces takes care of liquidating their own bogus preambles expeditiously, so that the orators don't risk shifting too much the precious and whimsical focus of their listeners from the only hinge they really want it to revolve around.

So why calling such "criticism" of the USA a criticism, when it is not? I entertain a higher opinion of criticism, incompatible with making it such a bad service by identifying it with sectarian odium.
Or why possibly argue that I may be wanting to prevent criticism against the Usa? These are not critics of the Usa: they are military actors by all accounts with an intentional political agenda, wilfully planned and designed to exploit death and sorrow, in order to achieve a goal that has nothing to do with the merely cover up means.

The war on terrorism as a paradigm is somewhat predicating that this mask is off, and that such things as medical care flags waved just in order to release under their banners a set of daily interviews viciously attacking the Usa for everything, are going to be regarded and dealt with not for what they declare they would have been but for what they actually are: open enmity from a weapon carrying fiend with the military intentions to make a military front prevail against modernity, and to promote harm and injury under an artful disguise: it is guerrilla forces and psy-war expertise camouflaged as medical (or whatever) concern.
They are not offering aid care: they are buying cannon fodder for a cause bad enough that it wants cannon fodder.

Anyway for your convenience here is the only world from which you can pick an alternative, frozen at a time, ours, which is certainly a better one than the way the same political map looked simply 60 -and not even 600- years ago; yet you still have only one life and only one world to pick from, and beware: only one chance too, if you are unfortunate enough to pick the wrong choice; pluck from the map the alternative route to modernity, as wealth and freedom, you prefer, remembering that when you grab from Europe (I have a vague idea your finger might end up lingering above there), the West of it was rescued from that Nazism it opted for and the East of it from those various real Socialism flavours it had to endure as imposed upon it:

Let's speak of limits in modernity as friends of modernity and not as its sworn enemies in disguise, then.
Laws can be violated, of course; yet they can be also simply disregarded and just go unobserved rather than openly offended: but the outcome is the same, for in both cases law is no longer in vigor.

Ralf Dahrendorf, photo from http://www.zuv.unibas.ch

Ralf Dahrendorf reminds us of Amartya Sen: a few autocracies would allow you to have goods, say one million dollars, but do not confer upon you the rights to actually access or enjoy that million. Others provide you with the rights, but don't provide you with the million. That's the same in disguise.
This synergy between entitlements (rights) and goods implies that whatever infringes upon one, does not leave the other unaffected.
It's worth while citing Dahrendorf and the so called Martines Paradox:

«[Minister Martines answered:] "It seems to me you mean to criticize the fact there are not many goods to purchase on our shelves. Perhaps it is true. But let me say to you one thing: before the revolution our malls were crammed with goods. Whatever you can find in Miami, was to be found here too. But the majority of the people could not afford anything of what was on sale."
Many persons laugh when I report this episode. yet the Martines Paradox tells the story of a passage from [a paradigm of] growth without redistribution to [a paradigm of] redistribution without growth. It tells the contrast between provisions without entitlements, and entitlements without provisions.»

Whenever I impose a tax on the circulation, a tax on the purchase of a car, a tax on each single item the car is made of, a tax on fuel, and I set up a compulsory warrant to pay in order to drive it, and I set up fines for whatever infraction I may envision, and then maybe I add a tax on the purchase of a plate, and whatever else my fiscal fantasy may suggest to my voracious needs, what I am doing is that by insisting upon the good I am inflicting on the right too: the right of being free to move about my own country.

The american revolutionists had a battle cry: No taxes without representatives!
Sacrosanct.
We'd now add one: one good, one tax. You can only tax a provision once.
Which also gives a precise idea about how and in which direction whatever true agenda of tax relief should be pursued.

Thence I have a right to join my nation's political life, and yet all the accesses are clogged.
Thence I have a right to make a career out of my talent, but I am constantly between jobs.
Rights grow facing a process of aging: their actual practice can over time consume their original actual meaning. You ought to be vigilant onto them and perform regular overhauls; you ought to attend them. It is not always necessary the blood of the patriots to attend them; at times ink may suffice.

To these processes of obsolescence cartels and nepotism add typical insults.

An anti nepotist act is badly needed, and though it might sound anti constitutional, we cannot but wonder whether the practice that arose and which disavows the Constitution is more consitutional than an anti nepotism act would be.
If you consider the amount of house representatives who are sons of former representatives or who got enrolled or coopted because they were sons and daughters of previous state officers, ambassadors, embedded long range journalists, former vice secretaries of something, former Party leaders, and the alike, you'd have a striking evidence of this persistence of the Ancient Regime amidst Democracy.
You should not complain against democracy, but for democracy.

Of course, it is still true that the texture of a Nation can overcome its own unavoidable limitations: as George Orwell pointed out, though both France and Uk made the same mistakes dealing with Hitler, yet there was still some underlying basic difference that prevented the Uk from consigning its own citizens as slaves to Hitler as France did.
In the Usa a free market is still the true bulwark against this: for how long nepotism might affect politics, the life of the country is not wholly played on politics but in the market arena.
And yet it would still be something to be corrected this possible forthcoming show of a USA presidential race between the son of an ex president of the Usa with the wife of an ex President of the Usa vying to become President of the USA.
And I don't think anyone can blame me of saying this out of prejudice against G. W. Bush or Bill Clinton or out of biased anti-americanism.

Every dutiful modern political agenda ought to include not only economical maneuvers that affect the provision side, but also regular entitlement maneuvers that don't lose sight of the trade off between the two.
Such revisions should remove those hindrances grown over time that alterate the enjoyment of a right, as well as those legal bottlenecks developed out of laws approved over time and that clumped together inadvertently and that prevent the hypothetical flux of an entitlement from streaming as much unabridged as in the original constitutional intentions it was meant to.
Entitlements are subject to silent wounds. I am not arguing that you have to invent new rights: I am rather saying that in order to attain the necessary ones, you periodically till the ground around them and you periodically root out the weed and the parasites that each season brings about and that hinder their natural display to the effect that a few among our rights might suddenly be left to fade away in a slow death, forlorn and neglected in a dark corner.

Napoleone Bonaparte at Arcola in a Antoine-Jean Gros painting (1796-97)

It is the maintenance of the entitlements what makes the provisions stabler.
For if provisions and entitlements are bound together, then all the might of a country doesn't reside in the quantity of the rights but in the concrete enforcement of those available.
Make sure all rights are available, make sure like the Templars that "the roads to Jerusalem are always open": for entitlements are the highways upon which the wealth of the nations travels.
Governing well an affluent western society, and make it more powerful and wealthy, is not a despot's or a demagogue's or an engineer's job: it is a gardener's job, as Voltaire would concur.

We cannot say that it is not true, that it is not noble, that it is not just the Napoleonic battle cry: «La carrière ouverte aux talents» - Careers open to the talents!
But it is a matter of rights - thence Universal Rights, the only true International Legality worth talking about.

And it is no objection that occasionally you can find episodes against human rights in our Democracies: when British soldiers at war perpetrate an abuse, what must be considered is not only that the abuse is an exception, not an endorsed rule; but most of all we ought to remember that we eventually know about it, whereas in tyranny you know nothing if not by casually hearing the screams, and we punish it by making the culprits face martial courts and dishonor - whereas in Tyranny what they risk for the same or for worst actions is getting a medal.
Failing this discrimination is like the child who can't discriminate safely between good and evil; for one thing is the systematic and the rewarded and another is the episodic and the punished: the difference is irrelevant only for those who find no difference between Churchill and Hitler as well, simply because also in Churchill's Army you could still find a handful of bastards.

So this napoleonic cry that resounds of human rights, «La carrière ouverte aux talents», belongs to us all: from Iraq to the Usa, deeply and dramatically belongs, and calls upon us all, every day.
"Vive l' Empereur" was shouted in attack and defeat both from the Dragoons of Napoleon.
What may have induced these men, often coming out from the Ecole Politecnique, into swooning with this yell on their lips, if not the feeling there was something universally and not sectarian or merely locally true for what it was worth while living, making room for oneself with sabre slashes, or perish?
But perhaps nothing is more difficult than communicating the meaning of light to those who spent their lives upon cages and twilights.
Yet as Benjamin Constant wrote, I feel like sharing his conclusion:

«For they absolutely maintain that nothing pertaining to Law can exist when it comes to governing mankind, and all they have as far as intelligence is concerned, they employ it all to demonstrate the impotence of intelligence itself. Social State is to them made up of a thin amount of very simple elements: prejudice to cheat men, supplices to frighten them, avidity to bribe them, frivolity to vilify them, arbitrariness to lead them and -this is required too- a few data picked from some science so to exert arbitrariness in a more appropriate way.
I am not going to believe that the travail of forty centuries amounts to this.»

But rather than that: "Vive L' Empereur!".
And so let's partake of the cry as Victor Hugo magnificently brings it back to us in its full original, denser meaning:

Victor Hugo in a Leon Bonnat painting

«The northern door, which was beaten in by the French, and which has had a piece applied to it to replace the panel suspended on the wall, stands half-open at the bottom of the paddock; it is cut squarely in the wall, built of stone below, of brick above which closes in the courtyard on the north. It is a simple door for carts, such as exist in all farms, with the two large leaves made of rustic planks: beyond lie the meadows. The dispute over this entrance was furious. For a long time, all sorts of imprints of bloody hands were visible on the door-posts. It was there that Bauduin was killed.

The storm of the combat still lingers in this courtyard; its horror is visible there; the confusion of the fray was petrified there; it lives and it dies there; it was only yesterday. The walls are in the death agony, the stones fall; the breaches cry aloud; the holes are wounds; the drooping, quivering trees seem to be making an effort to flee.
This courtyard was more built up in 1815 than it is to-day. Buildings which have since been pulled down then formed redans and angles.

The English barricaded themselves there; the French made their way in, but could not stand their ground. (...)
A massacre took place in the chapel. (...) The walls are covered with inscriptions. Near the feet of Christ this name is to be read: Henquinez. Then these others: Conde de Rio Maior, Marques y Marquesa de Almagro (Habana). There are French names with exclamation points,--a sign of wrath.
The wall was freshly whitewashed in 1849. The nations insulted each other there. (...)

It was in this garden, further down than the orchard, that six light-infantry men of the 1st, having made their way thither, and being unable to escape, hunted down and caught like bears in their dens, accepted the combat with two Hanoverian companies, one of which was armed with carbines. The Hanoverians lined this balustrade and fired from above. The infantry men, replying from below, six against two hundred, intrepid and with no shelter save the currant-bushes, took a quarter of an hour to die.

One mounts a few steps and passes from the garden into the orchard, properly speaking. There (...) the wall is hidden on the outside by a tall hedge; the French came up, thinking that they had to deal only with a hedge, crossed it, and found the wall both an obstacle and an ambuscade, with the English guards behind it, the thirty-eight loopholes firing at once a shower of grape-shot and balls, and Soye's brigade was broken against it. Thus Waterloo began.

Nevertheless, the orchard was taken. As they had no ladders, the French scaled it with their nails. They fought hand to hand amid the trees. All this grass has been soaked in blood. (...)

There is in this day an obscure interval, from mid-day to four o'clock; the middle portion of this battle is almost indistinct, and participates in the sombreness of the hand-to-hand conflict. Twilight reigns over it. We perceive vast fluctuations in that fog, a dizzy mirage, paraphernalia of war almost unknown to-day, pendant colbacks, floating sabre-taches, cross-belts, cartridge-boxes for grenades, hussar dolmans, red boots with a thousand wrinkles, heavy shakos garlanded with torsades (...)

Ney drewhis sword and placed himself at their head. The enormous squadrons were set in motion.

Then a formidable spectacle was seen.

All their cavalry, with upraised swords, standards and trumpets flung to the breeze, formed in columns by divisions, descended, by a simultaneous movement and like one man, with the precision of a brazen battering-ram which is effecting a breach, the hill of La Belle Alliance, plunged into the terrible depths in which so many men had already fallen, disappeared there in the smoke, then emerging from that shadow, reappeared on the other side of the valley, still compact and in close ranks, mounting at a full trot, through a storm of grape-shot which burst upon them, the terrible muddy slope of the table-land of Mont-Saint-Jean. They ascended, grave, threatening, imperturbable; in the intervals between the musketry and the artillery, their colossal trampling was audible. Being two divisions, there were two columns of them; Wathier's division held the right, Delort's division was on the left. It seemed as though two immense adders of steel were to be seen crawling towards the crest of the table-land. It traversed the battle like a prodigy.

Nothing like it had been seen since