'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

A view from Europe

I arrived at Charles De Gaulle airport Monday morning, had a few hours wait for the flight to Bordeaux. I spent some time keeping my eyes open for well-known Francophile Richard Perle who must fly through CDG a lot. But I guess he sticks to the First-Class Lounges...

The lead story in Le Monde was titled "Tourisme: l'ete des mauvaises nouvelles" (Tourism: the summer of bad news). The follow-on story talked about the "cross-atlantic slowdown which touched the Old Continent", along with general global fearfulness and some local problems with forest fires etc. Folks in the French hospitality industry talk about the Americans staying away as the main factor.

But the most interesting thing I picked up at CDG was Monday's Financial Times. It had a long article by Stephen Fidler and Gerald Baker titled "The best-laid plans? How turf battles and mistakes in Washington dragged down the reconstruction of Iraq."

Well, the title more or less tells you what these guys' thesis is. It seems they have talked to a lot of people in and around DC. It comes as zero surprise to me that they report,

According to several participants [in internal administration discussions], the Pentagon ignored the extensive work done by the State Department and relied on a different group of advisors, including Ahmad Chalabi, leader of the Iraqi National Congress exile group.

Anyway, if you can access that article, it's a good read. I found it online today.

... Meanwhile, here we are baking in the hot French sun. We're in a hotel near St. Emilion, which is a veritable Mecca (bad word, perhaps...) for wine-lovers. Nearly the entire landscape is planted with vines, which are meticulously pruned and trained into 60-inch-high rows that are cut square at the top. The ros are about four feet apart from each other and dead straight. As we look out from our window, it's like looking down onto a sea of green.

Beneath the bright green foliage hang the bunches of now-blackening grapes. To my eye, the individual grapes look very small. I guess that's from the drought they've been having hereabouts. Bill (who got here a couple of days before me and had a visit with a wine-grower on Sunday) says they're hoping for some rain in September to plump up the grapes.

This morning I went out to run at around 9 a.m. and it was already really, really warm. But with a dry heat, unlike what we have back at home in Central Virginia. The French drivers give little consideration to runners, so where possible I ran along the broad strips left between the edge of the vineyards and the roadway. I ran around the Figeac fields and through many areas of Pomerol, including Cheval Blanc. Actually, I got a bit lost, but it was fun.

Tomorrow we leave this area and start driving across to the Ardeche area. I don't know when I'll get to blog again. I'm using a phoneline connection to AOL. It seems to work okay, but it was hard to get a connection this morning.