Max Boot has just published an interesting item at the Commentary blog highlighting a new paper by two of our favorite neocons, Reuel Gerecht and Gary Schmitt, titled “France: Europe’s Counterterrorist Powerhouse.” Schmitt and Gerecht write that “of the things the French do well–and perhaps the hardest thing for Americans to appreciate, let alone adopt–is granting highly intrusive powers to their internal security service.” But the authors indicate that American reluctance to adopt such methods may be, at least in part, misguided, despite their own distaste for “some French counterterrorism practices–such as the government’s ability to jail French citizens without sufficient grounds for actually taking them to court.” Schmitt and Gerecht conclude:
So, on the one hand, the French, for all their self-righteous talk about American human rights abuses in war on terror, seem to have have far less regard for the rights of their own citizens than does the Bush administration for its. And yet, at the same time, neither has France become a police state. Quite the opposite, it’s laws have become “much more liberal and open.” So if Schmitt and Gerecht advocate a more European–a more French–approach to counterterrorism, where does that leave the American left?
