Canadians are so out of touch with the military some don't know a warrant officer from a brigadier general. Uh, including me. Within five minutes of reaching the media trailer on a recent visit to CFB Petawawa, I greet Gen. Gary O'Brien as ranking below a lieutenant. Strange. The media relations people seem tense. I was told I was addressing the OCE of Operation Stalwart Guardian, but filed it under HWT (Huh? What's That?) because I am an RCJ (Really Clueless Journalist). It meant he was the Officer Commanding the Exercise of more than 3,000 soldiers from all the reserve regiments in Ontario practising large-scale modern military operations (brigade-level, for those who know sergeant is a rank and sergeant-major is a job and that warrant officers are in some ways more important than generals but clam up when generals are about). Where there's that much food, vultures gather. Enter the media on Tuesday, Aug. 23.

Wednesday morning we rise early for a lovely stroll in the woods. Of nine kilometres. Followed by a frenzied assault on a trench and bunker system. But first, brekky. And my first encounter with an IMP, or Individual Meal Pack. Last year at Fort Drum, New York, for a Brockville Rifles urban warfare exercise (officially FIBUA, for Fighting In a Built-Up Area but one sergeant called it FISH, or Fighting In Somebody's House, and sergeants know stuff), we had to subsist on American MREs (Meals Ready to Eat) because mad cow kept Canadian food out. The Canadians kept saying IMPs were better, easy to believe while eating MREs. But now my wife hands me a piping lukewarm foil package, which I wrestle open to encounter a Pressed Object in Fluid. Later someone claims it was a ham steak. I say it sure didn't look like one. He smiles. "Welcome to the army."

Unfortunately for a journalist seeking a comic angle, the other IMPs I encounter are quite edible. The pork in cream sauce and the shepherd's pie go well with hunger, while Friday's breakfast is genuinely good. So let me be fair. It's easy to complain, but making almost imperishable, nutritious, energy-packed hash browns and sausages in foil that are even passable once immersed in hot water is almost miraculous.

This stuff is actually worked out pretty well. You can do a lot of things to soldiers but you cannot underfeed them. The army is even, after long resistance, starting to issue "Camel packs," knapsack-style water bags with hoses. I had already noticed all sergeants-major seem to have them and they know even more than ordinary sergeants. And everyone has "tac vests" so excellent I wish I had to carry enough things to justify buying one. I mocked, and mock, the Clothe the Soldier program's hunt for a combat bra; try the MEC, I say again. But this vest is really cool.

Meal break over. Resume fun. For our comfort and convenience, the Public Affairs Office (PAffO) gives us flak jackets that weigh about 20 pounds when we start out and at least 50 when we reach the bridge and the clowns tasked with capturing it are ahead of schedule so instead of an hour break to sit, eat and swear we run across it. A colleague filming for CTV unaccountably fails to recognize the green sweaty lumps trying to shake her hand.

Say, this helmet's pretty heavy, too. And there's a pungently sour stench and strange glowing colour. Not porta-potties but acrid purple and yellow smoke grenades. Seems the better, white ones are too unhealthy for training. Kaff. I discover the crumbly walls of a sand trench are easier to get down than up. My vest weighs 800 pounds. A soldier hears I'm media and ploughs past me. I discover the crumbly walls of a sand trench taste bad.

Once the bunkers are taken, we discover the IMP bread, which Tuesday night was hard and dry, has become sweet, tender and delicious. I'm in the road holding a big piece dripping with honey, when momma bear and three cubs saunter out of the forest 20 metres away. Hey, everyone. Let's play spot the dumb civilian.

Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday we make prime pests of ourselves. See, we really really want to go on the Friday morning helicopter ride but it requires safety training at a time we can't manage. Finally, 400 Squadron Capt. Mark Horstead accommodates us. It turns out you only need to know 10 things. First, do not impale yourself on the sharp objects at the front of the helicopter as they are air intake pipes essential to the operation of the engine. Two, do not walk into the rear rotor as it is like a six-foot buzz saw except way more dangerous. Three, board the aircraft in an orderly manner, securing your own seatbelt without sitting on the one next to you. Four: Do not undo your seatbelt in flight. Five, six, seven and eight: DO NOT UNDO YOUR SEATBELT IN FLIGHT even after you hear the words "One minute to landing." Nine: Do not undo your seatbelt on touchdown because if they don't like the spot and lift off again you could get walloped by the skid. 10: Once you hear the flight engineer shout "Go, go, go" undo your gol-durn seatbelt, when the first guy off lies down two paces from the helicopter facing forward, do the same with your right leg on top of his left and once he gives a thumbs up and the helicopter zooms away stand up after making sure you're not stepping into the skids of an incoming helicopter and get your butt out of there before the mortar rounds hit. Point 10 is a bit complicated. I hope I will do it right. There are no real mortar rounds but the guys we are with are practicing for very real.

Friday morning we assemble in a field by "Oh-five-hundred" for a 6 a.m. chopper flight. Thinks: it wouldn't be the military if you didn't get to stand around cold, tired and bored for at least an hour.

Bad news. Our "chock" on this flight includes two journalists and a general. It's bad for the sergeant who must keep us out of the rear rotor. And bad for me because I'm in a jump seat facing an open door with the general I called a warrant officer sitting behind and to my right. Whaddaya bet he shoves me out and I become a really embedded journalist?

Good news. He can't make it. So I calmly board the helicopter, muff the seatbelt bit, and eventually get secured for a breathtakingly beautiful ride. At twice treetop height, I see dawn clouds reflected in lakes and rivers beneath a blanket of mist. Awesome. All the trouble taken by PAffO was worth it for us.

As we approach the LZ (Landing Zone), a bird departs as fast as his wings will carry him. Hey, bird, it's OK. This base is a bird sanctuary. I SAID IT'S A ... Never mind. We land safely, the rotors blow grit into my hair so hard it embeds in my scalp and we march a kilometre through dense forest to the bridge. Our platoon guards the road despite the crucial "platoon warrant" being distracted by two pesky journalists. The bridge is taken in splendid form on the last day of a long exercise. Everyone is elated but exhausted and hopes like heck they won't have to do it again. After a long, dull break we get the word. Do it again. The IMPs finally arrive. Mr. Hot Sun has been here for hours. Revealing suicidal thoughts to the medic doesn't get anyone excused. A general decided three years ago this attack would be done twice on this final day and nothing can stop it short of the base catching fire.

Which it does. The RCR regulars playing the enemy force take off for a real fire-fight, down by our old LZ. We drink six litres of water each and do an AAR. In today's kinder, gentler Canadian military each exercise is followed by an After Action Review. I am handed a little green AAR aide-memoire card. It is "Not an assessment," "Nobody has all the answers" and "Process belongs to training audience, not the facilitator." Are camouflaged sociologists lurking in these woods?

It turns out AARs are valuable, especially at Stalwart Guardian where many troops are so green they're chartreuse, in helping privates understand what their section and platoon leaders were trying to do and why. Including how confusion arises and how to combat it. No wonder the military has so many SOPs (Standard Operating Procedures) to make chaos manageable. Imagine what your job would be like if you had to do it exhausted in a forest with bad people hurling high explosives right at your head.

These guys work incredibly hard and their kit weighs a ton. I admire them, and think I understand a lot of it better now. Though not the Pressed Object in Fluid.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Michaëlle Jean may yet prove an excellent governor general. But her appointment has dramatically underlined a major source of pervasive mediocrity in Canadian public life. Because clear thinking about Quebec tends to be alarming, our politics is dominated by people who don't think very clearly. It's irritating to have another vice-regal consort who dresses and thinks like a campus socialist. It's worse that, in 1991, Ms. Jean's husband Jean-Daniel Lafond filmed her joining in a toast to "independence." But her, and our, big problem is that, as Paul Wells wrote in Maclean's, "In some circles last week it was fashionable to write off" both his films and her toast as "an expression of the ideological flexibility that is as fundamental a part of life in Montreal as a jaunty disregard for traffic signals. Everyone in Montreal finds himself at a table full of sovereigntists now and then, according to this analysis. Anyone might, finding himself at a polling station after a morning stroll, take it into his head to vote 'Oui' instead of 'Non.' What of it?"

What indeed. Here's the question we can't even ask. Not the comparatively harmless one whether Ms. Jean was a good choice for governor general, but the far more alarming one whether it would matter if she had flirted hard with separatism. If the answer from one part of the country is that destroying Canada is something any decent person might seriously have considered, and from another that the proposal is outrageous, it could lead to real trouble.

There's growing suspicion out Lethbridge way that much of the great debate since 1968 has taken the former view for granted, and has concerned only whether Canada can be salvaged by making it far more like Quebec or whether it's unredeemable so Quebec should get out now. In 1999, Pierre Trudeau's son Justin told the television program W5 that his father's philosophy, "and certainly he has passed it on to us, has always been that Quebecers are better than the rest of Canada. A lot more of us are bilingual, bicultural, a lot more awareness of the rest, and that's a richness. Who's to say we should need special protection?"

If that's the real "federalist" option in Ottawa as well as Montreal, you can see why it hasn't been presented clearly out in Alberta. If not, if the real position has been that Quebec should stay in Canada and get with the program, you can see why it hasn't been presented clearly in the Saguenay. But you can also see the pernicious long-term consequences if a frank presentation of the choices would drive mainstream Quebecers into the separatist camp in a heartbeat, provoke a hearty "Then let them go" from the hinterland, or possibly both.

It's tempting, instead, to start by not talking about it and end by not even thinking about it. But then politics becomes increasingly congenial to people not troubled by difficult questions, even oblivious to them.

A division of opinion so fundamental it threatens to split the country creates a political climate in which the profoundly shallow flourish. It is particularly dangerous to the political careers of those with enough wisdom and courage to understand the central question, but not enough to accept that it cannot be fudged. Thus it clears the stage for genuine mediocrities who are far less prone to fail in politics by tripping over fundamental issues or quit politics because they cannot bear the stress of avoiding them.

Survey our political landscape and tell me that's not what you see. Petty bluster over softwood unencumbered by strategic realism is just one small symptom of our lack of memorable oratory or compelling vision. The fear, that either offending against or frankly acknowledging mainstream Quebec aspirations will destroy the country, long since reduced our statecraft to such blither as "Conscription if necessary, but not necessarily conscription." The issue is everywhere from Iraq to gay marriage, and nowhere: We even ignore our history, lest we should blunder onto the Plains of Abraham.

I do not suggest recklessly enflaming public feelings, and respect people reluctant to dispute Ms. Jean's appointment because it was raised by hard-core separatists for precisely this purpose. I have no easy solution to the problem. But drifting into a crisis is even more dangerous than striding into one.

Ms. Jean did not create the problem. But she underlines how hard it has become to fudge the question whether it is obvious that Canada must be transformed or else demolished. And how shamefully mediocre to try.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

PETAWAWA - As dawn broke over the misty rivers and forests of CFB Petawawa Friday, two platoons of Cameron Highlanders boarded Griffon helicopters for a simulated attack on a rebel-held bridge. It was the high point of a massive week-long exercise, literally and figuratively, for nearly 100 reservists from Ottawa. These soldiers, part of a company under the command of Maj. Derek Cheff of Ottawa's Governor General's Foot Guard, were among more than 3,000 reservists taking part in Operation Stalwart Guardian. The culmination of three years of planning and field exercises, this brigade-level exercise brought together soldiers from every reserve unit in Ontario, as well as several dozen from Canada's NATO allies, for a hard week of drills and blank ammunition exercises, ranging from raiding a terrorist camp to seizing trenches.

In addition to basic military skills, the reservists were given a good look at the difficulties of 21st-century military operations by more than 300 members of the Royal Canadian Regiment (1st Battalion).

The regular force soldiers played the role of enemy forces, then in after-action reviews helped their reserve counterparts understand the importance of such things as 360-degree awareness and security even for very small groups of soldiers in modern asymmetrical warfare. These are the problems now faced by Canadians in places like Afghanistan.

Reservists, or militia soldiers, serve and train part-time. They are an increasingly vital supplement to the regular forces, not only filling gaps within Canada, but typically making up about 20 per cent of any foreign rotation.

Ottawa militia soldiers on the Petawawa exercise include more than a few who have been on missions to Afghanistan and Croatia, as well as others hoping to get the opportunity.

One of the senior officers on this exercise is Ottawa's Lt.-Col. Mike Roach. The commanding officer of the Brockville Rifles, he was given command of an entire brigade at Stalwart Guardian.

"It's very important for the soldiers here to understand that they themselves will get a call to volunteer for service" in missions such as the one pushing into Kandahar, and that reservists "can, and must be ready to respond," he said.

Some reservists have less than six months service. Scott Roy, 23, joined the Cameron Highlanders in February, and has spent most of the summer in the field, learning basic military skills and sleeping in a tent, eating military rations and learning to function amid the fatigue and chaos of military operations.

Stalwart Guardian gave soldiers like the Camerons' 17-year-old Josh Bouchard a chance to see how the skills they've acquired in small-unit training work in a much larger exercise involving light infantry, artillery, engineers, intelligence and combat service support, as they carry out a sequence of widely separated raids, helicopter landings and assaults.

Stalwart Guardian was designed to teach post-Cold War combat. Its underlying scenario involved enemy forces composed partly of soldiers from a collapsed enemy regime, like those of the Taliban or Saddam Hussein, and partly of irregular forces like al-Qaeda, who might not wear uniforms or defend fixed positions and who are more likely to try to attack soft targets like supply convoys and civilian contractors than a rifle platoon.

Reservists who qualify for an international tour must spend six more arduous months training with the regular forces' unit they will accompany overseas. Reserve training is designed to get them ready for the transition.

When asked whether he'd consider putting his name down for a tour in Kandahar, Mr. Roy's eyes lit up. He plans to, he said, and hopes to put his training to good use. Mr. Bouchard agreed. Going to Afghanistan "is my duty," he said.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

To suggest that liberals ought to be careful what they wish for may amount to locking the door of a stable that never contained a horse. Let me nevertheless try to explain to them the concept of "unintended consequences" with regard to Iraq. A lot of people on the left seem to desire an American defeat there for a variety of reasons. One, like Mick Jagger, they find George Bush insufferable. Two, they are frightened of American hegemony -- both military and cultural. Three, they consider western civilization arrogant and want to see it taught a lesson.

Each proposition can be attacked on its supposed merits. But for now I want instead to attack them on the basis of their consequences.

If the U.S. does withdraw from Iraq in what a neutral observer would call defeat, one very probable result will be great American aversion to further foreign adventures. Given the sentiments outlined earlier, this might seem desirable. But there is unfortunately more to the picture. I don't want to dwell on the danger that the terrorists would be emboldened, not appeased, except to cite Australian Prime Minister John Howard's comment that, as Sept. 11, 2001, happened before the invasion of Iraq, it probably wasn't caused by it.

Instead, I want to suggest that whatever hopes liberals had for a better world if the Iraq war had been avoided are unlikely to be achieved if it now ends badly. And not only because the coalition ruined everything by going in. Remember, the alternative was meant to be multilateral action that secured peace with honour. But the United Nations oil-for-food program has been revealed to be not only ineffective but scandalous. Its sanctions were supposed to make Saddam Hussein repent of his ways because his people were suffering and he wasn't causing it. Instead it went crooked. However little one thinks of President George W. Bush's approach, Woodrow Wilson's alternative of an international organization to bring about peace gently sure looks like a busted flush here. And also regarding Iran.

Perhaps nothing can be done about Tehran's atomic ambitions; certainly a vigorous approach would present grave difficulties given that Iran is farther away, bigger and stronger than Iraq even if the U.S. weren't already busy there. But instead the West followed the Franco-German model of empty grovelling words ("I plead for the leaders to take the time to examine the proposals with care," snivelled the French foreign minister to no avail) with British and American backing, possibly sardonic. The Iranians responded with phrases like a "clear violation of international law" and others that, translated out of diplomatese, would not be printable in this newspaper. In short, it didn't work.

So the alternative to unilateral American action looks less like effective multilateralism than the 1936 League of Nations. And it gets worse.

I was not among those who hailed the wave of democracy sweeping the world last year or whenever it was. As American commentator John Roche wisely observed, the world is not made of Play-Doh. Other cultures exist, with various qualities that, good or bad, are largely intractable. We cannot, like naive Victorians, expect foreigners to adopt our ways as soon as we explain them.

The left considers such naivete a bad habit of the right but it is at least as much a habit on their side, often compounded by a delusion that the Third World is already multicultural, pacifist, gender-sensitive and various other things not conspicuous in Iran or Saddam Hussein's Iraq. And a chronic danger of inflated hopes is crushing disappointment followed by bitterness.

Thus defeat in Iraq risks not only a period of American isolation and, based on 20th-century history, consequent global upheaval. Should democracy fail in Iraq even with U.S. military backing it risks engendering, in large segments of western public opinion, the contemptuous vision of the Third World embodied in Evelyn Waugh's caustically sardonic novel Scoop as culturally allergic to honest and reasonable compromise. Such an attitude will not be conducive to further foreign engagement, multilateral or otherwise, of the sort liberals favour.

It would be unpleasant for members of the left to accept that they'll end up even further from the world they want if the American venture in Iraq fails than if it succeeds. Especially if it leads to the perhaps even less welcome realization that there is little they can do to influence the matter either way (see "not Play-Doh" above.)

On the bright side, any subsequent suggestions suitably chastened liberals make about international relations would finally show a little horse sense.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Even as you read this, I will not be looking at a computer screen. I will be looking at a lake. And thinking about Jews. Not because I anticipate a rousing chorus of Hava Nagila from the campsite across the way. Because of Paul Johnson’s observation in A History of the Jews that “The day of rest is one of the great Jewish contributions to the comfort and joy of mankind.”

We take this weekly rhythm of work and rest so much for granted that it is hard as well as horrible to imagine a life consisting of days of toil in endless dreary procession. You’d feel like you were working on a pyramid. Or for a modern corporation.

My editors, for instance, are much plagued by e-mail, which follows them like angry bees. There is archival evidence that it was once possible to put out a newspapers without instant communication. But woe betide the modern manager not available on Sunday. Even your humble scribe, fortunate enough to get a whole week away from the telephone this week, is also making a real, necessary, and overdue effort to restore a sane balance the rest of the year.

I read Johnson’s book as homework for my Canada-Israel Committee sponsored trip to Israel. And typing notes from it into my computer at about 63 o’clock in the morning in an airplane chair so cramped it would have caused comment in a Roman galley, I started wondering whether modern technology had not rather chained us to the oars as well. Especially as I discussed Sabbath practices with various people I met on the trip.

Among other things, a real, hard-core Jewish Sabbath means no work and no travel. Instead, you sit staring glumly at your family until finally, in desperation, you talk to them. Horrible. Or you sneak off with a book, because the rule against creating anything forbids writing, but not reading.

Detailed, laborious observance of the Sabbath, kosher etc., seems a commendably logical outcome of a deep religious faith in good works. But though I myself am not planning to redeem creation through my deeds, I was struck by how the Sabbath was a gift that keeps on giving. Its requirements seem singularly suited to man’s needs, though anthropologists and rabbis might disagree about why.

Then I asked myself: Might there be something I should avoid one day a week, not because it isn’t important, but because it is so important that, if not fended off with a stick, it will clamp itself around my leg and drag me down?

The answer came immediately. The computer.

So off it goes (normally on Sunday, as I am not remotely Jewish). I find my computer so useful that I spend much of my non-computer life hurrying to finish whatever else I’m currently doing and get back to it. Now I have one day a week where I’m not in this constant state of suppressed panic. I’m not less productive. I’m just less tense. Try it.

There’s an American non-profit organization PC-Turnoff (www.pcturnoff.org), founded by a guy appalled that his 14-year-old daughter was instant-messaging until well after midnight. It promoted Aug. 1 to 7 as “PC-Turnoff Week” to “Give your kids the gift of boredom” -- that is, stop overstimulating them and give them time to think and create. And do wholesome things like talking to others face to face (sell it to them as “chinware.”)

It’s excellent advice. But (file under “Jehovah was no fool”) one week a year is at once too much and too little.

It’s too much because it is, nowadays, a major disruption. Indeed, PC-Turnoff founder Joe Acunzo picked that particular week so kids wouldn’t have the excuse of needing the computer for school. But it’s also too little because, whether the kids find such a week an opportunity or an ordeal, it’s only once a year. Weeks off are great if you can get them. But what we really need is a wholesome rhythm in our school or work week.

Try it. You’ll like it.

Restoring something resembling a real Sabbath is just part of a happy battle against the accelerating pace of modern life. There’s a “slow food” movement to enjoy eating and even cooking. And Maclean’s just ran a feature on Carl Honoré, a multitasking journalist whose road to Damascus was the airport in Rome, where he read about classic fairy tales condensed into One-Minute Bedtime Stories. His first thought was “Eureka!”; his second was “Have I gone completely insane?”

He went home and wrote In Praise of Slow whose message, ironically, spread quickly. In fact, he says, people often ask if there’s an audio version for the car because they haven’t got time to read it.

They would have time, if they turned off their computers one day a week. Even if they don’t know a yarmulke from a kippah.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Jerusalem is not just a city on a hill. It is also a light unto the nations. Thanks to wise municipal ordinances, especially a requirement inherited from its British colonial administrators that resulted in most buildings being made of, or at least clad in, tasteful Jerusalem stone. I know, I know, you're not meant to go there and have realizations about the new urbanism. But people do live in Jerusalem, mostly in quite ordinarily life-like ways. As a result, they rightly care as much that their city is nice, as well as that it is famous. As I learned on my Canada-Israel Committee sponsored trip, Jerusalem is both.

The city has enjoyed some good luck in this respect. First, being on a hill rather improves the climate, especially in summer. Second, as you may vaguely have heard, Jerusalem is a bit old and revered. (According to senior archaeologist Dan Bahat, the “salem” is not a cognate with shalom/salaam but is the Canaanite god of night, though an Internet search reveals controversy even over that; in addition to one site saying Jerusalem has more than 100 names and another that it has just 70, a third flatly contradicts Mr. Bahat about the origin of the one the city is normally known by. Brockville was never like that.)

Being old, Jerusalem has a street layout created organically over many centuries by actual live humans rather than cyborg city planners. And while being revered can be a bit of a handicap (digging so much as a barbecue pit will probably infuriate three religious authorities and possibly dislodge something left by someone who considers Herod the Great “that Johnny Come Lately”), this attitude also helped Jerusalem escape the peculiarly destructive modern sort of urban renewal that has, and gives cities, the soul of a machine.

Of course, the city has considerable experience of old-style urban renewal (“After we sack the place, we burn the temple, level everything, steal the inhabitants and change the name”) plus a big earthquake in 1033. But from that you can rebuild. Unlike the damage done to New York City by Moses (Robert, not prophet). As for the essentially new city of Tel Aviv, it was once called The White City because of all the modernist Bauhaus architecture that renders it, let's be frank, hideous. Whatever charm it possesses, aside from a few imaginative buildings, including some by Moshe Safdie, is despite what architects and planners have done.

I doubt the average city council would want to model itself in every way on Jerusalem. There are drawbacks to having your burgh disputed not only between but within major religions to the point that brawls have erupted within holy sites. And at least some North Americans might be inclined, in evaluating Jerusalem as an urban environment, to obsess on terrorism to the point they think the explosions keep you awake nights.

It may not be all that reassuring to be told the traffic is even more dangerous. But in fact the statistical probability of being a direct victim of terror is very small in Israel, while being an indirect victim is up to you. People we met seemed mostly as bafflingly blase as, say, Canadians are toward potential hypothermia. We heard rather comical accounts of living right next to Gaza or Hezbollah-controlled bits of Lebanon from which various lethal objects were routinely, if ineptly, hurled. “It's a good quality of life. It's quiet, you know the neighbours, the schools are nice, there are rockets coming in, it's prosperous, there's a strong sense of community.” After hearing this in Natif Ha'asara, where a mortar shell killed someone two hours after we left, and in Metulla, we went down to the Dead Sea, and as we climbed Masada I had this image of the zealots explaining the advantages of the place circa 69 A.D. “There's a great view, the schools teach values, it's quiet, the neighbours are industrious, see where they're building a huge dirt ramp to come up and kill us, we got caves full of millet and oil, fresh air, sunshine, there's a strong sense of community.”

There's something a bit unnerving about seeing not only the main security wall but also additional concrete walls inside Jerusalem, built to keep the neighbours from taking potshots at the local kindergarten, prettily decorated by the kids. But people mostly shrug off the danger and go about their business in an urban environment delightful in ways that can be copied.

Start with the ban on high-rise buildings. And let me not hear Canadians lecture Israelis about limited available space and the need to infill. (The Jerusalem Post just described a plan, with the three main Jewish cemeteries in Jerusalem almost full and people reluctant to encroach on the Jerusalem Forest or build beyond the Green Line, to dig vast, multi-storey tunnels under the existing Har Hamenuhot cemetery, also providing lots more building stone.)

It may seem odd that someone generally libertarian on economic issues would thus casually endorse urban planning. I assure you it is not casual. Urban planning that imposes patterns of living people would not choose for themselves or, indeed, any member of the human race is much to be avoided. Instead, it was much embraced in the 20th century, making our cities quite unnecessarily hideous. Zoning should be flexible and humane. But urban planning of some sort is inevitable, because cities contain much that is inevitably public space.

Private housing developments can contain local streets privately owned by local residents' corporations. But main streets must be public because competing road networks are impossible on a two-dimensional surface. And the fact that we must all share public spaces suggests, to me at least, that we must have a “highest common denominator” rule: Rather than permitting anything any one of us might personally do in our private space, we must reject anything that most people would find offensive in their living room. Like living in a Bauhaus canyon of dead, ugly, overwhelming glass and steel.

As Christopher Alexander and his colleagues observe in their splendid A Pattern Language, huge monolithic buildings are bad to work and live in; their chapter “Four Storey Limit” claims: “There is abundant evidence to show that high buildings make people crazy.” From any height greater than four storeys, people in the street look like ants, an alienating perspective from which to look down. But it's even worse living among and walking between such buildings. If one were merely making a private error in staring at life through the wrong end of a telescope I would be more than happy to let people do so. But in such public spaces we all have to see the buildings. As their occupants look down, we look up and find the experience equally inhumane and alienating.

It is pretty generally understood that one may not exhibit an obscene or disgusting object in public unless it is a piece of modern art. But if a building may not display a naked woman 600 feet high on its facade, why may it display a hideous facade 600 feet high at all or, indeed, even have such a facade? And by golly, four storeys was for a long time the limit in Jerusalem. It's great.

Local authorities had a fortuitously strong incentive not to clog the skyline because no one wanted to spoil the view of, or from within, important sites in the Old City. (Unlike, say, the Alamo, secretly a grubby mud heap to begin with, but far worse for being overshadowed, when I visited San Antonio in the late 1980s, by an equally grubby department store). But even Ottawa managed to avoid hemming in the Parliament buildings too closely. Regrettably, I am informed by Amiram Gonen of Hebrew University that Jerusalem has begun relaxing this rule. It is a decision they will come to regret. And since the best time to plant an olive tree or a pleasing city plan is 25 years ago (or 2,500) but the next best time is today, let's cut the scraping of skies. It's not nice.

Jerusalem has some problems you wouldn't want and some blessings you can't have. But it is also a very humane city, pleasant to stroll through, with a harmonious colour scheme especially beautiful as the sun sets, and healthy, walkable, eminently humane winding streets. We can't all have hills or a non-grid street plan, let alone the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. And once bits of your city are overrun with high-rise buildings, you must be ready to live with the unpleasant consequences for a while. But we should still think about what an ideal urban environment would look like and how much of that ideal we can achieve. For, if you don't know where you're going, you may well end up somewhere else, and you could have worse urban destinations than Jerusalem. Like Newark. Or Tel Aviv.

How many cities can boast that you absolutely have to see the local YMCA, built by the guy who also did the Empire State Building? Plus architects could come back from conferences on livable cities with T-shirts saying “I went to Jerusalem and got stoned. And I didn't even say J-h-v-h.” And did I mention the strong sense of community?

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

It is not immediately obvious that Michaëlle Jean is a poor choice for governor general. But there are certainly pitfalls she will have to avoid to confound the cynics. Let me first confess that I was a little dismayed the last time our new governor general was a child refugee CBC broadcaster woman of colour of left-wing elitist leanings. It seemed a divisive rather than unifying choice. Instead, Adrienne Clarkson proved an excellent governor general, which surely obliges me to exercise charity here. Also, while I am no Abraham Lincoln, he once wrote in a letter "I shall do nothing of malice, what I deal with is too vast for malicious dealing." Which cannot safely be said of journalism but can, and I think should, be said about our Constitution.

Hence my first point on how Ms. Jean can conduct herself with the dignity owed to her office and Canadians is to avoid anything smacking of malice. Which may be harder than it sounds if you have tended to move in intellectual circles that mistake narrowness for elevation of thought. She must especially avoid any hint of contempt for English Canadians, Canada's traditions, or Americans.

She must be a governor general of all the people, or else, in the end, she will be a governor general of none of them. Here I advise her to seek the counsel of Adrienne Clarkson, who not only struck the right tone on significant occasions (most notably at the dedication of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier) but conspicuously avoided abrasively progressive pronouncements.

Another related thing Ms. Jean must do is love the Canadian Constitution. By which I emphatically do not mean the Charter of Rights. Her new job, for the most part, is ceremonial, and I see no reason to suppose she will not be gracious, charming, and dignified through endless hours of tedious functions. But in the event of a constitutional crisis, the incumbent acquires real power and must really understand, and cherish, the underlying mechanisms of self-government in this country of which she is the guardian.

My ideal governor general would harbour some doubts about the impact of the Charter on those mechanisms. But in any event, if Ms. Jean has not read A.V. Dicey, it is imperative that she read and absorb him now. For in a crisis, she will be handicapped if she has to rely on the views of her advisers and crippled if she has to rely on the views of those who put her in office (other than the Queen, who profoundly understands both duty and her duties). To act in a partisan manner in a constitutional crisis would entangle both governor general and prime minister in malicious dealing.

In this regard, I am not encouraged by her invocation of Samuel de Champlain or the suggestion by this newspaper on Wednesday that, by virtue of having French as well as Canadian citizenship, she is the first French governor of this part of North America since 1763. It was appalling tribalism for Jean Chrétien to wish he'd been there to wake up Montcalm, as if a preference for constitutional monarchy, civil rights and representative institutions over French absolutist tyranny were some grotesque Anglo propensity like boiling vegetables into pasty grey submission. If Ms. Jean regards the conquest of New France as other than fortunate for all Canadians, she must avoid saying so. Governor general is too big a job for malice, or for political, intellectual or ethnic partisanship.

Here she will need particular tact, because one of her major challenges is to reach out to the West. She must avoid thinking of the importance of reaching out in her job in traditional left-wing terms: children, women, minorities and so on down the PC list. The point is to reach out to everybody, especially those who aren't like you. As in western, male, conservative, white and unilingual. There. I said it.

Silencing the spouse will be less of an issue. It's odd that two successive governors general should haul into Rideau Hall trendy leftist philosopher husbands disinclined to tactful silence or to neckties. But John Ralston Saul's enduring penchant for daft remarks on globalization proved far more absurd than consequential. I am more concerned about Ms. Jean's own self-aggrandizing pronouncement that "Having a person like me as governor general will mean a lot not only to Canadians. I think it will mean a lot for humanity."

It's not about you, Ma'am. It's about Canada. Safeguarding its dignity and Constitution ought to be enough to occupy even an exceptional person fully over the next five years.

If Michaëlle Jean does that, she will make a fine governor general. And I see no reason to assume she won't.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Why isn’t the “war on terror” going better, people ask? I’m not convinced things are that bad, even in Iraq. What were they expecting? But one problem I have recently discovered is that the terrorists are way smarter than us. I learned by reading newspapers that, especially in the London bombings, those plotting mayhem against us are so brilliant we need a special word to describe it. They are “masterminds.” Hang on. Aren’t these the clowns who couldn’t set off the second series of bombs, and from the heart of dawkness made cellphone calls that gave them away? Weren’t some in the first wave apparently duped into believing there’d be time to escape, only to set the “timer” and go boom? Never mind.

You see, in reading the newspapers I encountered headlines like “Police seek terror mastermind” and “Police on hunt for mastermind of bombings” “Suspected bomb mastermind arrested” said another. “Bombing mastermind probably long gone before attack began” warned a fourth. And “Suspected mastermind held in Zambia,” about how 20 careless cellphone calls got this particular genius nabbed. An earlier Citizen story said an Indonesian “who the U.S. says is a terror mastermind in Southeast Asia, has been in prison since 2002.” Doesn’t it lower the bar a bit if you end up behind a set of them?

I’m not quite sure how you get this designation. When I was a kid, I dimly recall “Mastermind” as a board game whose box showed a goateed, suave uber-nerd with exactly the sort of gorgeous woman on his arm you don’t attract through such hobbies. But I had the distinct impression in real life you had to ace the Mensa exam or show James Bond around your secret super-complex or something.

Perhaps standards are different elsewhere, as a Tuesday paper informed me the late King Fahd of Saudi Arabia was also one. Hey, if I’d been born on top of that much oil, I’d look smart and sexy too. I know what Napoleon said about generals who were lucky, but it didn’t include “mastermind” (or “maitre-esprit”).

Napoleon might actually qualify, despite ignoring one of history’s key lessons (don’t march on Moscow). But I always thought masterminds were comparatively rare.

In their use of the term, the newspapers of my youth were, for once, not liberal. I also don’t recall George W. Bush being, knowing, or arguably having met any (except John Kerry -- until we saw his college transcripts.) But hey. That dead guy in the cave? A mastermind. That shirtless slob being handcuffed by bobbies? His friend in the next cell? All masterminds. In fact, so’s his cat.

I have the slightly neurotic habit of taking extensive notes from newspapers, magazines and books so I won’t remember what I expected or wanted to read instead of what I did. I was not on the lookout for this particular term until recently, arguably as it was not so frequent as to be remarkable. So a massive search of newspaper databases would give a more scientific result. But a sweep of my hard drive found 63 instances of the term, and in 50 of those cases (79 per cent of the world’s great thinkers!) it was applied to terrorists. Bummer, huh?

Some might think the club has doubtful standards. In addition to King Fahd and one sardonic use, the non-terrorist masterminds in my notes included WorldCom’s Bernard Ebbers, whoever it was who tried to get Pope John Paul II assassinated, some busted armed robber in Ontario, a guy who printed way too many rubles in 1990, Lyndon Johnson (by Soviet diplomats who thought he had arranged JFK’s assassination), some U.S. school prankster, the U.S. (by Chinese officials who blamed it for Tiananmen), the guy behind the Medak offensive, some American robbers who got caught, Uday Hussein, the point man on Zimbabwe’s farm invasions, a guy executed for corruption in China, Guatamala’s Efrain Rios Montt, general Vo Nguyen Giap and a Greek politician acquitted of embezzlement.

Now some of you may be about to suggest the press are just a tiny bit lazy in their choice of metaphors, that this overuse of “mastermind” is due less to their prevalence among mad bombers than to their rarity in newsrooms. Others may think they are subtly conveying a sense of futility in the West’s struggle with its foes. Not me.

Every third terrorist has an IQ of 160, and George Bush is, to quote that mastermind Dr. No, “just another stupid policeman.” I’m convinced the only reason they haven’t blown us all away is they have so many brilliant schemes for defeating us, and such profound debates about them, that they’re suffering paralysis through analysis. It must be true; it’s in the newspapers.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]