A shred of proof that he isn’t always drinking the bong water

«Jacques Chirac has hinted that he is prepared to use nuclear weapons against any state that carries out a terrorist attack against France.

The French president said France must be able to hit hard at a hostile state's "capacity to act".»

Granted, he said this while pandering to submariners for their affection or their votes, but when he’s beyond the reach of a society given to bi-polar bouts of self-contempt and occasions of hubris, he shows a clear, un-PC-ified understanding of detterence and to some extent conflict management. By no means would it allow the west to live with terror organizations or government-proxy terror groups having WMDs as the BBC seems to hope for, but it would give them something to think about.

They might gage his intestinal fortitude, and start laughing when they realize that he would probably never retaliate in that fashion, but it's a start - perhaps a steady return to a better and more realistic concept of their own national exceptionalism.

Just as the Israelis learned to make the cost of Jewish blood high, and the balance struck by Ike and Khrushchev, the deterrent and not the drumming circle is what makes the peace.