CHRETIEN UPDATE: Mark Steyn is dissing him and the horse he rode in on:

M. Chrétien, whatever his efficacy as a small-time largesse-dispensing ward-heeler, has never troubled himself to form anything approaching a political philosophy. So, ask him what’s to blame for September 11th, and he falls back on that old standby — “global poverty,” the growing “inequality” between rich and poor.

Let’s spell it out: There’s no such thing. The story of the last 30 years is the emergence of “a new world middle class,” as Professor Xavier Sala-i-Martin calls them in his study The World Distribution Of Income. This class is made up of some 2.5 billion people in the developing world, whose standards of living now approach those of the West. That’s to say, roughly half the people in the developing world are doing pretty well economically. As Virginia Postrel wrote in The New York Times recently, taking the world’s population as a whole, in 1998 “the largest number of people earned about $8,000 — a standard of living equivalent to Portugal’s.”

Why hasn’t the Middle East shared in this economic growth? Because they’re failed states run by kleptocrats who govern by clan and corruption and whose starting point is to exclude half the population — the women — from the economic life of the country. If M. Chrétien wants to give Paul Wells’s salary to President Mubarak, that’s up to him but it will have zero effect on either poverty or terrorism. . . .

The Islamists have no rational demands, and no conceivable changes to U.S. policy will deflect them. M. Chrétien says he formulated his theory –American arrogance plus Osama’s poverty equals global terrorism — on the evening of September 11th. And what’s heartening is that in the last 12 months nothing in the torrent of evidence has stirred our grand buffoon from his complacency.

There’s more.