In a story that wants to be an editorial, the Philadelphia Inquirer's Ken Dilanian weighs in on what's behind the riots in France:

Looking as wary as U.S. soldiers in the streets of Iraq's Sunni Triangle, the armor-clad police pointed shields and rubber-projectile cannons at groups of mostly black and Arab residents, who gazed back with hard stares. The officers left after a few minutes, dodging rotten fruit thrown from high windows.

"The only dialogue between the French state and the ghetto is through the police," said Karin Allawi, 24, a high school counselor who watched the scene. "And this is how the police communicate. It's been that way for 30 years."

For the last 11 days, the Parisian ghettos have been communicating back, in a fit of riotous rage that has spread across the country, resulting in vast property destruction and a handful of serious injuries. About 1,300 cars were burned on Saturday night alone, authorities said.

The riots were growing more violent - and looking increasingly well-organized. Last night, youths ordered passengers off a bus in southern France, then torched it.

On Saturday night, police found a gasoline bomb-making factory in a building in Evry, south of Paris. More than 100 bottles were ready to be turned into bombs and 50 were already prepared. Fuel stocks and hoods for hiding rioters' faces also were found, the Justice Ministry said. Police arrested six people, all under 18.

Isn't that a quagmire?

Isn't it a little premature to be implying that the French riots are a quagmire?

While I have a problem with Dilanian's analogy, because I disagree with the apparently underlying "quagmire" premise, there's more for American readers to ponder than the analogy to Iraq. There's also an analogy to America's race problem -- only the situation in France is described as, well, better:

Many of those suburbs have come to resemble the worst of America's inner cities - segregated pockets of alienation - although there are important differences.

On one hand, the French welfare state, with its universal health care and generous payments to the long-term unemployed, has ensured that the French underclass - which includes large numbers of ethnic minorities - does not suffer the kind of privation widely experienced by the poorest Americans. And, although crime in the suburban ghettos is common, guns are not, so neither is murder.

Many of today's young Arabs, whose parents and grandparents came here from France's former colonies to work, say they do not feel a sense of belonging in the country in which they grew up.

They face job discrimination, they say, and there is a lack of Arab or African representation in parliament, in local government, in the media, and in corporate boardrooms.

A few hours talking to these young people makes it clear that French welfare payments do not counter their sense of having been rejected by society.

However, Glenn links to a fascinating piece by Brussels Journal which argues that the analogy to American blacks is hopelessy inapt:

Those media that tell us that the rioting “youths” want to be a part of our society and feel left out of it, are misrepresenting the facts. As the insurgents see it, they are not a part of our society and they want us to keep out of theirs. The violence in France is in no way comparable with that of the blacks in the U.S. in the 1960s. The Paris correspondent of The New York Times who writes that this a “variant of the same problem” is either lying or does not know what he is talking about. The violence in France is of the type one finds when one group wants to assert its authority and drive the others out of its territory. American MSM who imply that there is a direct line from Rosa Parks, the black woman who refused to stand up for a white man on an American bus in 1955, to the rabble that are now throwing molotov cocktails into French buses containing passengers, are misrepresenting the facts.

I'm fascinated by the fact that there are as many explanations for the causes of the unrest as there are reports.

ABC News has a different spin from the Inquirer:

Authorities say drug traffickers and Islamist militants are helping organize the unrest, via the Internet and mobile phones, among the North and sub-Saharan African immigrant communities who make up a significant part of many suburban housing estates.

The violence has tarnished France's image abroad, forcing Villepin to cancel a trip to Canada, while Russia and the United States have warned their citizens to avoid troubled suburbs.

Neighboring Germany, too, has a large immigrant population, including over 3 million Muslims — most of Turkish origin.

Wolfgang Bosbach, deputy leader of the conservative Christian Democrats in parliament, said Germany should be under no illusion that similar events could happen there too.

The New York Times sees the riots as a failure of assimilation:

The government has been embarrassed by its inability to quell the disturbances, which have called into question its unique integration model, which discourages recognizing ethnic, religious or cultural differences in favor of French unity. There is no affirmative action, for example, and religious symbols, like the Muslim veil, are banned in schools.

"The republican integration model, on which France has for decades based its self-perception, is in flames," the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung declared. An editorial in Germany's Süddeutsche Zeitung called the violence around Paris an "intifada at the city gates," a reference to the anti-Israeli uprising by Palestinians.

Writers across the spectrum cite the failure of assimilation as a key ingredient. Arguing that "French Arabs have been carrying on a low-level intifada against synagogues, kosher butchers, Jewish schools, etc.," Mark Steyn goes so far as to ridicule the idea that the rioters are even "French":

As Thursday's edition of the Guardian reported in London: ''French youths fired at police and burned over 300 cars last night as towns around Paris experienced their worst night of violence in a week of urban unrest.''

''French youths,'' huh? You mean Pierre and Jacques and Marcel and Alphonse? Granted that most of the "youths" are technically citizens of the French Republic, it doesn't take much time in les banlieus of Paris to discover that the rioters do not think of their primary identity as ''French'': They're young men from North Africa growing ever more estranged from the broader community with each passing year and wedded ever more intensely to an assertive Muslim identity more implacable than anything you're likely to find in the Middle East. After four somnolent years, it turns out finally that there really is an explosive ''Arab street,'' but it's in Clichy-sous-Bois.

If I could editorialize for a second, I'd point out that in all fairness, neither assimilation nor multiculturalism would seem to be possible in xenophobic, intolerant France (a place where English words aren't just frowned on; they're banned!) The idea that anyone might think of France as a "melting pot" is almost absurd. Despite whatever rhetoric its leaders might use, I don't think France is comfortable with other cultures -- and whether they are to be assimilated or merely tolerated in a segregated form.

Analyzing a piece by Francis Fukuyama, Belmont Club's Wretchard explores the tension between multiculturalism and assimilation:

Is it possible to "reverse the counterproductive multiculturalist policies that sheltered radicalism, and crack down on extremists" and then "reformulate their definitions of national identity to be more accepting of people from non-Western backgrounds"? Or isn't that rather like taking two aspirins prior to massaging your head with a claw hammer?

Frankly, I don't think the forced analogies to "America's inner cities" are helpful, and while I understand the need to make the news interesting I'm a bit disappointed to see the Inquirer promoting them.

But since everyone has a different take on the French riots (and since I want to try to be fair), I might as well take a look at riots with which I'm more familiar, not to search for an analogy but to see whether there's a common thread. The famous South Central rioting in Los Angeles, while ignited in black neighborhoods in reaction to the videotaped beating of Rodney King, quickly spread into many other neighborhoods in the form of opportunistic behavior by assorted criminals, thugs, and even people who wanted to run wild and trash things.

There's no escaping the simple fact that if you're young and wild, riots are cool! (And being a rioter is a hell of a way to impress your friends....)

I saw the same thing in Berkeley in the case of the various "People's Park" riots. Riots can be ignited by radicals, but the initial "reason" quickly morphs into a crassly opportunistic excuse, or in other cases is forgotten. It's just a riot, and people who like riots pour into the streets.

I was in attendance at San Francisco's Dan White Riot -- a gay riot, which -- as I've said before -- was about as "civilized" as a riot can get. But even there, opportunists apppeared out of nowhere, mingling with the crowd and exorting them to do things like attack the San Francisco Opera House. (Something gay rioters refused to do.) But even that riot (a fluke by rioting standards), came very close to going beyond it's original attack-the-police purpose, and that's because of the dangerous and evil nature inherent in mob violence.

Maybe it's because I'm twenty six years older, and maybe it's because I feel a bit guilty at having been so close to the center of the action, but I don't think mob violence should be encouraged. Ever. Whether by misleading analogies or by art reviews which shelter radicalism.

The latter may be a stretch, because whether the Inquirer sheltered radicalism or not, certainly the paper didn't glorify mob violence. All they did was helped promote an artist who sells T-shirts like this:

(At least I hope that's not glorification of mob violence.)

UPDATE: Glenn Reynolds has more, including a link to this classic Clockwork Orange (that's "L'horloge orange" for all you despicable Yankees), life-imitates-art piece from Affordable Housing Institute. My favorite:

Where there is free-flowing violence, there are megalomaniacs ready to use it.