Traveling to Paris in search of business for a Belgian steel mill, after trying 14 days to find the responsible person in the ministry of energy, I sent a telex to the "Director General of the ministry of Energy, department Coal Mines", even though I hadn't a clue what his name was.

Arriving unannounced the next morning at the ministry I bluntly show my telex to a clerk with a pretentious uniform, and, miracle of miracles, he calls somebody who calls somebody and another uniformed clerk appears who guides me through the portals of heaven.
 
I am ushered in a palatial office, compared to which the Oval Office is a cubicle, and I am introduced to a rotund gentleman behind a massive desk: Director General Vautran of the French Coal Mines. My telex had specified why I wanted to see this Emperor of the French Mines.

He looks at me and my young face, asks me my age and: "Do you drink wine?"  I admit that I like a glass from time to time and let slip that my father-in-law is a wine merchant. He ducks behind his imperial desk and hauls a 5 liter (1½ gallon) belly bottle of wine, fills two glasses, hands me one, says "santé" and gulps his down. It is not quite 9 o'clock in the morning.

[Vaclav Klaus is President of the Czech Republic]

It is a great pleasure to announce the English translation of my book Blue Planet in Green Shackles, published by the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Authors often claim their books speak for themselves. I cautiously agree and will, therefore, speak not about the book itself but about my motivations to write it.

My thinking today is substantially influenced by the fact that I spent most of my life under a Communist regime which ignored and brutally violated human freedom, which wanted to command not only people but also nature itself.

To "command wind and rain" is one of the famous slogans I remember since my childhood. This experience taught me that freedom and rational dealing with the environment are indivisible. It formed my views on the fragility and vulnerability of free society and gave me a special sensitivity to all kinds of factors which may endanger it.

I do not, however, live in the past and do not see the future threats to free society coming from the old and old-fashioned communist ideology. The name of the new danger will undoubtedly be different, but its substance will be very similar.

Whenever retreat-now activists or their favored presidential aspirant are confronted with our progress in Iraq, their stock reply is, "Al Qaeda wasn't in Iraq in 2003."

Well, I happen to agree with Sen. Barack Hussein Obama and his supporters on that count: At most, the terrorists had a tenuous connection with Saddam's regime. But it's 2008, not 2003. And our next president will take office in 2009. It's today's reality that matters.

And today's reality is that Al Qaeda is nearing final collapse, Iran has failed in its bid to take over Iraq, and the democratically elected government is gaining in popularity.

What don't the critics like? Democracy? The defeat of Al Qaeda? Moslems turning to the US military for help? Troop cuts? The dramatically improved human-rights situation? What's the problem here?

The answer's simple:

Forty years ago I found out what it's like to do business with Germans.  The lessons learned, I've discovered since, can apply to dealing with businessfolk in general who don't play fair.

During my stay as a director in a Belgian steel mill I was in direct competition with the biggest steel mills of Germany. I was the first to export our special steels to Germany, something like selling sand to the Arabs.

When I started travelling to Germany I found a closed market from the heavy steel industry down to the smallest distributor. They had one price list and the biggest buyers, the German coal mines, still had to buy rigidly from the local distributor. The mines bought thousands and thousands of tons per week and the local distributor got rich while asleep. It was an ironclad market, completely locked up. When I visited the distributors they laughed me out of town.

So I went to the German coal mines and the German ship yards with impossibly low prices. What I expected happened, those consumers called their distributors, who called the big steel mills. Within a couple of weeks I was called out of the blue by a "Herr General Direktor Wolff" who from very high in his steel blue sky ordered me to cease my foolish interference in the German market or else!

I told him politely that I was going into the German steel market no matter what...

Do we still have troops in Iraq? Is there still a conflict over there?

If you rely on the so-called mainstream media, you may have difficulty answering those questions these days. As Iraqi and Coalition forces pile up one success after another, Iraq has magically vanished from the headlines.

Want a real "inconvenient truth?" Progress in Iraq is powerful and accelerating.

But that fact isn't helpful to elite media commissars and cadres determined to decide the presidential race over our heads. How dare our troops win? Even worse, Iraqi troops are winning. Daily.

You won't see that above the fold in The New York Times. And forget the Obama-intoxicated news networks - they've adopted his story line that the clock stopped back in 2003.

As corrosive as the Saudis have been for our system, they're far worse for Moslems.

The crucial point you have to grasp is that the Saudis don't give a downtown damn about Moslems - flesh-and-blood men, women or children. They only care about Islam. They'd sacrifice tens of millions of Moslems to further their perversion of the faith.

I've visited over a dozen Moslem countries and many more that have significant Moslem minorities. In every case, I've found the Saudis funding evil.

From Thailand to the United States, the Saudi goal is to prevent Moslems from integrating into their host societies. In poor countries, such as Kenya, they pay families to pull their children out of state schools and send them to madrassahs - where they learn to recite the Koran, but no career skills.

The Saudis don't mind if Moslems live in poverty and squalor - as long as Moslems don't identify with the societies around them. They want strict religious and cultural apartheid.

This is a personal story of what it's like doing business in Europe - specifically a part of Europe called Wallonia, or French-speaking Belgium.

In 1976 Occidental Oil constructed the Claymore Alpha gas production platform for the North Sea.

The platform had a total steel component of more than 600,000 tons. The modus operandi was to construct the platforms with prefabricated modules of 500 tons weight max each and put them together module by module. Since the North Sea only allows a good weather gap of 1 to 2 months each year in summer time, the costs and time delays were staggering.

A Dutch maritime engineer-pioneer, Pieter Heerema, had the fantastic idea to start constructing with 5,000 ton modules, ten times as big as before. He was the first to use an old tanker, welding compartments in it, and with the help of sensors and computer steering pump with massive pumps seawater in or out of the different compartments to counterbalance  the heavy loads.

But he had a very big problem.  I made the mistake of trying to solve it in Belgium.