Le miracle du président de Hollande

Now, now, please keep you undies untangled. It is Google Translate, of course, and for all I know it skewed the meaning. The single word in French that I can claim to master is unprintable, more or less.

Anyway, this is about a miracle. The Guardian publishes an article Hollande: the 'indecisive' French president who intervened in Africa by Pierre Haski, where - miracle of miracles - not a single bad word is said about the French intervention in Mail.

When you see a former deputy editor of Libération easily accepting (and on the pages of The Guardian, no less) such an act by a Western power, which happens to be his country as well, you want to ask an obvious question. The question being: what would have the same person written if the deed was done by American (or British) military?

Actually, you don't have to ask: I have prepared a short sampler for you already. Not that you can't predict Mr Haski's drift without reading it.

At least one can enjoy the famous Gallic in-your-face frankness (no pun intended), reading a quote like this from that article:

But abstaining when the Malian president sent an SOS last week would have meant taking a risk no French president wants to take. He would have been held responsible for the eventual fall of Bamako to radical Islamists, with its potential destabilisation of the whole west African region – including neighbouring Niger, France's main source of uranium for its nuclear industry.

Although it has largely taken a back seat in sub-Saharan Africa – compared with the first decades of the post-colonial era when it was clearly running the show – France remains a power to be reckoned with on the continent. Failing to act in such a crisis would have been seen by every French-speaking African government as a sign that France is no longer a reliable ally.

Mer... but I can't exhaust my whole cache of French words in one post.

So there.