Well I learned the word from Bejot and I want to keep using it.  But really, go back and look at the blogosphere, and the writing on Mali is exactly the same as the writing on Darfur back in 2004.  Pretty soon we’ll have a breathless The New Yorker article by the new Samantha Power and John Prendergast team, with a beheading anecdote thrown in for good measure and a translation story (about a beheading!)  for an audience to chuckle at.

$2 billion will be spent on the war, and not a penny for publishing and distributing cheap editions of Amkoullel etc.  Every adult Malian could get a free copy for what, $10million?  The price of the one helicopter shot down so far.

Interventions like this lead everyone into a mass of contradictions; every commentator becomes an inconsistent pragmatist, and the ultimate justification becomes, “well, probably here it will be pretty easy and successful, and so it is a good idea I guess,” typically ignoring that each intervention then influences the politics/narratives for subsequent scenarios, so the narrative after Somalia 1991 was “intervention=bad” and ended up with France protecting the genocidaires in Rwanda…. everyone looks for anecdotes that confirm the position they happened to take according to the meal they happened to digest that evening…. and don’t want to think about how My Lai coverup or Abu Ghraib or anything else “fits in”… that would lead to messy “I don’t know” and to be a pundit you have to know.

Ultimately, hard to escape the feeling that intervention driven by low domestic poll numbers of Hollande… I mean, would a Saharan Islamist regime really pose a national security threat to France greater than Iran or Libya or the Islamists in Algeria?  Did France invade there?  Did France do one really creative thing in Mali before intervening militarily (I’m thinking Antanus Mockus creative here…)?