The French Military: Still Useless.

Over the past two days the French military have been extremely busy. Over Thursday night they deployed troops to Mali to help Malian troops fight Al Qaeda militants who have been advancing from the north of the country since the fall of Qaddafi in Libya. Although the situation in Mali has been bad and has been getting worse for a long time what triggered the intervention was the kidnapping by Al Qaeda fighters of a number of French nationals. As these Islamist fighters are the same people that the UK, Saudi Arabia and Qatar were arming, training and building relationships with in order to overthrow Qaddafi it's pretty obvious that the kidnapping was carried out specifically to trap France into a conflict in Mali in order to stop it intervening in the Central African Republic (CAR) to support the government against the rebel alliance (Seleka).

Having finally worked that one out over Friday night French special forces mounted a raid to free a hostage being held by al-Shaabab in Somalia. This raid was a complete failure with the hostage being killed, a soldier being killed and another missing presumed taken hostage. The intention of the raid was to draw comparisons between a possible solution for Mali and the US' great mistake in Somalia. In roughly 2005/06 US special forces fought a secret war in Somalia in order to overthrow the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC) who were the de-facto government in the failed state. The problem with this is that although they had the word Islam in their name the UIC weren't linked to Al Qaeda in any meaningful way and were much more focused on reconstructing the damaged country then waging Jihad. Their main problem was dealing with al-Sahaab which roughly translates as "The armed youth." With the UIC out of the way al-Sahaab proceeded to cause chaos in the way that only a 15 year old with an assault rifle truly can. Their presence and piracy were used to garner western support for intervention in Somalia and it now looks like the nation will be broken up with the southern portion being used as an export route from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) via Rwanda. Sadly the Somalia model won't work in Mali because the Islamists in Mali are militant, heavily armed and deeply embedded in the nation. However deploying French troops to CAR instead would have given France an excellent excuse as to why either the UK or the US would have to sort out Mali.

Rwanda of course have just begun their 2 year membership of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) so if Susan Rice is going to continue in her post the US is going to get massacred. It's a shame then that I'll be tied up with Rihanna's "Diamonds" tour because try to guess what most of these African conflicts are about. Seriously if I was in her management team at this point I would be very seriously looking at cancelling the tour and recouping the loss by suing Chris Brown et al and the Los Angles probation service. Either that or just change the name.

13:00 on 12/1/13.