HAPPILY, W DOESN'T SPEAK FRENCH:

We're All Interventionists Now: How do you say 'coalition of the willing' in French? (WSJ, 4/08/11)

France is acting under the authority of a humanitarian U.N. mandate to protect civilians, just as the U.S. and its allies are doing in Libya. But it's hard to imagine that Paris would have intervened militarily if it didn't believe that its interest in preserving influence over a former colony was critically at stake. In the age of humanitarian intervention, the national interest has become the motive that dare not speak its name.

All this makes for a telling contrast with the debate over the invasion of Iraq, in which a previous French government, along with the mandarins at the U.N., did what they could to stop the Bush Administration from overthrowing Saddam's atrocious regime, despite a dozen years of "diplomacy" and more than a dozen U.N. mandates. When it comes to military intervention, apparently the case sounds better when it is offered as "humanitarianism" and rendered in—and by—the French.

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