The French are going into the Congo with orders to fight when necessary in order to keep the peace, such as it is around there, according to the Telegraph. I am completely in favor, but 100 French Special Forces aren't going to do much good. They need thousands of Special Forces and elite troops in order to clean that mess up, and it's not only the Congo, it's also Rwanda and Burundi and Uganda and Angola and Zimbabwe.

Questions: Do the French have UN approval for this little expedition? If they don't have it, why not? Seems that the French have attempted to set the precedent that the US has to check with the UN in case we want to attack somebody. To be consistent, they can't send their guys roaming all over Africa without asking anybody, at the same time they tell us we can't take out a major international criminal without their permission. Also, how do we know the French aren't there just to grab the diamonds and the other mineral riches of the Congo? They said, after all, that we just went into Iraq to grab the oil. Why should anybody believe that the French are any more moral and altruistic than we are? I challenge Robert Fisk to head off to Congo and start turning out exposés on the behavior of French troops in Kivu or wherever they are. But I'm afraid he'll be staying in his luxurious manse in Beirut while regurgitating everything negative anybody, no matter who, tells him about the United States.