Former French PM: Mali Intervention Not Well Thought Out, Not French Way, Kind of Like Iraq

Dominique Villepin, who opposed the US invasion of Iraq, asked how did neoconservatism pollute French thinking

Former French prime minister Dominique de Villepin has warned that military intervention in Mali risked dragging the country into an interminable conflict in the former French colony, was ill thought-out, and "not the French way".

In an editorial for the Sunday newspaper, Le Journal du Dimanche, Villepin compared France's mission to stem Islamists advances into southern Mali to "a decade of lost wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya".