Ivory Coast's plight

The Providence Journal: Instability is a way of life in West Africa, and Ivory Coast is the latest tragic example. A 2-year-old cease-fire, brokered by France, between Muslim rebels and the government of President Laurent Gbagbo has broken down -- probably irretrievably -- and thousands of French troops are trying to protect lives and maintain civil order in this former French colony.
Ostensibly, this all began when a raid by Ivory Coast's air force killed some French peacekeepers enforcing the cease-fire. It seems fairly obvious that the air raid was intentional, for it was swiftly followed with coordinated attacks on French nationals in the country. French troops occupied Ivory Coast's two main airports, began ferrying expatriates to Paris, and moved to separate government troops from rebel forces, to save civilian lives.
Irony
There is, of course, a certain irony in all this. France has been the leading diplomatic critic of American action in Iraq, yet France has sought to protect its interests in Ivory Coast, supervise the truce, occupy the airports and police the capital and surrounding countryside without either the permission of the U.N. Security Council or -- unlike the United States in Iraq -- the help of allies. This has not been an easy task. Nonetheless, it is clearly necessary to save lives and to prevent Ivory Coast from descending into murderous chaos.
The Bush administration has offered France its full support. The Gbagbo government has systematically violated the cease-fire and blocked power-sharing arrangements that were an important element of the truce. The Muslim rebels concluded that the cease-fire was a secondhand device to crush their movement, and the Gbagbo government sees French peacekeepers as the main obstacle to its oppression of Muslim Ivorians.
You could argue that the liberation of Iraq, with the U.S. and coalition commitment to all-party democratic elections in January, is something like the French mission in Ivory Coast writ large: just a lot more multinational.