Who is more rational — Gaddafi or the Western allies bombing him?

THERE has always been a special relationship between Ireland and France going back to at least 1798. The French, unlike the brutish Brits, are a civilised, rational people, right?

Any such notions have been dispelled recently. Whoever thought the French were soft — “cheese-eating surrender monkeys” even — has been proved very wrong by the attacks on Colonel Gaddafi’s forces.

Actually, the French never were the effete beings of American caricature or the high-minded rationalists of Irish imagining. The first Indochina War and the Algerian War both saw France fight with ferocity, frequently employing torture.