French for "lancing the boil". I was not expecting François Hollande, the newly-elected French Socialist President, to grow a pair at all, but he has, and a lot sooner than could be hoped for. The intervention North of the Macina was certainly triggered by a dire emergency on the ground, and what remains to be seen is whether the French army's deployment is sufficiently vigorous and determined to defeat the insurgency. To date, the numbers seem to indicate that such a victory is not in the cards, although the military forces from the ECOWAS neighboring countries, and maybe those of additional, i.e, European, allies are still to reach the theater. What the French action in Mali will probably achieve, however, is an early maturation of the Islamist abcess in France itself. The AQ affiliate groups that have been incubating in France's numerous urban and suburban Mu... will most certainly respond to the situation in Mali with terrorist violence, thus prepping the French public opinion for the inevitable and brutal crackdown by the government and its armed forces. No right-wing government could ever have achieved that, but the fact that the Left is in power, along with the shock and the horror of the coming terror attacks, will probably silence most of the virtuous indignation of the chattering classes and make possible an attempt by the goverment to reinstate the Republic's sovereignty in what they call the "Zones Urbaines Sensibles" (ZUS, sensitive urban areas), a politically-correct term designating the heavily-armed no-go zones in which the French authorities have held no sway for decades, and which have been taken over by a coalition of petty criminals and Wahabbi and Salafi preachers.