Pour Le Droit d'Intervention Humanitaire: Can A French Socialist Rescue Kandahar?

French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner will embark on a joint mission to Afghanistan next month with his Canadian counterpart, Maxime Bernier - an event "that could presage the announcement of badly needed reinforcements for Kandahar province," the Toronto Star reports.

Kouchner is a soixante-huitard of an especially principled kind. The founder of Doctors Without Borders, and the former head of the United Nations Interim Administration in Kosovo, Kouchner has been called the father of humanitarian interventionism.

He has friends on the left in Canada. He has important acquaintances in the middle (and here, a lengthy profile in the NYT Magazine, notice the byline - it's Michael Ignatieff).

Michael Totten correctly places Kouchner in the socialist tradition of "militant anti-totalitarian liberals and leftists from the generation of 1968 who didn’t become neoconservatives, who started out on the radical left and who remain radicals of the left in more mature versions."

Christopher Hitchens writes: "His principles led Kouchner to defend two oppressed Muslim peoples—those of Yugoslavia and Iraqi Kurdistan—who were faced with extermination at the hands of two parties daring to call themselves socialist. . . I personally find it satisfying that a French socialist was identified with both these victories."

So do I.