NATO allies are promising to assist in Mali, hoping to get their share of the spoils.

Paris is also exploiting the rottenness of the West African national bourgeois regimes, which are lining up to provide cannon fodder for its wars. Ivorian President Alassane Ouattara, installed by means of the 2011 French war in the Ivory Coast, is backing Paris in Mali. Senegalese President Macky Sall, who came to power last year after US- and French-backed protests against President Abdoulaye Wade, will also send troops to Mali, along with Nigeria, Niger and Ghana.

In this submission to neo-colonial rule by the West African bourgeoisies, the Algerian regime plays a key role. Fearing Al Qaeda-linked forces against whom it fought the 1990s Algerian civil war, or an upsurge of the working classhas collapsed in the polls due to its austerity policies and its decision to continue the wars of the preceding president, the widely despised Nicolas Sarkozy. Now it has launched its own bloody imperialist war.

The petty-bourgeois parties that called for an unconditional vote for Hollande in last year’s elections, the Left Front and the New Anti-capitalist Party (NPA), bear political responsibility for the war in Mali. The brief, perfunctory criticism of the war posted by the NPA on its web site does not alter its continuing support for Hollande. In the course of several decades, these forces and the Third World bourgeois nationalists have shifted so far to the right that they now support imperialist war.

It is increasingly clear that the period of decolonization was merely a historical