Someone recently said the murder of two French journalists in Mali demonstrated the need there for elections, and Dalrymple responds on his Hilarious Pessimist page at the Salisbury Review:

Have I missed something, or is it not the case that Mali has just had elections that the whole world judged free and fair? These elections followed hard upon the French military intervention to displace the Islamists in the north of the country who were threatening to overthrow the putschists who had just overthrown the president – who had been elected in free and fair elections, the only such elections until then ever held in Mali, but who unfortunately turned out to be a corrupt scoundrel – as, of course, would all his opponents have done if they had won the free and fair elections in his place.

It is also worth remarking, perhaps, that the situation in Mali deteriorated rapidly after the overthrow by France and Britain of Colonel Gaddafi in the name of – among other things – free and fair elections.