Three people were wounded in a car bomb attack on the French embassy in Tripoli, including one 13-year-old girl, and Libyan investigators say they’ve never seen anything like this before in Tripoli. “Why would France be targeted?” asks the CNN host in this clip covering the car-bomb attack against the French embassy in Tripoli. That’s a good question, especially since Libyans can thank France in large part for the liberation of Tripoli from the Moammar Qaddafi regime:

NBC and Reuters have a brief account of the attack:

A car bomb went off outside the French Embassy in Tripoli, Libya, on Tuesday, a Libyan Foreign Ministry official said.

The official said two guards were hurt, but no one had died.

Television images showed extensive damage to buildings in the area.

“I think there were two blasts, the first was very loud and then there was a smaller one,” a  witness told Reuters. “There was some black smoke at first, and then it turned white.”

Let’s get back to the question posed by the incredulous CNN host.  Why attack France?  For that matter, why attack the US consulate in Benghazi last September?  The US led the intervention that saved Benghazi from an attack by Qaddafi and his forces and allowed the rebellion to remain alive, which included a number of Islamist terror networks operating in eastern Libya.  If anything, they should feel gratitude to the US, France, the UK, and the rest of NATO for liberating them from Qaddafi. The fact that they don’t should be informing our impulse to intervene on behalf of other rebellions with significant participation by Islamist networks — Syria being the prime example here — but probably won’t.

Those Islamist terror networks pushed all of the Western consulates out of Benghazi and all of eastern Libya; we were the last to go.  It looks like they want to push Western interests out of Tripoli, and aren’t wasting time in making that plain, either.  If Libyans aren’t used to seeing that in Tripoli, they’re going to be coming up to speed in short order.