The U.S. strikes in Somalia against suspected Al Qaeda may have looked like a surprise yesterday, or an expedient (if inscrutable) move by the U.S. Administration on the eve of a new war plan in Iraq. But according to a friend of mine, a marine officer who served in neighboring Djibouti in 2005, we shouldn't be so surprised. He writes back to my email query, in hip marine slang:

All I can say is that we have been watching Somalia and keeping our eyes on its borders since before the first strike in the Stan [Afghanistan] and long before the invasion of Iraq. An Islamic state with no government was the obvious place for terrorists to regroup once the war in Central Asia and Iraq made doing business there impossible. Camp Lemonier, Djibouti, has been a forward anti-terrorist base since 2002. Unlike the Stan [Afghanistan] and the Rack[Iraq], the Booty [Djibouti] doesn't get much press, and we like to keep it that way, but there is nothing that happened in Somalia in the last 72 hours that wasn't on the radar screen for a long, long time.

Was the strike effective? It has been reported today that the Al Qaeda member who planned the 1998 bombings against the U.S. Embassies in East Africa may have been killed. The price, however, seems high. As U.S. Politics Guide Kathy Gill points out, the attacks also killed civilians and garnered global censure for the U.S. In the long run, the attempt not only to kill one or two or even three Al Qaeda members, but to do so by supporting competing warlords just because they aren't Islamists, may cost Somalia any hope of stability that it had. This is exactly the kind of situation that comes back to bite superpowers in their achilles' heels (see, for example, my notes on the U.S. proactively funding jihadists in Afghanistan in the late 1970s, to help oust the Soviet archenemy. Those jihadists grew up to become Al Qaeda, in part.)

If the United States is serious about stamping out international terrorism, it should take off its "global war on terror" colored glasses, which have narrowed its vision of the world to a simple battle between Al Qaeda (and all Islamists, it seems) and the United States. Better: a broader, less narrowly ideological, more informed strategic look at the global landscape. Then decide whether long-term goals are always served by powerful airstrikes that have a few individuals in their sights. Because it hasn't worked in Afghanistan or Pakistan.

For reportage on the Somalia strike, also see:

• U.S. Bombs Somalia (?!) (World News)