http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ivan-eland/terrorist-attack-on-kenya_b_3977601.html

Ivan Eland

Senior Fellow and Director of the Center on Peace & Liberty, The Independent Institute

Terrorist Attack on Kenyan Shopping Mall Should Cause Americans to Pause

Posted: 09/25/2013 

The horrible carnage inflicted by the Somali Al-Shabab Islamist group on a Kenyan shopping mall should cause the U.S. government to reassess its foreign policy of profligate worldwide intervention. Like most other reporting on terrorist attacks, the American and, to a lesser extent, foreign media seem to treat this incident a senseless attack by Islamist crazies that came out of the blue, with its causation muddled at best. The U.S. media did focus on the FBI's investigation into the group's claim that some of its fighters are Americans -- with the implied threat that they could take their martial training and easy access to the United States to return and cause the same pointless mayhem here -- without any analysis about why an obscure Somali group would want to threaten a faraway superpower. A little history is very instructive.