The European Union can suck it. I don't see them volunteering their forces to help.

See... I disagree with a lot of American foreign policy. I think President Bush and Vice President Cheney should resign in disgrace for their chicanery around Iraq. I actually think another couple of days of diplomacy should have been tried with Afghanistan (there was some room for compromise that a more intelligent foreign policy team could have made room for), or, failing that, we should have left more troops in Afghanistan.

But this strike, I can agree with. Get the cooperation of the locals (the Ethiopians and the Transitional Federal Government), let them wipe out the base, and we'll hunt down the people who hurt us. This is how the War on Terror is supposed to work - make low-cost strikes on the people who are actually hurting us. The Iraqi people... they just want us the hell out of their country. But these Union of Islamic Courts people were aiding and abetting terrorists quite openly, and for that they deserved to be beaten up by the Ethiopians.

Furthermore, the end result is a more stable Somalia, in the long run. The Courts were already turning on the people, and vice versa - witness the Fall of Mogadishu for a telling example of just how little support they had left. The TFG can actually bring in the more stable region of Puntland, and possibly Somaliland (if arm-twisted), into a federal republic. By involving the warlords and making them work together, there is an opportunity to transition them into a more stable government. Is it going to be perfect? No. But it's better than Islamists creating a base for Al-Qaeda in the Horn of Africa - right next to Ethiopia and Kenya.