Quote Originally Posted by KingJaja View Post
You either deal with the root causes or you do nothing at all. You're experience in Iraq should have taught you that.

Anyway, the future is very predictable. If US couldn't figure out Sunni & Shia in Iraq until it was a bit too late, one assumes they know next to nothing about what's really going on in Nigeria.

Don't touch this tar baby unless you've fully figured out what's going on.
I disagree that "we" have to deal with root causes. We have thousands of political, social and economic theorists who all think they understand root causes, but their models for resolving them are either unfeasible or fail when tried. For military intervention, we should focus on achieving limited military objectives, which may be reducing the BH threat. Some problems can be solved, but they can be managed. I'm not advocating for the U.S. to get involved unless we believe important interests are threatened, and then we reduce the threat to those interests.

Underlying issues must be addressed by the locals. If we desire, we can provide capacity building, though we haven't been very successful with that effort. The bottom line is not every problem needs to be solved, it just needs to be managed. Most Americans, myself included, suffer from the savior syndrome. The first step in mitigating the ill advised behavior that this syndrome encourages is self-awareness of it. We can't save the various African nations from themselves, but we can protect our key interests and we might be able to help Africans solve their own problems by providing limited technical assistance (along with the UN and a lot of other nations).