I personally believe that "radicalization" and "foreign fighters" are two of the most overblown and misunderstood aspects of the current political violence going on across the greater middle east.

People join fighting organizations, legal or non-legal, for all manner of reasons. And people go off to get involved in the fights of others , legal or non-legal, for all manner of reasons as well.

This does not cause these conflicts. We need to worry less about naturally occurring side effects of the tremendous political friction in the world. The US, as an outsider to all this, should focus on how we can help reduce the friction. Instead we fan the flames and attack the smoke.

This also leads us to see what are fundamentally issues of internal governance as some sort of warfare to employ our military power against. The military can help create time and space for civil leaders to get the stuff all in one sack, and the military can help civil security forces mitigate the high end of violence - but there is no enemy that we can defeat and make this all go away. History simply does not support that concept, though historically this is how governments almost always respond.

So, we are in good company, but we will almost certainly achieve the same bad results.