What did al-Shabaab do ???

Harakat al-Shabaab al-Mujahideen (HSM) (Arabic: حركة الشباب المجاهدين‎; Ḥarakat ash-Shabāb al-Mujāhidīn, Somali: Xarakada Mujaahidiinta Alshabaab, "Mujahideen Youth Movement" or "Movement of Striving Youth"), more commonly known as al-Shabaab (Arabic: الشباب‎, "The Youth" or "The Boys"), is the Somalia-based cell of the militant Islamist group al-Qaeda. [from Wikipedia]

Sounds more or less like a Somali version of the Taliban, no?

What did al-Shabaab just do in Kenya, and why? Here are two analyses:

http://fff.org/explore-freedom/article/the-kenyan-massacres-roots-in-americas-somalia-policy/

http://scotthorton.org/2013/09/23/92313-thomas-c-mountain/

How should this be characterized? Here are some definitions [all from Wikipedia]:

War is an organised and often prolonged armed conflict that is carried out by states or non-state actors. It is characterised by extreme violence, social disruption, and economic destruction.

Asymmetric warfare is war between belligerents whose relative military power differs significantly, or whose strategy or tactics differ significantly.

Terrorism is the systematic use of violent terror as a means of coercion. In the international community, however, terrorism has no legally binding, criminal law definition.

Humanitarian intervention has been defined as a state's use of military force against another state when the chief publicly declared aim of that military action is ending human-rights violations being perpetrated by the state against which it is directed.

The impression I get from all this is that if you are a nation, and especially if you are the United States, you can use all the extreme violence, social disruption, and economic destruction you want, and it will be deemed to be "war" or maybe even "humanitarian intervention". Anyone who fights back, justified or not, will be called a "terrorist".

Here's something we should consider, Colonel Kurtz's soliloquy from Apocalypse Now:

I've seen horrors... horrors that you've seen. But you have no right to call me a murderer. You have a right to kill me. You have a right to do that... but you have no right to judge me. It's impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means. Horror... Horror has a face... and you must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not, then they are enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies! I remember when I was with Special Forces... seems a thousand centuries ago. We went into a camp to inoculate some children. We left the camp after we had inoculated the children for polio, and this old man came running after us and he was crying. He couldn't see. We went back there, and they had come and hacked off every inoculated arm. There they were in a pile. A pile of little arms. And I remember... I... I... I cried, I wept like some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out; I didn't know what I wanted to do! And I want to remember it. I never want to forget it... I never want to forget. And then I realized... like I was shot... like I was shot with a diamond... a diamond bullet right through my forehead. And I thought, my God... the genius of that! The genius! The will to do that! Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure. And then I realized they were stronger than we, because they could stand that these were not monsters, these were men... trained cadres. These men who fought with their hearts, who had families, who had children, who were filled with love... but they had the strength... the strength... to do that. If I had ten divisions of those men, our troubles here would be over very quickly. You have to have men who are moral... and at the same time who are able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill without feeling... without passion... without judgment... without judgment! Because it's judgment that defeats us.

Men who are moral ... and who are able to kill without judgment.

To whom does that description apply: to us, or to al-Shabaab? To both, or to neither?

People in the Horn of Africa are starving, and again we are using food as a weapon against them, aiding the processes of starvation and killing as just another phase of our war on Islam:

http://fff.org/explore-freedom/article/u-s-government-to-blame-for-somalias-misery/

Libya was a breadbasket for the region, so we destroyed it and stole their water. Syrians were suffering from drought and famine, and instead of helping we fomented their civil war. Egypt also may soon be suffering from famine, so our ally Ethiopia is damming the Blue Nile River, which will make that famine worse.

Is our goal to starve them? Do we really expect no one to fight back? And when they do fight back, will we call it "war" or "terrorism", or will anyone even be able to tell the difference?