Making kebab out of Shabab

Jeffrey Gettleman has an article in The New York Times about Somalia:

The Kenyan military stormed into Somalia recently, sending hundreds of troops to battle the al-Shabab militant group, and becoming the latest East African country to be dragged into Somalia’s intractable anarchy.
Ethiopia occupied much of Somalia in 2007, and thousands of Ugandan and Burundian troops are stationed there now, serving as African Union peacekeepers, trying to shore up Somalia’s weak transitional government. Those countries have a history of civil war and relatively active armies, while Kenya is known for its mild foreign policy, and is one of the few nations in the region that has never been led by a military man.
According to Kenyan security officials, several hundred Kenyan soldiers crossed into Somalia in a column of armored trucks and tanks, backed by helicopters, which have begun to bomb and strafe al-Shabab positions. More Kenyan soldiers are apparently on their way. “They’re going all the way to Kismayo,” said one Kenyan security official, referring to a Shabab-controlled port city in southern Somalia. “We’re going to clear the Shabab out.”
A Somali military commander said warplanes carried out airstrikes on al-Shabab bases in southern Somalia, according to Reuters, but he could not confirm that the aircraft were Kenyan.
al-Shabab is a ruthless insurgent group; they have pledged allegiance to al-Qaeda and have become masters of suicide bombs, slaughtering countless civilians in their own country and scores of pub-goers in Uganda in July 2010, apparently as a reprisal for Uganda’s involvement in Somalia. Many Kenyans are now concerned that al-Shabab may try to kill Kenyans, or some of the hundreds of thousands of tourists who flock to see the country’s fabled wildlife parks each year.
“It worries me,” said John Githongo, a political analyst and former Kenyan government official. An al-Shabab attack is “overdue, to be very grimly honest,” he said, adding that Kenya’s decision to wade into Somalia was only going to raise the risks.
The Kenyan government has justified its actions, blaming al-Shabab for a recent string of kidnappings of Westerners in Kenya. George Saitoti, Kenya’s internal security minister, announced that Kenyan forces would begin hitting back, even though many analysts have said that the kidnappings were not the work of al-Shabab, but of Somali bandits and pirates. “Our territorial integrity is threatened,” Saitoti said. “It means we are now going to pursue the enemy, the al-Shabab, to wherever they will be.”
Kenyan security forces have intervened in Somalia before, back in the 1960s, when Somalia tried to foment an uprising in the ethnic Somali parts of Kenya along the border. More recently, the Kenyan Army, which is trained by British and American advisers, has been aiding Somali militias along the border in an effort to push back al-Shabab, who control much of southern Somalia, and create a buffer zone. Occasionally, small contingents of Kenyan troops have crossed into Somalia, though the maneuvers were usually covert, with the government covering up casualties.
But Githongo and others could not remember a time when Kenyan forces had so overtly intervened in a neighboring country. “There’s no precedent,” Githongo said.
al-Qaeda terrorists have shown they can strike in Kenya, blowing up the United States embassy in Nairobi in 1998 and bombing a tourist hotel in Mombasa, on the Indian Ocean coast, in 2002. Some of the terrorists involved in those attacks later hid in Somalia, which has been mired in various stages of anarchy since the central government collapsed in 1991.

Rico says this might be a good precedent for our eventual incursion into Northern Mexico. (And the kebab joke only works with napalm so, fortunately, the Kenyans are using aircraft...)