Should we bomb London?
If you guys promise to burn down Washington again, we'll take out Downing Street for you.
As to Somalia, my travel agent the US Marines sent me there for an extended holiday. The mission started out simply as a humanitarian one then mission creep eeked in to the lexicon and we stretched further and entered the civil war.
The beginning stages were quite successful as the famine was in large part man made via feudal turf wars. A technical blocking a bridge stopping food shipments because a "tax" wasn't paid is no match for a Cobra gun ship. Then some genius in the UN (and the one in the White House as well) decided that nation building was the word of the day. We all know how it went from there.
I don't know if it's the right thing for your lot to head to Africa, for you to decide. What I do take a degree of exception is to some posters who view a UN mandate as the legitimation of a mission. As if moral clarity is somehow crystallized and the path forward clear via UN vote. Not advocating war by fiat, but the moral authority to act exists because of the circumstances of the particular mission and not via political decree.