If you were all-powerful and malevolent, how would you unite the fanatics in Mali, Algeria’s Islamists, various Libyan and Tuareg gangsters, Nigeria’s odorous Boko Haram (loose translation: “Western Education Is Forbidden”) and other North African miscreants, including Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb?

The answer: send in American forces. As Paul Pillar, a sensible, former senior intelligence official told The New York Times recently, a US intervention would might rally people to the anti-American cause:

It puts a transnational framework on top of what is fundamentally a set of local concerns, and we risk making ourselves more of an enemy than we would otherwise be.