One of our major gripes with Syria and Iran is that they allow their borders to be porous to "foreign fighters" entering Iraq to participate in the ongoing unpleasantness there.
An article in today's paper talks about a Somalian detainee named Abdullahi Sudi Arale, alleging that he "held a leadership role in the Council of Islamic Courts" and — worse? — "[had traficked] in counterfeit documents to help foreign fighters get into Somalia."
The Council of Islamic Courts basically ran Somalia for some period of time, until they were driven out of office by the warlords (against whom we fought in the early 1990s) aided by the Ethiopian army. But ... wait a moment ... the Ethiopian army? Once they crossed the border into Somalia, weren't they, too, "foreign fighters"? For that matter, well over 100,000 U.S. soldiers in Iraq hardly qualify as "Iraqi patriots".
The U.S. press — following the lead of the U.S. government, as far as I can tell — has the practice of referring only to volunteers for the other side as "foreign fighters", even though we ourselves qualify as such.
It may be good strategy for the attainment of "victory" (not very well defined, so far) to exclude the other side's foreign fighters; but let's get our terminology straight. The "foreign fighters" on our side far outnumber those filtering in through the Syrian and Iranian borders with Iraq or across the sea from Pakistan into Somalia.