WASHINGTON, Dec. 27 (UPI) -- The incoming chairman of the powerful Senate Committee on Foreign Relations says he will be looking closely at U.S. policy options and mistakes in Somalia.
"We're going to be focusing on it," Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., told reporters in a conference call Tuesday, adding he had assigned staff to follow events in the war-torn nation's worsening conflict with Ethiopia. He said it was too early to say when the committee would hold hearings on the issue, but "I'm sure we will at some point."
In recent days, Ethiopian troops and airpower supporting the weak but internationally recognized Transitional Federal Government of Somalia have pushed towards the capital of Mogadishu -- currently held by a coalition of Islamic militias dubbed the Islamic Courts Union, or ICU.
The ICU is accused by U.S. and Ethiopian authorities of harboring Islamic terrorists, including several loyal to al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden. U.S. officials have also said recently that the influence of bin Laden-linked militias in the coalition is rising.
One of the questions Biden said he was following was whether there might have been a tacit U.S. "green light" to Ethiopia to deploy their troops across the border into Somalia in support of the federal government, a move that has apparently bolstered the claims of the ICU to be fighting a defensive Jihad, or Islamic holy war, against the mainly Christian Ethiopians.
Stressing he did not know for certain, Biden said, "It appears as though there's been the tacit (U.S.) approval" for "getting (the) Ethiopians to weigh in here."
"I can't imagine it happening otherwise," he added.
Biden said U.S. options needed to be evaluated in the light of what he called a mistaken past policy of CIA support for anti-Islamic warlords, whose rapacious corruption, in the view of many observers, only fuelled support for the ICU.
U.S. support for Ethiopia's incursion would have to be looked at "given the options that we have relative to the initial mistakes made," he said, adding "On its face, it's troublesome. But I'm not prepared to comment beyond that without learning more about" what (the administration) has in mind regarding the policy.
