The U.S. has been a central player in the Somali civil war, backing anti-ICU warlords, providing arms and intelligence to Ethiopian forces, and sending in U.S. Special Forces to assess the impact of bombing raids by U.S. AC-130 gunships aimed at killing ICU leaders with alleged links to Al Qaeda.

The dispatch of Special Forces to Somalia was described by the Washington Post as "the first known case of U.S. boots hitting Somali soil since a disastrous mission to stabilize the country ended in 1994 after Somali militiamen downed two Black Hawk helicopters and killed 18 U.S. soldiers in the capital, Mogadishu."

The impact and extent of the U.S. bombing raids have been subject to dispute, with U.S. officials claiming that eight to ten individuals with suspected links to Al Qaeda were killed with no civilian casualties. The Washington Post has further noted that that the raid failed to hit three top Al Qaeda operatives thought to have taken refuge in Somalia after masterminding the 1998 attack on the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. A U.S. diplomat also claimed that there was only one bombing raid. The human rights and global development group Oxfam has asserted that 70 civilian nomads were killed in multiple U.S. strikes, based on information from their affiliates inside the country.

As U.S. intervention in Somalia deepens, a little-referenced United Nations report from last October documents the role of U.S. allies Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Djibouti, and Uganda in supplying arms and training to the ICU in violation of the UN arms embargo on Somalia. Assistance provided has included training of ICU forces in Egypt, military uniforms from Djibouti, food and ammunition from Saudi Arabia, and air transport, ammunition and anti-aircraft gun components from Uganda. While the bulk of supplies to the ICU have come from Eritrea, the role of U.S. allies once again underscores the risks inherent in arming nations that cannot be trusted to use their military assets in accord with U.S. interests.

It should not be forgotten that the warlords who plunged Somalia into chaos and spurred a massive humanitarian crisis in the early 1990s were armed in part with U.S.-supplied weaponry that had been captured after the fall of U.S.-backed dictator Siad Barre. Past U.S. arms sales have caused devastation and instability in the Horn of Africa. Why can we expect this round to be any different?

The current situation in Somalia provides yet another example of the need for global curbs on the arms trade along the lines of the Arm Trade Treaty that is being promoted by the International Action Network on Small Arms (IANSA) along with sympathetic governments. Yet when the issue of studying such a treaty came up at the United Nations' disarmament committee last year, the United States was the only country to vote against it. The few times it has come up in polling, as in the annual surveys by the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, the majority of Americans express opposition to the U.S. role as the world's leading arms supplier. Public education on this issue is urgently needed if we are to have any chance to move U.S. policy in the right direction.

William D. Hartung is a Senior Research Fellow at the World Policy Institute in New York and the Director of the Institute's Arms Trade Resource Center (www.worldpolicy.org/projects/arms). He can be reached at hartung@newschool.edu.

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