Bush to push international action against pirates

In one of its final foreign policy initiatives, the Bush administration plans to push for a broader international accord on how to suppress piracy in waters off Somalia’s lawless coast, officials say.

Without committing more U.S. Navy ships, the administration wants to tap into what officials see as a growing enthusiasm in Europe and elsewhere for more effective coordinated action against the Somali pirates. Administration officials view the current effort as lacking coherence, as pirates score more and bigger shipping prizes.

Spearheading the administration’s case, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice intends to make a pitch at a United Nations anti-piracy meeting in New York on Tuesday with her counterparts from a number of nations with a stake in solving the problem.

“I expect in the coming weeks we will work within the U.N. to give the international system better policy tools to more effectively address the problem and its root causes,” State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said.

That includes pressing for an international peacekeeping force in Somalia to replace an Ethiopian-led force that is to depart soon, he said. The pirates are Somalis based in camps near coastal port villages. The U.S. says they have links to an Islamic extremist group that has taken control of much of the country.

The administration has decided it needs to be more active against piracy, if only because the U.S. Navy is the world’s predominant sea power and the United States has a long-standing interest in freedom of navigation. But officials want to avoid appearing to force action on partner nations, especially without committing more U.S. Navy ships.

Fighting piracy was not a prominent topic during the presidential campaign. The Obama transition office’s chief spokesperson on national security issues, Brooke Anderson, on Wednesday declined to comment on how the incoming administration would deal with it, indicating that for now it is a matter for President Bush.

Stephen Morrison, an Africa expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said in an interview Wednesday that he doubts anti-piracy policy will be a high priority for Obama early in his term. Nor does he foresee a heavy Obama focus, in the early going, on the broader problem of instability in Somalia.

“I don’t think there’s going to be any stomach for, `Hey, let’s really get our arms around Somalia as a first-out-of-the door issue,’” Morrison said. The reluctance is rooted, he said, in the U.S. experience in Somalia in the final days of President George H.W. Bush’s administration in 1992, leading in late 1993 to a deadly U.S. military clash in Mogadishu and a humiliating U.S. withdrawal.

Two State Department officials discussed broad outlines of the administration’s anti-piracy plan on condition of anonymity. They insisted on anonymity because decisions on some aspects of the plan were still pending.

Elements of the administration’s approach include: