For the larger picture of the US involvement in Africa I recommend b real´s Understanding AFRICOM at Moon of Alabama. It is really good.

But although the US government was clearly pushing for war and participating in it, I think there would have been a war anyway. Ethiopia and Eritrea has been conducting a proxy war in Somalia for quite some time now, I wrote some about it here last summer.

Sweden's finest (and perhaps only) collaborative, leftist e-newspaper Synapze.se