Appointment in Somalia

ONE of the unexpected products of the end of the cold war is a reawakened liberal enthusiasm for military intervention. We saw a glimpse of it in Yugoslavia; in Somalia it is full blown. When liberals get so gung-ho about war, we get nervous. Some of us still remember Indochina.

Indeed, a whole new field has grown up in Washington think-tanks, known as "humanitarian intervention." Its devotees are proud that they have thrown off their former allergy to the use of military power--but prouder still that they have found ways of using U.S. power purely in vindication of abstract principles, without regard to any U.S. strategic interest. You can be sure that if Somalia were an allied country in which we had a significant stake, our involvement there would be far more controversial on the Left than it is.

After getting all that off our chest, we give Operation Restere Hope our qualified support (see WFB's "On the Right," p. 54). We see an achievable military objective and an achievable political objective. Even more, we see satisfying vindication in the alacrity with which the world turns to the United States as the only country with the military capability, experience in leadership, and reputation for decency for such a task. The forces arrayed against "American imperialism" seem routed, abroad as well as at home. (Imperial tutelage may even come back in vogue, as Paul Johnson suggested in NR's last issue.) There's nothing wrong with being the world's only superpower, provided we know what we're doing.

The attainable military objective is to suppress this civil war. We cannot believe that 28,000 U.S. Marines and soldiers cannot suppress the armed bands that have wrecked Somalia's civil order. The Administration makes us uneasy when it abjures such a mission and confines its task to securing the safe delivery of food; we assume this is just diplomatic cover. In reality, the safe delivery of food cannot be assured without the broader interpretation of the mission. Pentagon nervous Nellies cite the precedent of the ill-fated "humanitarian intervention" in Lebanon. But the best way to turn Somalia into another Lebanon is to evade the real military problem and refuse to help solve it.

The attainable political objective is to see to the restoration of some rudimentary political structure. Once the civil war is suppressed, the country's tribal and political chieftains need to be brought together, perhaps under the aegis of the UN or the Organization of African Unity, in some cooperative grouping to approximate a governmental structure. The best model, oddly enough, may be the 1965 U.S. intervention in the Dominican Republic, in which U.S. troops squelched the extremist forces on both sides in the nascent civil war, then knocked heads together among the civilian politicians and turned the country back over to them. Clearly, the political vacuum in Somalia is a more daunting problem. But the chances for success will be the greater, the more decisive is the military success in suppressing the forces that would threaten it.

The large number of U.S. troops committed testifies to a correct Pentagon assessment that military operations should not be attempted on the cheap. With the same boldness applied to the overall problem, there is some ground for hope that we can do the job required of us and then turn it over to others within a reasonable period of time.