The Trouble with Good Intentions: In Feeding Somalia and Backing Yeltsin, America Discovers the Limits of Idealism .

Complexity theory holds that even the wildest disorder may eventually cohere into a pattern -- as when the teeming molecules of the young earth united in the arrangement that became life.

If complexity theory is valid, there may be hope someday for Somalia. There may even be hope for the Clinton Administration's foreign policy.

It is wrong to expect too much coherence from any quarter, writers on foreign policy warn: with the end of the cold war, the world is formless -- no | longer Manichaean, no longer organized around two neat poles of ideology. America's conception of its national interests and its moral role abroad, to say nothing of its idea of itself at home, is disheveled. It is therefore natural that in trying to find its way through problems like, say, Bosnia and Somalia, the Administration can see no farther than the range of its low-beam headlights.

Maybe so. But it is misleading to blame the diversity of the new world for the confusion in Somalia. The chaos has been there a long time. And it is also a very old story when the most wholesome moral intentions (such as the American desire to feed starving Somali children) lead down a road into nightmares of entanglement and unintended consequences. The best, brightest American policy thinking went off a cliff in Vietnam, for example.

The Clinton Administration has tried to do good by helping Boris Yeltsin. But by supporting him so unreservedly, the U.S. risks collaborating in the creation of a democratic authoritarianism. It is impossible to accomplish moral and political fine-tuning amid turmoil. American policy toward Haiti, a place almost as poignantly miserable as Somalia, is also smudged by uncertainty just at the moment when the Administration is sending military trainers and engineers to join a U.N. force.

The aid effort in Somalia displays an attractive American tendency: the impulse to construct idealistic policy out of generous feelings. The danger is that such international idealism may be shallow and short-lived, a sort of sentimentality of the privileged.

These feelings-behind-policy, this Great Power subjectivism, often arises spontaneously from pictures, either still photographs or television clips, that are mainlined directly into the democracy's emotional bloodstream without the mediation of conscious thought. America got into Somalia because it felt a sane and generous outrage at the spectacle of thousands of children and other innocent people starving while gangs of thugs stole the food from their bowls. Now the majority of Americans want to withdraw from Somalia because they have felt a converse outrage at pictures of an American soldier's body gruesomely dragged through the dust, and of grinning Somalis dancing on the corpse of a helicopter.

In both instances, the feelings aroused by the pictures have their passion and validity -- as feelings. But not as solid thoughts on which to form American policy when that policy may put American lives, and many others, at ( risk.

The eye, fastened to CNN, makes a valuable witness. But it has a tendency to stir people to bursts of indignation that flare briefly, spectacularly and ineffectually, like a fire splashed with a cup of gasoline.