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

(2 of 2)

An advertent and sustained foreign policy uses a different part of the brain from the one engaged by horrifying images. If Americans had seen the battles of the Wilderness and Cold Harbor on TV screens in 1864, if they had witnessed the meat-grinding carnage of Ulysses Grant's warmaking, then public opinion would have demanded an end to the Civil War, and the Union might well have split into two countries, one of them farmed by black slaves.

It is obviously futile to march Americans into the midst of long-standing Somali blood feuds. To do so creates an explosive dynamic in which the Americans are the new villains and targets: more Americans die, more Somali civilians die as Americans grow frustrated and retaliate with bigger gunships, hatreds grow deeper, and the tragedy is compounded.

It is strange how many ghosts hover around Somalia. There is, of course, the big dark ghost of Vietnam, that formative evil myth of Clinton's generation. That war, like the Somalia conflict, was dominated by images injected into the American psyche -- the Viet Cong in a plaid shirt being shot in the head point-blank by Saigon's police chief during the Tet offensive, for example. The experience of Vietnam issues its warnings ("quagmire" and so on), but strangely, Bill Clinton the old war resister last week used much the same rhetoric of steadfastness and honor that Lyndon Johnson used when explaining another escalation in Vietnam.

The Americans have ventured into Somalia in a sort of surreal confusion, first impersonating Mother Teresa and now John Wayne. It would help to clarify that self-image, for to do so would clarify the mission, and then to recast the rhetoric of the enterprise.

Above all to simplify. To say, We came here to feed starving people. With its bloodshed and starvation, Somalia has been a tragedy. But there are many tragedies in the world. The U.S. will help the U.N. peacekeepers as it can, but the U.S. will not allow itself to become another fighter-killer among factions in the streets and alleys of Mogadishu. Americans have better things to do, in places where they can help.

American policy does not need more feelings. It needs, as George Meredith said, "More brain, O Lord!"