Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: FRIDAY, September 3, 1993                   TAG: 9401140005
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A15   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Paxton Davis
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

SOMALIA

It combined good intentions and confused purposes, and added to them mistaken intelligence and bumbling leadership, to create an episode of military incompetence that would have made, in earlier times, a hilarious Keystone Cops two-reeler.

The raid netted the Rangers a dozen or so terrified U.N. staffers in the building, but in the end no one was killed and no one even seriously wounded, though it would not have been inappropriate if whoever conceived this latest example of military lunacy had hung his head and headed for home.

The raid's failure to accomplish anything - military or political - completes the black comedy it provided.

What happened was that a Ranger force of unidentified strength accompanied (or perhaps carried) by a dozen helicopters launched a mortar and small-arms attack on a Mogadishu building presumed to be occupied by Gen. Mohammed Farrah Aidid, the Somali "warlord," as the American press has identified him.

Aidid, believed by American military leaders to be behind continuing guerrilla attacks on United Nations operations in Mogadishu, is this year's heavy, America's chosen successor to Iraq's Saddam Hussein, despite the fact that he controls little more than a handful of "militiamen," as the press also calls them, in their resistance to U.N. and especially American intervention in Somalia's troubled existence.

Being both powerless and with few followers, Aidid is ideal for the part, since no one so far has found a way to bring down Saddam Hussein and the American need for visible "enemies" is high.

He is a nuisance, to be sure, and his "militiamen" have killed some U.N. troops, but as a threat to world peace, or even the stability of Somalia, he is little more than another of the tinpot tyrants whom the United States is ordinarily only too eager to place in power in the Third World, a sort of tenth-rate Noriega without the uniform.

All of that is silly enough and futile enough. What is worse is that it epitomizes the awkwardness with which the United States is bungling its way - now that the Cold War is over and America is the only remaining superpower - into civil and border disputes that it neither understands nor can do much to change, though clearly it can do much to harm.

When President George Bush dispatched troops to Somalia last winter, the narrow purpose of the mission was to protect efforts to feed a starving population, whose pitiable plight television had portrayed with great success.

American soldiers would be out before the end of January, Bush predicted, since their humanitarian purpose in Somalia was limited and could be accomplished quickly.

That did not happen. The population was, indeed, saved from famine and is now virtually free of starvation, but the mischief of Somali gangs and warlords prolonged the task, and the task grew longer still as the political institutions of Somalia, such as they were, obviously could not stand on their own.

Now, after nine months there, the American purpose - and that of the U.N., following its lead - is to restore political order. That means defining what political order we want; that means trying to rid the countryside of obstacles to order; and that means troops, and more troops, and more troops still. This was scarcely what we said we wanted when we went in.

The result, as it has been in so many American interventions elsewhere - Vietnam, Lebanon, Grenada, Nicaragua, Cuba - is that we have not only failed to achieve our original goals but made civil disorder and conflict worse.

At least, seeing where our good intentions have led us in the recent past, we should avoid blundering into the same tragicomedy in Bosnia. We are sure to make a mess of it.

\ Paxton Davis is a Roanoke Times & World-News columnist.