The Immaculate Intervention

By Charles Krauthammer

Remember the promise of the post-cold war world? That new world, with a new order, said to have dawned with the fall of the Berlin Wall? Not a perfect world by any means, but at least a world more likely to harmonize might with right. A world in which the U.S. might finally pursue good intentions abroad uncontaminated by considerations of national interest or ideology. Somalia seemed to herald the day. The Marine landing at Mogadishu last December was the most unalloyed, most unprecedented example of humanitarian intervention in memory, perhaps in history.

In the old days, Franklin Roosevelt could say (or so it is said) of Anastasio Somoza, "He's a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch." No longer. With the end of the great ideological wars, we could stop propping up our sons of bitches: our Somozas, our Trujillos, our Nguyen Cao Kys. We could subordinate foreign policy to morality, something Americans have hungered to do since Woodrow Wilson suggested the idea to an incredulous world almost a century ago.

So much for the fantasy. We waded ashore in Somalia to feed the hungry. Now our gunships hover over Mogadishu shooting rockets into crowded villas. Blue- helmeted U.N. troops, once a symbol of ineffectiveness but at least innocuousness, now fire into a crowd of demonstrators. At least 20 women and children die. The Security Council stoutly defends the massacre.

It is the humanitarian's ultimate nightmare. Famine relief turns into counterinsurgency. From Red Cross to Green Beret in six months.

What went wrong? What happened is that Mogadishu exposed the first post-cold war mirage: in foreign policy, particularly foreign policy at the point of a bayonet, there is no such thing as pure humanitarianism. Once you go beyond relief to policing, you have to shoot.

The fact is that post-cold war, as pre-cold war, the same old rule applies: To do good, you often have to do bad. Sometimes you do indeed have to destroy the village in order to save it. How much better off Cambodia, for example, would have been had the U.S. prevailed in its Indochina campaign and the communists never come to power.

In Somalia the paradox returns. There is no such thing as just feeding the hungry, if what's keeping them from eating is not crop failure but vandalism and thuggery. One has first to destroy the vandals and the thugs. In a country racked by civil war, what starts with feeding ends with killing. There is no immaculate intervention.

The other illusion to die in Somalia has to do with the United Nations. The U.N. has become the all-purpose ambulance service for bleeding countries. From Cambodia to Bosnia, blue hats have been sent not only to observe an already existing peace as in cold war days but also to bring peace where peace does not yet exist. In Somalia, to force peace.

But this post-cold war vision of the U.N. as the new major player on the block is a hallucination. Why? Because the U.N. is a fiction. Yes, it has a Secretary-General, a bureaucracy and a building. But it has no army, no taxing authority, no independent will. Because it is a creature of the sovereign powers that control it, its sovereignty is an illusion.

Consider the current disarray of U.N. forces in Somalia. The Italians have the third largest contingent assigned to the U.N. force. But the operation in which they lost three soldiers was reportedly not authorized by, not even known to, the U.N. commander in Somalia. And when the Italian commander subsequently received an order from his ostensible U.N. superior, he refused to obey. He would take his instructions from Rome, he said. The U.N. demanded that the Italian commander be relieved. Italy refused and threatened to pull out altogether.

Boutros Boutros-Ghali is justifiably angry. Another U.N. contingent, reportedly Saudi, was similarly insubordinate. If the troops don't obey the orders of the U.N. commander, then the U.N. force dissolves overnight. But there is no cure for this dilemma, because at its heart lies the U.N. fiction. Its soldiers wear the same colored hats, but they have differently colored , allegiances. When ordered into danger, they will always phone home. How are we going to abolish the allegiance soldiers feel to their flag and country? And how are we going to prevent governments from exercising sovereign control over their own troops?

There are two ways out of this dilemma. The U.N. could develop its own army, a kind of foreign legion for desperadoes, mercenaries and idealists from around the world. They would come to New York and swear allegiance to Boutros- Ghali and the blue flag. A fine idea, but even as a screenplay, farfetched.

Or else places like Somalia have to be handled in the old way. Not post-cold war, but again pre-cold war: given over in trusteeship to some great power willing and able to seize and rule it, as France once ruled Lebanon. Third World nations don't like that idea because it smacks of colonialism. And so it does. It is colonialism. But no one has come up with a better idea for saving countries like Somalia from themselves. Trusteeship means unified authority imposed by a real army taking orders from a single capital. That is certainly better than the disarray now so painfully on display in Mogadishu.

Much is on display today in Mogadishu. The limits of humanitarianism. The hollowness of the U.N. Bloody proof that in this era of good intentions, good intentions are not enough.

There is no new world. There never is.