The Best of America, The Best of Bush : There is no oil, or military advantage, to be had in Somalia

The U.S. willingness to help Somalia is nothing less than a great tribute to the American spirit and character. There is little in Somalia for a superpower to covet. It is not a repository of strategic resources such as oil and gas. It does not offer exploitable wealth in the form of diamonds or gold. And with the demise of the Cold War, it is no longer a prominent pawn in the East-West struggle for dominance.

And yet there is the United States of America, troops and ships steaming toward the Indian Ocean, ready to act when many other nations, including some on the African continent, have so far offered only pathetic excuses. Without American initiative, collective inaction might have amounted to little more than death warrants for hundreds of thousands of starving people, many of them children.

And there is President Bush--defeated for reelection but even in the shadow of that great political loss still trying to be the best of what he is: the world leader.

He is the telephonic equivalent of a person-to-person United Nations . . . calling foreign leaders, soliciting their advice, seeking to build a broad consensus.

This was the best of George Bush during the Persian Gulf crisis; this is the best of Bush today, during Somalia’s heartbreaking crisis.

No doubt no one more than the President--and President-elect Bill Clinton--is aware of the need for this rescue mission to be far broader than a U.S. go-it-alone operation. France, Italy and several other nations have now offered to participate. More countries must help.

Moreover, Washington must be careful not to involve U.S. forces in a mission with unclear goals and of an indeterminate duration. One recalls the United States’ tragic experience in Lebanon.

President Bush was right to insist on Security Council authorization. That was one of the saving elements of the Kuwait rescue operation, and it was a vital condition for this one.

It’s true that the line-of-command question could not be clearly addressed. This issue centers on the historical U.S. refusal to permit American battlefield commanders to report to anyone other than an American commander. The U.N. resolution, for better or worse, deliberately sought to fudge that issue with U.N. gobbledygook.

Even so, no one at the United Nations believes for a moment that U.S. troops will go anywhere or do anything except on the orders of U.S. officers.

Now the American people need to hope, along with George Bush and Bill Clinton, that the operation proves to be relatively brief and focused, that somehow no American men or women are lost in the great humanitarian intervention and that this dramatic involvement of the United Nations will lead to a termination of the Somalian civil war and the beginnings of a measure of political stability and democratization in that disintegrating African country.

Until then, the United States has spoken to the starving people of Somalia. It has said: You are important. It has said that this mass starving will not stand. Now others too must contribute all that they can to the U.N.-authorized effort to save Somalia.