Operation Is Restoring Hope in Somalia--and Ourselves

They are starving in Africa, and in China, and in Russia, my mother used to say.

My sister and I, and all my friends whose mothers would tell them the same, didn’t quite know what this meant. We didn’t intend to take anyone’s food.

Certainly we would have offered our lima beans, and our sweet potatoes, to anything with a mouth. And we would have said please.

My mother’s translation of this little parable was of course this: Eat up, stop whining and feel grateful. Or there will be no dessert.

So I ate well. I was certainly never deprived. And I figured there was a reason for this.

Back then, I was an innocent. The prayers said aloud in church thanked God for having delivered us here, to this great country of ours. I thought God favored America, because people starved someplace else.

Now, kids can see this on TV.

The military calls its mission Operation Restore Hope. It’s a double-entendre at the very least.

We are to restore hope to Somalia and we are to restore it here. Somalia will get food and America will get back a white hat. There’s no oil in Somalia, or sneaky Communists, far as we can tell.

I, and most Americans, just believe that we are doing right. It’s taken about 300,000 starvation deaths this past year.

The media had been bearing this horrific message for a while. Finally, it became too uncomfortable to stand. Before that, it just numbed. The story came to us on the backs of others about Ethiopia and the Sudan.

So there was a danger of reading, or seeing, too much about Somalia. The numbness would wear off and a nerve would suddenly lay exposed.

Instead of thinking about our “national interests,” and their “clan rivalries,” we would start thinking about human beings. Feelings would take over after that. Then we’d have to do something beyond just turning away.

We’d have to lessen the pain, for Somalia and for ourselves.

This is the simplified thinking that has allowed our military to act, with very little public debate. The talk of quagmires and an Africanized Beirut has been muted.

It seems only an occasional letter to the editor will rail about dangerous precedents, about picking Somalia and ignoring the Bosnian mess, about raising the expectations of the world’s poor.

Now, instead of derision over America acting as the world’s policeman, the comparisons are closer to volunteer firefighters delivering holiday ham.

We’re told there will surely be sniper fire, terrorist attacks and diseases with exotic names and deadly aims. But, shucks folks, the good guys know it just comes with the job.

So now Marines are telling their children that it’s Daddy, or Mommy, who will be acting as Santa Claus for the Somali boys and girls.

I envision the tearful send-offs: I love you. Be good. Merry Christmas. And make sure to clean your plates. They are starving in Africa, still.

I imagine that it doesn’t take too much to restore hope to Somalia. Hope is usually the very last to go before death quiets the soul. Word alone of an American rescue brought joy to most Somalis still capable of a smile.

Restoring hope to America is tougher, of course. Only the political slogans are simple here. But in this early stage of this military mercy mission, Americans are feeling proud, and feeling good might come next.

That is if the mission goes as planned.

The plan is a relatively quick in and out. The plan is to leave the really messy stuff to somebody else. The plan is to offer a life raft, not a prefab infrastructure for prosperity and peace.

Because America can only do so much.

This, more than anything, is becoming our motto here. Only so much. The years have made us wiser and more cynical too. Americans want to be friendly, we like wearing a white hat, but we’re afraid of looking like fools.

We felt proud, too, of sicking our troops on Saddam Hussein. But now we know that even that military rout wasn’t as antiseptic as it seemed. “Friendly fire” killed too many of our own. We mowed down thousands of Iraqi soldiers, but left Hussein still laughing in our face.

Still, had we to do it over, my guess is that most Americans would say, yes, send in the troops. Only don’t make as many mistakes.

In that sense also, we are all for restoring hope to Somalia. It restores something in us, as human beings.