Beirut, 1983, Mogadishu, 1993: Ominous Parallels : Somalia: American troops are risking their lives for a cause that is not clear. Are we asleep again, as we were in Lebanon?

Ten years ago, in one of the saddest days in American military history, 241 U.S. servicemen, most of them Marines and most of them sleeping, were killed in what was later described as the largest non-nuclear explosion ever created by man.

There have been, to be sure, bloodier days in the history of American troops. During the daylight hours of a single September day, 121 years before the Oct. 23, 1983, disaster at Beirut’s International Airport, nearly 23,000 Americans of two opposing armies were killed, wounded, missing or captured in the fields and meadows alongside Antietam Creek in the Maryland.

Yet the sadness one associates with death on the battlefield is not necessarily measured by the length of the casualty lists. The men at Antietam, notwithstanding poor generalship on both sides, knew their mission. The men in Beirut, even if they had been wide awake at the hour of their deaths, never really perceived the truth of their situation--that they had become part of anther country’s civil war, a war in whose outcome neither they nor their country truly had a stake.

There are those who argue that history is repeating itself today in the streets of Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia; that Somalia is Lebanon writ small. Yet there is a key difference between Beirut, 1983, and Mogadishu, 1993.

Ten years ago, most Americans, whether Administration officials, members of Congress or ordinary citizens, dimly perceived what was happening in Lebanon. At the moment of the explosion, not only the Marines but also their military and civilian leaders in Washington honestly believed that U.S. forces ashore in Lebanon were peacekeepers and were therefore immune from a massive, crippling attack. Only in the aftermath of the disaster was the U.S. government able to reconstruct how, in the eyes of Lebanese, a peacekeeping mission had evolved into something quite different.

In Somalia, matters unfolded quite differently. The change of mission for U.S. forces occurred explicitly and in the full light of day. When Americans died in the streets of south Mogadishu, no one--neither the President nor his secretary of defense nor any member of Congress--was able to claim surprise or could argue, as we did in the case of Lebanon, that those who attack Americans misunderstand our motives. President Clinton and Gen. Mohammed Farah Aidid understood each other all too well.

I applauded President Bush’s decision to intervene in Somalia, notwithstanding the fact that the United States had no strategic interest in the country. Had I believed, however, that American forces would have been directed to engage in combat operations to establish civil authority, I would have opposed the deployment. In my mind, the absence of a U.S. national interest in Somalia was balanced by the prospect of saving hundreds of thousands of Somalis at little or no cost in terms of American lives.

Likewise, I applaud the reported decision of the Clinton Administration to downplay or even abandon the ill-considered manhunt for Aidid in Mogadishu. I sincerely regret, however, that the Administration allowed the mission of U.S. forces to change in a way that produced needless combat casualties. As a matter of principle, I believe that no American military person should be asked to sacrifice his or her life for a purpose not related, however indirectly, to the defense of the United States. I do not recall anyone in the Administration having made the argument that Aidid posed such a threat.

As a veteran of four combat tours in Vietnam and as a Reagan-Bush-era official, no one will accuse me of being an isolationist, a pacifist or even someone with an excessively narrow definition of American national interests. Yet I fear that our leaders must become more sensitive and more sensible about exposing our all-volunteer armed forces to gratuitous danger. Absent a draft, our civilian political leaders simply do not have the benefit “enjoyed” by Presidents Johnson and Nixon of hearing directly from our campuses and from citizens who might object quite vocally to dubious deployments abroad if only they perceived a personal stake in the matter.

Although Beirut in 1983 and Mogadishu in 1993 are not exactly analogous, they are similar in this respect: American forces initially deployed for one reason ended up fighting and dying for another. As we approach the 10th anniversary of the tragedy in Beirut and as the Administration re-evaluates its position in Somalia and on peacekeeping in general, a review of Adm. Robert L.J. Long’s remarkable December, 1983, post-mortem of the Beirut bombing (the Long Commission report) is very much in order.

In fact, such a review should have been mandated before our forces’ mission in Mogadishu was allowed to change and before American soldiers started to die. An Administration sincerely interested in learning about the pitfalls of “peacekeeping” would do well to dig out a 10-year-old report already paid for by the blood of American servicemen whose civilian leaders, in another place and time, let them down.