COLUMN RIGHT / SMITH HEMPSTONE : Why Wait Six Months? Three Would Do It : Why expose U.S. troops longer? This is tragic sideshow, not national security.

When it comes to Somalia, President Clinton still doesn’t get it.

There is nothing wrong with his plan, revealed in a nationally televised speech on Thursday, to reinforce our 4,700 troops in Somalia. He is sending 1,700 soldiers equipped with 104 armored vehicles and additional aircraft, and will station the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln and 3,600 Marines offshore under American command. The presence of these additional troops and their equipment will enhance the security of those ashore.

Where Clinton has got it wrong is in the setting of March 31 of next year for getting all but “a few hundred” American logistical troops out of Somalia. The mood of the nation and of Congress is such that a departure date of three months, not six, would have been far more acceptable.

If the United Nations cannot get its act together in three months, it shouldn’t be playing in the bloody Somali sandbox. And if the United States cannot retrieve its missing and dead and effect an orderly withdrawal within 90 days, our bureaucrats--uniformed and in mufti--are not worth their weight in paper clips. As the song of yesterday goes, breaking up is hard to do. But the only way to do it is to do it.

The President was not persuasive when he argued, as other advocates of staying on have done, that an earlier exit would erode American prestige and credibility abroad. That didn’t happen when we pulled out of Lebanon in 1982 after the deaths of 241 Marines, and there’s no reason to believe it would do so now.

Most foreigners are able, if some Americans are not, to tell the difference between an issue of national security vital to the United States and a tragic sideshow such as the mayhem in the bloodstained streets of south Mogadishu (where another American serviceman died Wednesday night and 12 others were wounded). Certainly the British would understand: Having had some experience with Somali savagery in colonial days, they had the sense not to get involved in Somalia in 1992 and have remained on the sidelines ever since.

It is good that, as he announced Thursday, Clinton intends to send Ambassador Robert Oakley back to Somalia “immediately.” While Oakley is a self-promoter with an enormous ego, he does know well Gen. Mohammed Farah Aidid, the Al Capone of south Mogadishu, and understands the Byzantine political dynamics of the Somali clan system.

If further bloody shootouts such as last Sunday’s are to be avoided--it produced more than 90 American and about 700 Somali casualties--it is absolutely vital to get Aidid back on the negotiating track. If Aidid is not part of it, there can be nothing approaching an even partial and temporary solution to Somalia’s security problem.

First steps toward reconciliation, if U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali could be persuaded to take them, would include lifting the $25,000 price on Aidid’s head, revoking the warrant for his arrest and releasing from U.N. custody his principal bagman, Osman Ato, perhaps in exchange for the return of our dead and missing.

The extrication of American forces from the Somali quagmire with as few casualties and as much honor as possible is the toughest foreign-policy issue that Clinton has faced in his young presidency. In his Oval Office speech, the President acknowledged that the recent carnage in Mogadishu had “raised hard questions about our presence in Somalia.” Unfortunately, Clinton left many of those questions unanswered.

Airlifting food to Somalia was one thing. Inserting American troops into a volatile situation fraught with racial and religious overtones was quite another. Leaving them there with unclear objectives, inadequate rules of engagement and a faulty U.N. command-and-control system verges on the criminal.

The pity of the whole tragic, well-intentioned, botched misadventure is that it could have been so easily avoided. When I was the American ambassador to Kenya, I warned against American involvement on the ground in Somalia, predicting in a cable to the State Department: “If you liked Beirut, you’ll love Mogadishu.” But that advice was not only spurned but publicly denigrated by then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney.

It would be nice to think that something useful may come out of next week’s congressional debate on Somalia. Unfortunately, old politicians do the talking; young soldiers do the dying.

As for those U.S. troops standing by to deploy under U.N. command in Bosnia: unpack.