Paying the Price of Doing ‘God’s Work’ : Somalia: Unwilling to risk U.S. lives, we stretched the rules and Somalis died.

The just-completed drawdown of the U.S. mission in Somalia has attracted scant notice. Yet before consigning Operation Restore Hope to the recesses of memory, Americans would do well to consider how it is that their peacekeepers--dispatched by President Bush to do “God’s work”--ended up as likely to draw a bead on a Somali as to feed him. Or her.

Consider the following: On Jan. 9, U.S. snipers in Mogadishu shot a Somali woman tending a stall in the city’s marketplace. With few correspondents remaining in Mogadishu, even major newspapers carried at most a brief wire-service report of this incident. The woman, eight months pregnant, died. Her unborn child, in the carefully calibrated language of the AP dispatch, “did not survive.”

According to an American spokesman, the shooting of the pregnant woman had been inadvertent. The intended target had been another Somali spotted with a machine gun in a truck 500 yards from the Marine outpost. Since rules of engagement permitted U.N. forces to “shoot anyone carrying a heavy weapon” in Mogadishu, the snipers were justified in taking him under fire. It was simply happenstance that their fire had struck a bystander. Just bad luck that the bystander was a pregnant woman. Truly unfortunate that she happened to leave six children behind.

Later that month, another incident on a larger scale: Marines escorting a convoy opened fire in a congested Mogadishu neighborhood, killing eight Somalis and wounding 12. Accounts of what actually happened were inconsistent. A Bangladeshi officer at the scene reported that the American troops fired “indiscriminately toward the crowd.” U.S. authorities in Somalia defended the Marines, asserting that they had come under sniper fire and had responded in self-defense.

Who will be held accountable? The likely answer is no one. After all, the Marines acted as their rules prescribed. The mission had become “force protection”--doing whatever was necessary to preclude further American casualties.

If those in the field are unlikely to be held accountable, then neither are the senior officials who devised Operation Restore Hope or those who have presided over its undoing. Certainly, those who ordered the intervention--now comfortably retired--never intended such ugly occurrences. As to their successors, they have long since redirected their attention to problems more pressing than those that beset the Horn of Africa.

Assurances that all concerned behaved responsibly--claims resting on the legitimacy of the rules of engagement--will provide cold comfort to the families of those gunned down by peacekeepers. The real effect is to allow the Americans involved--from the Marines at their observation post all the way back to the White House--to refuse responsibility for these acts. After all, everyone followed the rules.

Yet there is no dodging responsibility. That these incidents elicited only a wisp of interest from news reporters may persuade some that the “story” in Somalia has reached its conclusion, effectively ended by President Clinton’s decision to bring American forces home.

In fact, an important story remains--one that Americans ignore at their peril. The killing of these Somalis testifies to the illusion of altruistic interventionism in the post-Cold War era. It illustrates one of the consequences of committing U.S. forces to ambiguously defined peacemaking, peace enforcement or nation-building missions.

Who will question the high ideals with which Americans embark upon such tasks? Yet once good intentions collide with the reality that American soldiers are at risk, preserving their lives becomes an overriding priority. That’s the way the troops themselves and their commanders see it--for all too understandable reasons. Unless some vital national interest is at stake, that’s also the way the American people and their elected leaders are inclined to see it.

Americans will always want to play by the rules. Yet, as the danger to American soldiers increases, those rules are subject to change. Actions once deemed impermissible become acceptable. Concerns about noncombatant casualties diminish. Sensibilities are coarsened. The level of allowable firepower ratchets up. Justification is found even for the killing of innocents. This is not new. It is a recurring theme of American military history.

Somalia has revived that theme. Should Americans assume responsibility for making peace or rebuilding failed nations elsewhere, we will see it again. That prospect alone is not reason to refrain from acting. But let us have the honesty to acknowledge the moral price to be exacted.