It must be fun being an interventionist these days. The world is his oyster, and it presents a cornucopia of riches on where to intervene next. So many tempting opportunities to "cure starvation" or impose "democracy," to kill "warlords" and other bad guys, to bomb and strafe and feed and occupy.

There is the bipartisan Bush-Clinton Somalia caper. It began last fall, if you remember, as a purely "humanitarian" operation. The problem was that there was "anarchy" in Somalia, no regular government, just a bunch of battling warlords, and it became the U.S. armed forces' mission to go in there with food and CARE packages to pacify the warlords and feed everyone. Purely short-run mission. Out by Clinton Inaugural Day. It was supposed to be a perfect mission for America's New Model Army, a "sensitive" army that doesn't kill any more, just hands out food to starving children, the sort of army built for today's sensitive soldiery.

Well, things immediately and predictably began to go sour. We at Triple R might have written the script. First starvation increased, because the blundering free aid screwed up the Somalian food supply system. Second, the happy Somalians, who first greeted the American-UN army as liberators and feeders, began to turn sullen, especially since the U.S. decided that among the slew of "warlords" there was one really bad guy warlord, General Aidid, who controlled half of the capital city of Mogadishu. Americans have a deep need to see all foreign quarrels as two-sided: Bad Guys vs. Good Guys, the GG being defined as all opponents of the Bad Guys. The idea of multi-sided Equally Bad warlords fighting each other is too nuanced for the average Americano to comprehend: besides, multi-faceted warfare can scarcely justify massive American intervention on one side or the other. And so Aidid, who actually had been the original major welcomer of U.S. troops, now became the sole U.S. target. And when some Paki UN troops fired into a protesting unarmed Somali crowd, the U.S. shelled some Aididian posts in retaliation, killing more Somalis. (Why are Americans supposed to avenge Paki – and Moroccan – troop losses?)

All these events escalated and unified Somali hatred against the UN and against the U.S. in particular, as usual the main agitator and arm-twister inside the UN for massive intervention. Finally, Aididians ambushed American troops, killing four U.S. servicemen. U.S. blood is now drawn, and the Clinton regime is, of course and we predicted, dropping the humanitarian-food mask, and taking up more and more of the gun, vowing retaliation, war crime trials, and the usual apparatus of armed vengeance. Isabel Paterson's Humanitarian has indeed trotted out the Guillotine.

Is it too late to stop this senseless escalation? Hey look, this is not New Model intervention; it's the same old Wilsonian baloney, the same crazed crusade to feed and dominate and rule the world. Talk about your quagmires! Out, out before it's too late! The Italian UN troops finally got out, to much U.S. recrimination, because the Italians wanted the UN to negotiate with Aidid instead of singling him out for demonization. The reason: the Italians know something about Somalia; they ruled the region in the 1930s. But of course the U.S. never bothers to listen to people who know something about a region; it might learn something it doesn't want to hear. As Harry Schwartz, an economist and former New York Times editorialist not known for "isolationism," wrote prophetically in USA Today (July 19):

Somalia's basic problem was not lack of food.... It was and is the existence of warring factions... Each faction has a leader we call a warlord, but his followers all think of him as a Somali George Washington.... To the Somalis, the current U.S. policy there looks as though we are trying to impose our rule on that country. Of course, we can continue machine-gunning Somalis in Mogadishu streets from our helicopters.... It is time to recognize we made a mistake and get U.S. soldiers – and the rest of the UN forces – out of Somalia. Let the Somalis decide their own problems and their own fate.

I guess it was inevitable. The one and only place, foreign or domestic, where Clinton had evolved a fairly sensible policy, a policy of restraint, was in Bosnia. Not of course because his intentions were good. But because any military person or anyone familiar with the Balkans was counseling abstention from the Balkan mess; intervention could only be futile and counter-productive. But Clinton, as we all know by now, can't stand up to any pressure, and the anti-Serb hysteria by the dozen or so neoconservative pundits (aided and abetted by liberal pundits) proved irresistible. And so the Clinton administration began making bomb-the-Serb noises once again. And not only bomb the Serbs; because now it turns out that bombing in those crowded mountains and forests wouldn't work; therefore we need American spotters on the ground in Bosnia to direct U.S. planes where precisely to drop the bombs (as well as other spotters, I suppose, to direct planes where to drop those food packages). In short, the U.S. is going to need to put troops on the ground in Bosnia to support the air offensive.

Well! How long do any of you think a Yankee Serb-spotter is going to last in those Balkan mountains? I shudder to think of the death rate in that little operation.

Query: why is it that the same pundits who keep yowling about every Muslim being a "terrorist" want Americans to kill and die to save Muslims in Bosnia? What is there about Bosnian Muslims that makes them uniquely lovable?

I have long wished upon our interventionists' heads that they decided to intervene in Afghanistan! Afghanistan, the graveyard of the Soviet Union, where heavily armed and trained Soviet troops, equipped with planes and helicopters and all the rest, could never conquer. In the decade Soviet troops invaded and tried to occupy Afghanistan, 15,000 Soviet troops died in those harsh mountains, taking the Soviet Union down with them.

But look at Afghanistan. It's got all the requirements for U.S. intervention: it's got lots of genocide – a huge chunk of the population are either dead or refugees; it's got warlords and armies that are still fighting; it's got Communist or "ex"-Communist dictators; it's got lots of Islamic "fanatics"; it's got bitter ethnic warfare, largely between the Pushtoons in the East, the Tajiks in the North, and the Turkmens in the West; it's got a lot of starvation; and there's hardly a "democrat" in sight. Perfect fodder for the massive intervention that, if handled properly, could last a lifetime. And who knows, the U.S. Empire might even follow the USSR down the chute.

Well, nothing has even been hinted about U.S. intervention-invasion of Afghanistan, but things are warming up nicely in neighboring Tajikistan to the North. Tajikistan, part of the old Soviet Union, has been having a deeply satisfying ethnic civil war, full-scale war for the past year. In the last six months, out of a population of 5.1 million, fully a tenth has been shifted or "cleansed," and 20,000 people have been killed. The official government holding on to the western Tajik capital of Dushanbe is the old Commie, or "ex"-Commie government, resting for its support on the governments of Russia (including the sainted Boris Yeltsin), of neighboring Uzbekistan in the West (also in the hands of "former" Communist rulers), and the clans or tribes in the northwest who had been favored by the old Soviet regime. Opposing the Commie Tajik government of Emomali Rakhmonov, on the other hand, is a rebel coalition, resting on peasants and mountain tribes in the East and South, near the Afghan border; the rebels are observant Muslims.

Indeed, the rebels are a coalition of anti-Communist Democrats and Islamic fundamentalists.

"Ex"-Communists like Yeltsin and Uzbek President Islam A. Karimov, are justifying their strong support for the Commie government of Tajikistan by invoking the menace of "Islamic fundamentalism" spreading northward from Afghanistan like the plague. On the other hand, the presidents of Kyrgyzstan, on the northeastern border of Tajikistan, and of Turkmenistan, west of Uzbekistan, have been openly critical of the fundamentalist alibi.

The United States, which finds it hard to resist intervention anywhere, is edging toward getting into this hot potato. The Clinton administration has already appointed James Collins, deputy chief of its Moscow Embassy, as "regional coordinator" to "help resolve disputes" in the old Soviet Union, the job to begin in the fall. Yeah right. I'm glad to see that Pravda (Moscow) had the proper sardonic response to this Clintonian move. It wrote that the Clinton administration had not yet decided whether to use the Somalian or the Bosnian model of "pacification" in Tajikistan. In any case, Pravda concluded, "Soon the Russians won't have to worry about their fate anymore. Uncle Sam will take care of everything."

But Uncle Sam will have a difficult time trying to figure out on which side to intervene. How is it going to sort out the Good Guys from the Bad Guys? Let's see: on the one hand, Commies Bad; on the other hand, Democrats Good but Islamic Fundamentalists Bad. The Commie-Islamic problem of course reached its peak during the Soviet war in Afghanistan, when Uncle Sam decided that the Afghan resisters to the Soviet army were heroic freedom fighters, anti-Communist democrats who were inveterate readers of John Dewey, Sidney Hook, and all the other champions of global democracy. As a result, we armed the Afghans to the hilt, supplied them with hand-held anti-aircraft missiles which they used to shoot down Bad Soviet helicopters, etc. But no sooner did the Soviet troops pull out, when it turned out that the democratic Afghan Freedom Fighters had transformed themselves overnight into evil Islamic fundamentalist fanatics, dedicated to putting the veil back on women. Inside the dust jackets of the books of Hook and Dewey there turned out to be the Koran!

Indeed, the fat, diabetic "fanatic" blind sheik, he of the terrorists and the UN building, got his start as a freedom fighter in Afghanistan, reputedly a CIA asset in that brave struggle for democracy. Poor blind sheik: a victim of the latest twist of the historical dialectic!

So: if Mr. Collins and the Clinton administration play their cards right, who knows? We might wind up with American bombers, helicopters, and ground "spotters" invading the mountains of Tajikistan, if not of neighboring Afghanistan itself.

And then, of course, if he's got nothing else to do, Bill Clinton can always bomb Baghdad again. Hell, that's always good for a few points in the approval ratings.

Ruminating over our next intervention, an old friend of mine the other day brought up that old unresolved problem: Korea. Here's what Korea offers for our interventionists' delectation:

• An authentically hard-line, dictatorial, unreconstructed Commie regime, headed by the evil Marshal Kim II-Sung.
• A "democratic" "pro-Western" South Korea.
• An unresolved war, or even American defeat, that cries aloud for vengeance. In contrast to Vietnam, Korea for left-liberals was the last Good War of the Cold War. North Korea had "aggressed" against the South, violating all left-liberal-neocon canons of international behavior.
• North Korea is rumored to be working on nuclear weapons.

So: we can bomb, nuke North Korea back to the Stone Age to our hearts' content, and the terrain is not as inconveniently jungle-y as it was in Vietnam.

And the war could take a satisfyingly l-o-n-g, L-O-N-G time!