COLUMN LEFT/ ROBERT SCHEER : When Motives of Intervention Are Suspect : Redressing Somali poverty, not making good TV, should be the U.S. and U.N. concern.

The headline said it all: “20 Somalis Die When Peacekeepers Fire at Crowd.” The Somali mission has a United Nations imprimatur, and it follows that the foreign soldiers, no matter what they do, are keepers of the peace--even if the crowd was peacefully demonstrating and, witnesses say, shots were not fired from their ranks.

Indeed, while doctors were still sorting out the wounded from the dead, U.N. Ambassador Madeleine Albright rushed to tell CBS that the victims were part of a mob and that the shooting was justified.

There is nothing new to the assumption of innocence on the part of foreigners who kill natives, particularly when the motives of the foreigners are said to be selfless rather than imperial. But humanitarian motives may be more dangerous.

“Innocence always calls mutely for protection when we would be so much wiser to guard ourselves against it,” Graham Greene warned 40 years ago in his novel, “The Quiet American,” describing the U.S. blundering into Vietnam. The innocents never know what it is they are after or how to get there. “Innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell,” Greene wrote, “wandering the world, meaning no harm.”

When the United States first went into Somalia to do what President Bush termed “God’s work,” he promised that “this operation is not open-ended. We will not stay one day longer than is absolutely necessary . . . Our mission is humanitarian, but we will not tolerate armed gangs ripping off their own people.”:

Now U.S. troops, under the rubric of the United Nations, are frantically and pathetically attempting to build a government for Somalia and once again sorting out the good guys from the bad.

Why should we or any other foreigners be entrusted with this task? The United States, after all, propped up the regime responsible for this mess in Somalia. Despite the fact that military dictator, Mohammed Siad Barre, routinely “ripped off his own people,” and caused the death of 150,000 of them, the United States granted $800 million in assistance, about one-third in military aid.

We supplied that support, despite overwhelming evidence of corruption and brutality beginning in 1977, because Siad Barre had broken with the Soviet Union, so no other questions needed to be asked for 15 years and through three American Administrations. That aid, most experts now agree, created an indolent and dependent economy destructive of the traditional economy and social structures.

Both Mohamed Ali Mahdi and Gen. Mohammed Farah Aidid, the rival warlords obstructing food deliveries and competing for control, got their start in the foreign-aid rackets of the 1980s. It’s inconvenient to mention, given the current ordering of good and bad guys, that Aidid and other warlords were considered heroes by many for their role in overthrowing Siad Barre in January, 1991.

They are bad guys, but don’t blame them for the country’s basic woes. The decades of U.S. aid had done nothing to improve life in Somalia. According to the World Bank, Somalia’s annual per capita income has declined in the past 15 years from $150 to $120. By contrast, per capita income in the United States is more than $19,000.

The issue is not isolationism versus intervention, but rather what represents meaningful intervention in the national life of others. Intervention that does not address the incredible and rapidly widening imbalance in world incomes is a travesty. Yet we have ignored the constant demands in the United Nations to deal with sharpening class divisions. Warlords come and go, but knocking off yet another one while providing only charity handouts will do nothing to alleviate the long-term suffering of much of the world’s people.

We have to ask if we are serious or merely theatrical in our concerns. In the aftermath of the Cold War, our intervention has been driven by what makes for good TV and is useful for domestic political advantage. The grinding poverty of much of the world and the structural reasons for it are rarely subjects of mass-media coverage or presidential action.

As a result, our interventions have been inherently fickle, transitory and counterproductive. We routinely fail to fulfill the expectations raised by our interventions and usually leave things in a bigger mess.

To say this does not make one an isolationist. It only means that intervention to redress the pitifully skewed income distribution in the world is to be encouraged and that those who oppose that redress are the true isolationists.