There oughta be a law.

SOME say neighboring Djibouti is as close as any sensible person would get to Somalia. "It's crazy in there," snaps a just-returned German journalist, as if slamming shut the top on a particularly pestiferous Pandora's box. Soothing his dustcaked throat with bottles of Heineken's in the Djibouti Sheraton Hotel bar, he moans, "You can't tell who are the good people, and who the bad. In Mogadisho, one neighborhood is lawful, and the next is frightening. I can't name one Somali as a friend. Can you?"

As it happens, I can count a score or more Somalis as friends; further, having just completed my fourth visit in less than a year, I can say that most sections of Somalia, including Mogadisho, are law abiding.

Granted, it took a while for me to get the principles straight--principles that have so far completely eluded Washington policy makers:

Survival. For well over twenty years, life has been an unbroken hardship for the vast mass of Somalis; naturally, the overwhelming priority is to provide for one's immediate family.

Trust. In true Islamic fashion, Somalis trust the most those closest to them; by definition, the closer to being a blood brother, the more trustworthy.

Freedom. After nearly 22 years under the despotic regime of Siad Barre, Somali leaders, workers, and farmers shun all but the most limited government, cherishing their liberty to the point of anarchy.

Peace. The Somali tradition is an oral one, sometimes endlessly so, as discussions, briefings, and arguments roll on; the corresponding enthusiasm for talking out differences rather than fighting is abiding, except for a treacherous few.

This is not to deny that there are bands of brigands roaming cities, towns, and countryside; that 2 "warlords" out of 15 major tribal leaders are murderous villains; that solid, straight business agreements are rare, whether between Somalis, or between Somalis and foreigners. The relative lawlessness in today's Somalia, however, stems from the horrific conditions under which the people lived during Siad Barre's dictatorship, the latter half of which was roundly supported by the United States.

WHILE the media glare focuses on Ajdid and his cutthroats (accounting for a minuscule portion of the body politic) almost no coverage apart from several landmark stories in the Wall Street Journal is given the quietly heroic efforts of Somalis to rehabilitate themselves. They are getting, by the way, little or no tangible support from the United Nations' UNISOM contingent, which is bent on enforcing Secretary General Boutros Boutros Ghali's determination that the country remain undivided, whatever the popular will.

Reasonable men can differ about whether President Bush was right to send troops into Somalia in December 2992. The same reasonable men would not, however, find arguable:

--the predictable recklessness of such an action limited to humanitarian distribution of food and medicine, and not including the equally humanitarian disarming--if not removal-of malcontents, General Farah Aidid foremost among them;

--the cynical barbarism of General Aidid, whose troops "guarded" warehouses stuffed with relief agencies' food and medicine throughout most of 1992, only doling out small amounts to faithful supporters or to those paying outrageous prices;

--the incomprehensibility of seeking to capture or kill Aidid one day, then providing him U.S. military transportation and protection the next;

--the total lack of strategic awareness in President Clinton's announced intention to cut and run on March 31, whether or not order has been restored. (This reporter was in Cambodia in 1970 and smelled the burning rubber of Vietcong sneakers screeching to a halt, just beyond President Nixon's announced fifty-kilometer invasion limit, there to await the end of the sixty-day incursion.)

What has escaped Foggy Bottom planners is self-evident to numbers of hapless GIs, one of whom sighed: "What good does it do just to distribute food and supplies? As soon as we leave, Aidid's people will take everything back and extend their reign of misery even further."

That kind of sentiment is generally felt, both indicating the obvious weakness in the U.S. "policy" and suggesting the beginning of a Vietnam mentality toward the Somali action. The October gaffes by Ranger units were bitterly felt by the men themselves, coming as they did as a result of poor intelligence--the same glaringly weak intelligence that allowed Farah Ajdid to elude U.S. troops for more than six months in a relatively small quarter of the Somali capital.

U.S. policy failures in Somalia cut across party lines. No one is blameless, not Bush nor Clinton--nor, for that matter, Carter and Reagan, in whose administrations the decisions were made to back and keep backing Siad Barre.

The failures have, moreover, created an international atmosphere wherein despots of all sizes, shapes, and hues feel free to do whatever they please, knowing that American statecraft will ultimately accommodate their persistence. Pragmatism was never meant to be thus.

THOSE who despair of lawlessness in Somalia should consider the need for rules that would instruct policy development toward the nettlesome mini-states of the developing world, where it is clear the next several years' challenges will arise.

1. On the presumably rare occasions when it is deemed that U.S. force must be committed, make certain that a) the cause is reasonably just, and b) we are prepared to do what is necessary. Shortly after U.S. troops arrived in Mogadisho, television cameras captured the spectacle of a U.S. soldier, on orders of his commander, releasing hundreds of offensive weapons found in a Mogadisho house. This brought to mind the abrupt end of Desert Storm, when General Schwarzkopf and several key advisors reportedly were on the brink of resignation when ordered to curtail the allied offensive short of capturing Baghdad and deposing Saddam Hussein, inaction few would today argue was wise.

2. When an objective is set and agreed, change course only in view of overwhelmingly changed circumstances. Can it be seriously argued that Aidid, whose writ runs to perhaps 10--certainly no more than 15--per cent of the city of Mogadisho and whose "army' comprises some three to five thousand irregulars, was uncapturable?

3. If the United States, however reluctantly, is to serve as "the world's policeman," let it accept the role with commitment and grace, and incorporate both protection and training of local cadres for progressive self-protection. Time and again over the years, American humanitarian deployment of military peace-keepers has ended with a return to the brutal, often lawless status quo ante--consider Nicaragua in the Thirties and the Dominican Republic in the Sixties, as well as Somalia in the Nineties. With the sole exception of Grenada, U.S. humanitarian forces have typically been withdrawn without first assuring that local authorities were capable of maintaining basic law and order.

4. Such actions may be in association with other countries' forces; they should never be undertaken with American forces subservient to a non-American commander.

5. Perhaps most important, such interventionist actions should always be an honorable mix of enlightened self-interest and compassion, never solely the one or the other.

From the vantage point of the Djibouti Sheraton bar, or a Foggy Bottom conference room, or the Egyptian Foreign Ministry, things may look lawless in Somalia, and in many respects they indeed are. Let the press pundits and diplomats concerned, however, remove the beams of reckless policy innovation from their own eyes, before they would cast the motes out of the wretched Somalis'. Let us set rules of intervention and engagement which match our national will and inclinations. Once involved, let us have the courage to stand by those rules, despite the inevitable twists along the way.