Intervention

Local academics and business executives assembled last week over breakfast at Immaculata College to talk about alcoholism in the workplace and methods of dealing with it. Leo Orsino, who led the discussion, is director of student services at the Art Institute of Philadelphia and serves as an adjunct teacher at Immaculata College and Villanova University. As a certified addictions counselor, Orsino is trained in intervention and crisis counseling for people affected with drug and alcohol problems.

If the Serbian government is serious this time about ending the fighting in Bosnia - a large "if" - it is a triple political boon for President Clinton. It would mean the new President, by signaling his readiness to use military force, has helped achieve a humanitarian and geopolitical goal that eluded his predecessor - and other Western leaders. It would allow him to return his focus to his shaky domestic agenda, rather than requiring him to undertake the difficult task of persuading a skeptical U.S. public that America's national interest requires intervention in a poorly understood ethnic conflict.

One word is on everyone's lips in Panama. That word is invasion. Government officials invoked the word last week, predicting that U.S. war games under way near the Panama Canal were a prelude to an imminent U.S. invasion. And increasingly, the word is mentioned - this time with hope - by the man in the street. Rich and poor alike have been openly calling for U.S. intervention to get rid of the regime of Gen. Manuel Antonio Noriega. To date, virtually all of the actions taken by the United States against Noriega have been economic.

CULT LEADERS are the pied-pipers of America, leading the outcast, the despondent, and sometimes the highly intelligent off into the dark, isolated fringes of society. And then there's Rick Alan Ross, poking around in that darkness with a flashlight. From his eclectic office in a former cracker factory in Trenton, Ross, 58, runs the Rick A. Ross Institute, a nonprofit Internet archive on "destructive cults" and "controversial groups and movements. " Attorneys, universities and the media often go to Ross for explanations when seemingly benign groups go off the rails, and parents turn to him when their children fall under a cult's spell.

Decision-making used to be easy for America's "peace community. " Its members were antiwar, if not outright pacifist, and they supported self- determination for nations from Vietnam to Nicaragua. National liberation forces correctly opposed imperialist interventions, they said, and those outside powers - usually the American military or its agents - were almost always wrong. But now comes Bosnia-Herzegovina and its seemingly unstoppable violence. The number of Muslim, Serb and Croat dead - 100,000 and rising - is clawing at the conscience of the West.

A senior Soviet official charged yesterday that the U.S. intervention in Panama had been aimed more at securing control of the Panama Canal than at bringing Gen. Manuel Antonio Noriega to trial on drug charges. Commenting on Noriega's surrender and arrest, Soviet Foreign Ministry spokesman Gennadi I. Gerasimov accused Washington of violating international law and challenged U.S. officials to reveal the number of civilian casualties since the invasion began Dec. 20. Gerasimov said the issue of whether Noriega was guilty was of little consequence to Moscow.

U.S. military intervention in Somalia offers perhaps the only chance to disarm the fighting factions in that anarchy-ridden country, and prevent starvation from claiming thousands of new victims. But why intervene now as the Bush administration nears its end? Why should the United States spearhead the effort at a time when the United Nations was supposed to be taking the lead in keeping the international peace? And why risk military intervention for humanitarian goals in Somalia - where the CIA says prospects for rebuilding civil order are bleak?

They are the types of tragedies that can paralyze. A bank is robbed at gunpoint, and an employee is shot and seriously wounded. A child is struck by a car and killed. The residents of an apartment complex lose their homes and possessions in a fire. Helping the businesses or community cope is the next step. Recognizing that, Family and Community Service of Delaware County, a private, nonprofit social service agency, has put together a traumatic-stress intervention team to help the business or community affected.

It was the left that led the opposition to war in Iraq. Now it is the left that is most strenuous in urging intervention in Liberia. Curious. No blood for oil, it seems, but blood for Liberia. And let us not automatically assume that Liberia will be an immaculate intervention. Sure, we may get lucky and suffer no casualties. But Liberia has three warring parties, tons of guns and legions of desperate fighters. Yet pressure is inexorably building to send American troops to enforce a peace.

THE LIMITS OF U.S. INTERVENTION COMING INTO FOCUS The U.S. withdrawal from Somalia brings more clearly into focus the limits of intervention. There have always been limits on such a policy, beginning with the Republic's historic isolationist roots. At present, the shadow of Vietnam still hangs over any U.S. intervention, and the economics of scarcity, which must underpin all such efforts, cannot be ignored. Yet, it is in the relationship between the president and Congress that the limits of intervention are most clearly discerned.