Sad scenes on the back of the front section of yesterday's New Mexican: The carrier USS Essex, its complement of helicopters loaded with supplies for the survivors of last month's cyclone in Myanmar, turning away — barred by the rulers of the Southeast Asian nation from delivering the humanitarian aid.

Lord knows, we tried — but after 15 attempts to get the supplies to shore, the Essex and three other vessels left.

Our internationally scorned country wasn't alone: French and British warships also were turned away.

But there was a spot of brightness in the tragedy that left 78,000 people dead and 56,000 more missing: The oppressors of the land once known as Burma are allowing a few of our military transport planes to bring supplies into the capital. Relief efforts, however, are still being seriously hampered by the ruling junta and its soldiers.

It set us to wondering: Were they not bogged down in the occupation of two West Asian nations, and busily thinking of ways to spend America's treasure on destructive weaponry, couldn't our military leaders come up with high-tech tactics for humanitarian aid?

Twenty-five years ago, an obscure lunatic of our acquaintence cooked up a notion for neutralizing Nicaragua's Soviet-style Sandinista regime, under which hunger and other symptoms of poverty were flourishing:

Flying low from the east at dawn, B-26s brought out of Tucson's Air Force boneyard swoop over Managua. Their bomb bays open — and out come frozen chickens, followed by bubble-wrapped bags of beans and rice. Jeans and tennies would follow, all carefully targeted to the open areas in which that country has abounded since the 1972 earthquake.

A populace fed and clothed. A regime humiliated by its inability to do so. Democracy comes to that long-benighted republic.

It came to Nicaragua anyway, thanks in great part to that country's courageous newspapering family, the Chamorros.

But what if we made surgical aerial strikes on other countries in crisis? Could we have avoided the Clinton-era tragedy of Somalia? Might a surprise bombardment of a well-chosen target in Darfur deliver food and water sufficient to save lots of lives without putting our troops on the ground?

It would take planning — and military intelligence (yes, there is such a thing, for all the evidence to the contrary). It would take communications with oppressed locals, to keep the bonanza out of the Sudanese dictatorship's hands. Even then, orderly and fair distribution of the aid would be an enormous challenge. But wouldn't this be worthier of our nation's efforts than the military hell we so often raise?

It's probably too late to pull such a stunt on Myanmar, even if it might help generate the overdue revolution that country needs. And it couldn't have been accomplished by the two-dozen helicopters aboard the Essex; our crews would have been sitting ducks for the guns of the Burmese military.

But we have other aircraft — and could develop planes especially for humanitarian missions.

Who knows? Maybe some international veterans of the Red Cross could develop a new manner of operation, calculated to set tyrants quaking in their boots ...

Such a set up would have to be done sub rosa — on the order of today's secret-weapons and espionage budgeting. But it can't be worse than today's military waste.