There is still a possibility that 20,000 American soldiers and paratroopers will not have to shoot their way into Haiti. By any rational standard, the current rulers of the hemisphere’s most nightmarish nation – Lt. Gen. Raoul Cedras and his junta colleagues – should by now have pocketed their winnings and slipped away to a cushy retirement in Spain or the South of France. After weeks of saber rattling by the United States, Cedras may finally surrender power before an invasion. But even if he does, the Clinton administration has promised to keep thousands of American troops in Haiti while the nation rebuilds under the restored rule of its elected president, the flaky Father Jean-Bertrand Aristide. America’s occupation of Haiti could turn out to be longer and costlier than its recent misadventure in Somalia, where a peace mission gone wrong cost $2 billion and the lives of 30 U.S. servicemen.
There may be a strong case for invading Haiti, but Clinton has yet to make it. He hasn’t convinced the public that vital American interests – the promotion of democracy, the preservation of human rights, the credible exercise of superpower leadership in the Caribbean and beyond – are at stake. He can argue that the suffering of ordinary Haitians must be eased, if only to stop another stream of boat people from fleeing toward Florida. But Clinton has a glaring political problem to solve; he has threatened the Haitian generals so many times that if he does not invade, he’ll look like a weakling.
It is an invasion that few Americans want, apart from the Congressional Black Caucus and a small constituency of Aristide sympathizers in the human-rights (and op-ed) community. In a new Newsweek Poll, only 34 percent of the people surveyed favored U.S. participation in a multinational intervention; 57 percent opposed the idea. Haiti may engage U.S. interests in a moral sense, but most Americans think it means nothing to their national security. “In my view, the president has not made his case for an invasion,” Bob Dole, the Republican leader in the Senate, said last week. Former vice president Dan Quayle charged in a television interview that Clinton was considering an invasion in order “to increase his standing in the public-opinion polls.” In an even nastier critique, Ross Perot said Clinton should get congressional approval for the invasion, “since as a young man, he declined to risk his life in combat for this country.” Some of Clinton’s supporters urged the president to hold off until after the November elections, to avoid any appearance of a political conflict of interest.
The debate will only get hotter this week. Clinton will make his case for the invasion, probably with a televised speech. His advisers say he will argue that, after a year and a half of fruit-less negotiations with Cedras, and a string of promises broken by the junta, the only way to get Aristide back into power is to remove the generals – forcibly, if need be. Secretary of State Warren Christopher and other top administration officials will brief congressional leaders in one-on-one telephone calls. (“They don’t want anyone ganging up on them over this,” says a congressional staffer.) The State Department will release a special report on recent human-rights abuses by the junta.
It’s an ugly picture. As poor Haitians suffer the effects of a tightened embargo, the regime’s thugs add to their agony by murdering and terrorizing Aristide supporters. But some Americans may conclude that Aristide isn’t much better than the generals. Though loved by the poor, the volatile Roman Catholic priest is an anti-American Marxist demagogue whose commitment to democracy and human rights is far from rock-solid. Aristide was nearly eight months into his five-year term when the generals threw him out in 1991. He had been elected with 70 percent of the vote, and even his critics concede that he made ordinary people feel safe on the streets for the first time in their lives. He made the military and the middle and upper classes feel anything but safe. Aristide never made good on his threats to redistribute wealth, tax the rich or separate the army from the police. But his rhetoric was frightening.
He denounced “the deadly economic infection called capitalism.” He advocated class warfare, endorsing the idea of murdering political opponents with flaming tires placed around their necks, a weapon known locally as “Pere Lebrun,” the name of a Haitian tire dealer. In one angry speech, Aristide said the Haitian “masses have their own little tool” – Pere Lebrun – and urged his followers to “give [them] what [they] deserve.” A CIA report branded Aristide a psychotic; Lawrence Pezzullo, Clinton’s former special envoy to Haiti, had his own frustrations with Aristide, but he disputes that judgment. “What I saw,” he says, “was not a psychopathic maniac but a rigid, narrow person who does not have the courage to make decisions and is incapable of compromise.”
Yet Clinton is stuck with Aristide, if only because the Haitian president holds a moral trump card: legitimacy. “We all know that the guy is a bit of a weirdo,” says a European diplomat. “But if you are fighting for the principle of democracy, you have to take the results.”
Last week the decks were cleared for an invasion of Haiti by an agreement between the United States and Cuba that promised to cut off, at least temporarily, the flow of boat people from Fidel Castro’s foundering communist state. Washington had already sent messages to Cedras through intermediaries promising that the United States would fly him and his generals to safe havens if they gave up peacefully. If not, Washington warned, the military leaders would be hunted down and handed over to Aristide’s government. The generals could end up like former Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, but in a Haitian prison rather than an American one. “They would be absolutely crazy not to go while they can,” said a senior administration official.
So far, however, Clinton’s handling of the Haitian crisis apparently has convinced the generals that they can defy him and get away with it. The president’s key mistake may have occurred last October, when the USS Harlan County steamed into Port-au-Prince carrying more than 200 lightly armed U.S. and Canadian military engineers. They were supposed to be the vanguard of a U.N. mission overseeing Aristide’s return to power under an agreement brokered with the junta on Governors Island in New York City the previous summer. As the Harlan County approached, its berth was blocked by a motley flotilla of small boats, and a gang of about 100 pro-government thugs stood on the dock, shouting and waving machetes. The Harlan County was ordered to turn tail. “That was the breakpoint,” says Pezzullo. “When we caved, we pulled the plug on Governors Island.” He adds that Cedras immediately “became more crusty, more difficult to deal with.”
Clinton is also dealing from weakness on the domestic political front, after another policy flip-flop. Last April, civil-rights activist Randall Robinson began a hunger strike to protest the administration’s policy of repatriating Haitian boat people. The president reversed his policy in May. “Clinton was not going to watch Randall Robinson die and then have people criticize him at the funeral,” says a Democratic Senate staffer. Then a surge of Haitian refugees forced Clinton into another course correction, shunting the boat people into offshore “safe havens.” By then, Pezzullo had quit in frustration – one step ahead of being fired. He was replaced by William Gray III, the former chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus. Washington stopped searching for a compromise with the military. Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, who took charge of the policy, argued that the generals would never leave unless they were forced out.
The recent record of U.S. intervention in the Caribbean offers some hope for the Haitian operation. In both Grenada and Panama, U.S. invasion forces did their job – messily, to be sure – and got out quickly, without stumbling into any quagmire. But in Panama, the invaders left behind a government that became, in some respects, almost as corrupt and incompetent as Noriega’s. And Somalia may turn out to be a more relevant model for the Haitian endeavor. After the immediate hunger crisis was resolved, the United Nations turned its hand to nation-building. Perhaps inevitably, U.S. troops were forced to take sides in the power games of Somali warlords, and some Americans got caught in the cross-fire.
In Haiti, as in all interventions, getting out will be harder than getting in. The Americans cannot turn the country over to Aristide until he is capable of governing coherently. As his sponsor and protector, the Clinton administration can nudge him toward compromise with his enemies. Without U.S. backing, he cannot hope to receive the international financing he needs to rebuild his dilapidated country. This intervention is not like the one in 1915, which was designed to expand American hegemony and protect U.S. bank loans. The 1994 version has more respectable motives: to protect life, to build democracy and to head off a new wave of boat people. As long as the goals remain modest, the endgame can be within reach. Most Americans, however, still are not convinced that their country should be in the game at all.
Would you approve of the following policies to end military rule in Haiti:
51% Give tighter economic sanctions more time to work 34% U.S. participation in a multi-national invasion 44% Remove the junta through covert action 61% A compromise in which the generals give up power to someone other than Aristide, and new elections are scheduled The Newsweek Poll, Sept. 8-9, 1994
