[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 105 (Wednesday, August 3, 1994)]
[House]
[Page H]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: August 3, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
           AN INDECISIVE NONLEADER FOR THE NEW WORLD DISORDER

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. (Mr. Becerra). Under the Speaker's announced 
policy of February 11, 1994, and June 10, 1994, the gentleman from 
California [Mr. Dornan] is recognized for 30 minutes as the designee of 
the minority leader.
  Mr. DORNAN. Mr. Speaker, I was going to speak tonight about why I 
believe the Surgeon General should be deposed or fired by the people at 
the White House, but I decided to switch that subject to tomorrow 
night's special order and speak instead tonight about Haiti and our 
erratic foreign policy, because the President, in just an hour and 37 
minutes, will be having his press conference. I assume that he will be 
mentioning Haiti in this conference, but then the questions will likely 
be dominated by the Senate and the House Banking Committees' hearings 
on that 1 or 2 percent of the whole Whitewater scandal that those two 
esteemed committees are allowed to discuss.
  Mr. Speaker, I have said on this House floor many times that the one 
person who writes most cogently about all matters military and 
military/political is a retired Army colonel who spent much of his life 
in combat in Vietnam analyzing our political lack of will and failure 
of foreign policy during that decade from the mid-1960's to the mid-
1970's. That expert is Col. Harry Summers. Here is an article from 
Colonel Summers that I will put in the Record later this week, from the 
Washington Times of July 30, 1994. I think it is a good prolog or lead-
in to a discussion of Haiti. And I will briefly touch on Rwanda and 
North Korea, the latter which is the one issue we should be debating in 
this House, not for hours but for days. What do we do about North 
Korea, a country driving toward not only nuclear capability but also 
selling this nuclear weapons technology to renegade terrorist states 
like the current government in Iran?
  Harry Summers writes, July 30:

       Incidentally, notes Walter Scott, in his Personality Parade 
     column on July 24th, ``Marilyn Quayle's father, Dr. Warren 
     Tucker, was a follower of Colonel Robert Thieme, a Houston 
     evangelist known for his hostile attacks on Communists.'' It 
     was not intended as a compliment. A telling reflection on a 
     peculiar moral blindness among America's liberal 
     intelligentsia.
       The only acceptable comment on the Nazis who murdered 12 
     million people in their concentration camps is to call it a 
     hostile attack. And those who deny the realities of the 
     Holocaust are rightly condemned. But such ``hostile attacks 
     on Communists'' as Mr. Scott makes clear, are still beyond 
     the pale.
       For many years, anti-anti-Communism has been in fashion 
     among the cognoscente. In those elite circles. Ronald 
     Reagan's categorization of the USSR as an ``evil empire'' is 
     still a matter of scorn and derision. This remains true even 
     after the horrific revelations from their own official state 
     files of the former Soviet Union detailing the extend of 
     communist atrocities.
       As the Washington Post noted on July 17, last month, a week 
     before Mr. Scott's column appeared in the Parade Magazine 
     supplement, Soviet Dictator Joseph Stalin is believed 
     responsible for between 30 million and 40 million unnatural 
     deaths. These atrocities included the Ukrainian famine in the 
     1930s, where Stalin deliberately starved to death some 10 
     million peasants in a manufactured disaster designed to 
     consolidate his power.

  Now, William F. Buckley's Firing Line show that aired in this 
District of Columbia area a week ago Sunday had Robert Conquest, the 
great scholar and author on all Soviet affairs, and he closed the show 
with a line that while there are no more pro-Communists around in the 
cognoscente, those that Harry Summers calls ``America's liberal 
intelligentsia,'' are still anti-anti-Communists.
  I just sent for that transcript of Bill Buckley's show. I hope to put 
it in the Record later this week in the Extension of Remarks.
  Now, these people that still have never apologized for being on the 
wrong side of the whole horrible, almost half century struggle since 
World War II, three quarters of a century if you take the Communist 
revolution of 1917 with Lenin coming to power, these people who have 
never apologized for attacking Ronald Reagan over saying ``evil 
empire,'' or never lifted their finger, as I have said about Bill 
Clinton, never lifted a pinky in his entire adult life in that struggle 
against communism, now they want to marshall the forces of the United 
States against a little island nation that has never known democracy 
but is certainly not a threat to the vital interests of the United 
States.
  On this very day, 80 years ago, April 3, 1914, Germany declared war 
against France. There had been a whole week of declarations of war 
leading up to this event. I mentioned the Austro-Hungarian Empire 
declaring war on Serbia 80 years ago last week in July 28. That started 
the series of back and forth events with Russia defending Serbia and 
Germany weighing in against this or that country.

                              {time}  1830

  The United States, in a deeply isolationist mode, sat back, looked at 
this thing, and quoted George Washington and said ``Leave those people 
across the oceans to their own horrors,'' and everybody on all sides 
thought the war would be over in a month in Europe.
  Four years later, 11 million people, most of them the flower of the 
European youth, were gone, buried in all the mass graves from Flanders 
Fields to the Italian Alps to all across the Eurasian continent, 11 
million people, most of them young males in their early marriage or 
premarriage years.
  Only God, when we die, will ever be able to tell us what World War I, 
which led to World War II, how that horrible bloodletting, changed the 
surface of mankind for all of history.
  Obviously, Haiti is not a problem that is going to develop into a 
massive loss of human life. Haiti can be crushed quickly by American 
forces, including United States Marines. I have in front of me what 
cannot even properly be called an order of battle, with their little 
troops aligned against the world's only remaining superpower.
  The Presidential Guard has 1 infantry battalion, and a battalion, for 
those who do not track military affairs, is a little over 500 men, and 
in their case probably a lot less.
  They have one armored squadron. Usually it takes four squadrons or so 
to make up a battalion. They have one other infantry battalion, a 
special forces battalion, and I can tell you, these are not like our 
special forces, Mr. Speaker.
  They have 2 artillery brigades, 6 garrison detachments of about 25 
small companies. They do have some old Stuart tanks, a handful of them. 
They have a handful of personnel carriers. They have some old Cadillac 
gauge Commando V-150 personnel carriers they bought used from France.
  They have aircraft, Mr. Speaker, but most of them are grounded. They 
do not have any spare parts. Just a little Cessna Skymaster, 50-year 
old Curtis C-46 Commandos, now down to just one. They have some Twin 
Islanders, Norman Islanders, Beavers, a Baron, a Twin Bonanza, one F-33 
Bonanza, a Cessna 172, and three little tiny Cessna 150's, all 
grounded.
  However, in their guns, they have ten 57 millimeter guns, four 57 
millimeter towed air defense guns, 40 millimeter air defense guns, and 
37 millimeter guns. They have five 75 millimeter M-116 guns, four M-105 
Howitzers, four 20 millimeter Vulcan Gatling gun air defense Howitzers, 
and six 20 millimeter twin towed air defense guns.
  Mr. Speaker, all of these weapons will probably be taken out in the 
first few hours, but how many young American men will die? How many 
would kiss a wife good-bye down at Norfolk, or already have kissed a 
wife or a fiance good-bye months ago, sitting out there on the Wasp or 
Hornet under those horrible conditions, seven or eight young Marines 
stacked up in these hot bunks, that as soon as they jump out of, 
somebody else is getting into that warm bunk, and they have been out 
there, with the morale going down for weeks now just circling around 
Haiti. What about their cost?
  How many of them have already said good-bye to their families for the 
last time, and for what? For an Aristide, who called this Nation a 
satanic nation in front of crowds there some months back?
  Mr. Speaker, I have an article in front of me from the July American 
Spectator Magazine called ``Aristide Development.'' The subtitle is 
``Not Content With Having Destroyed the Haitian Economy Through 
Sanctions, the U.S. Now Wants to Impose a Would-be Tyrant by Force,'' 
Aristide. ``How Haiti policy has turned into a con-job by the 
administration and a cash cow for its friends,'' and it is written from 
Port-au-Prince, a fascinating article. I include it in the Record. For 
those who do not know how to get to the American Spectator, they can 
get this in their library from the Congressional Record in a few weeks.
  Mr. Speaker, if we do not make this tragic mistake of smashing this 
little island to restore this tyrant, they will certainly learn all the 
ins and outs of the finances from this American Spectator article.
  Mr. Speaker, we are going to put, and are in the process of doing 
that right now, 4,000 Americans into Rwanda, and we are going to spend 
about $250 million in United States aid, and that is 40 percent of the 
whole humanitarian effort, to help those thousands of people whose 
husbands and fathers were the murderers of half a million to one 
million Tutsis, these forsaken Hutu women and children, where 2,000 
starve today in Rwanda, and cried out for us to go in there at great 
expense, and our Secretary of Defense said our American men and women 
may be in there for a year or more, 4,000 of them, $250,000 cost, and 
that is just an opening.
  Mr. Speaker, if I know this House, they will try to take it out of 
the hide of the Defense budget, instead of providing for a special 
supplemental bill or taking it out of foreign affairs, but we should be 
in there in Rwanda in some way to help this ghastly human tragedy.
  However, when we have our hands full with that, why are we creating 
starvation with enhanced sanctions in Haiti when there is no effort at 
all with a special ops or covert operation?
  If this Clinton White House thinks it has the right to take out the 
military officer corps there, what right do we have to endanger young 
men in a Marine expenditionary force when we will not do something with 
more senior, better-trained, covert people? And then if we were to wipe 
out the whole officer corps, I have an article here that says ``The 
problem is the NCO corps.''
  As bothersome as the officer corps is there, up to and including 
General Cedras--he ought to be a colonel, by the way, he does not rate 
three stars because he does not have the men for that--the attention it 
diverts from North Korea is the most frustrating thing of all of this 
moss.
  Mr. Speaker here is a cartoon from the Orlando Sentinel today. I 
found it on the desk here when I was getting ready to speak, and it 
shows a boat, a little boat, loaded with tragic Haitian refugees. They 
are looking up at a United States destroyer-type ship, and one of the 
officers on the deck says to the commander, ``I forgot, what is the 
Clinton policy on Haiti,'' meaning do we pick up these tragic boat 
people. The skipper of the ship says ``Beats me. What time is it?''
  Yes, the Clinton foreign policy does change from minute to minute. 
Listen to this story by New House News Service, David Wood, dateline a 
few days back, Washington, DC:

       The United States has planned and rehearsed a military 
     invasion of Haiti, but it is ill-prepared for the most 
     difficult days and weeks that would follow the landing of 
     troops, according to senior military officials. According to 
     senior officers and others, the Clinton Administration has no 
     coherent political-military plan to restore democracy and to 
     halt the flow of refugees fleeing repression and poverty in 
     the Caribbean nation.

  When President Bush left office, the odds were 1 in 40 that a Haitian 
refugee could be accepted into the United States. Now those odds are 
down to one in four. What a magnet, what a tremendous draw on the 
people that have the physical strength and the imagination to get out 
of this place as the sanctions, I repeat, again, crippled, more than 
anybody else, the humble Haitians.
  In addition to creating an erratic foreign policy, I put in the 
Record yesterday, so I will not do it again today, the superb article 
by Charles Krauthammer saying ``Good-bye Monroe Doctrine.'' He points 
out that this is the first time in history that the United States has 
ever gone to the United Nations to get permission to take care of the 
problem in what Clinton refers to as ``our own backyard.'' I call it 
our front yard. Our backyard is our close, very close friendship with 
Canada and Mexico.
  Guess what we had to deal away. First of all, China gave us an 
abstention, so we got nothing out of them. But to get the Soviet Union 
to give us permission to try to resolve this Haitian island problem, we 
had to give the Soviet Union permission to go into Georgia, Stalin's 
hometown, which he had as a home nation state, for which he had a 
particular vengeance for tearing up to get even with his own fellow 
Georgians, who never did accept him.

                              {time}  1840

  The Russian troops that stirred up the Georgian trouble in the first 
place are now, under the United Nations, being allowed to keep 
peacekeeping troops in the formerly Soviet Georgia. ``Russia had 
threatened to veto U.N. approval of a Haiti invasion if refused a free 
hand in its former colony,'' what they call in this threatening manner 
their near abroad.
  So Russia has in its plans to not just keep peace but ``to restore a 
small piece of the old Soviet empire,'' Krauthammer writes, ``and 
signal Russia's intent to reestablish hegemony over all the rest of as 
many of the former 14 so-called Soviet republics that were under the 
control of the Kremlin.''
  Mr. Speaker, what I have come across, and I think it is probably the 
most revealing document, the Republican Study Committee has written up 
a fine paper on it, is the so-called Dante Caputo memo which was leaked 
to the press. It was a confidential May 23 memo from U.N. special envoy 
to Haiti Dante Caputo. Listen to this:
  ``The Wall Street Journal published a brief extract from the memo way 
back on June 16, with an editorial''--that I thought had a catchy 
title--``called Real Voodoo.''
  ``The Washington Times also mentioned the memorandum in a June 15 
story.'' They had the scoop on it. ``U.S. Poised for Invasion of Haiti 
within 2 Months.'' Thank heavens that 2-month window is almost gone. 
That would end on the Ides of August, August 15.
  ``The memo contained fascinating insights into the White House's 
suspect motives for invading this tiny little impoverished nation. The 
leaked document suggests that from the United States perspective, the 
economic sanctions are not intended or expected to dislodge Haiti's 
military rulers but to serve as merely a diplomatic cover for the real 
objective--an armed invasion timed to take place before this November, 
that is, before the United States elections! Caputo explained that the 
United States intends to leave Haiti after 1 month,'' no matter what, 
``passing the torch,'' those are his words, ``to the United Nations. 
The only constraint on the Clinton administration from Caputo's 
perspective is whether it can find countries to mount a multinational 
operation after the United States gets out.''
  ``Would the President really risk the lives of American soldiers to 
boost his party's electoral prospects? This probable intention is 
underlined by the fact that the Clinton White House, which until now 
has been fixated on multilateral and U.N. sanctioned military 
interventions,'' a la the concept of Morton Halperin, Strobe Talbott, 
and all of the former pro-Hanoi voices of the past, ``is now preparing 
to go it alone with'' this U.N. approval ``despite major reservations'' 
from the Latin American countries'.
  As my colleague Lincoln Diaz-Balart from South Florida said today, he 
got a call from an acquaintance, a diplomat in Argentina that said, 
``Why aren't you doing anything about Cuba?'' Castro is still a more 
evil, corrupt dictator, has more political prisoners, more people 
suffering, including the massacre of over 32 people--that Raoul Castro, 
his brother, is blaming upon us, although it was his fire boats that 
hosed these women and children that drowned in the Caribbean.
  We have Western democratic allies that are saying to us, ``What is 
your policy here?''
  ``Among Caputo's conclusions are the following damning statements 
attributed to none other than the No. 2 man at the State Department, 
old Strobe ``pro-Hanoi'' Talbott himself:
  ``The United States administration considers that an invasion of 
Haiti is its best option. In the same fashion, the President of the 
United States' main advisers are of the opinion that not only does this 
option constitute the lesser evil but that is ``politically'' 
desirable. Thus we think that the current opposition of public opinion 
to an armed intervention will change radically once it will have taken 
place. The Americans see in this type of action a chance to show after 
the strong media criticism of the administration, the President's 
decisionmaking capability and the firmness of leadership in 
international political matters.''
  Minutes from a May 24 discussion between Secretary General Boutros-
Ghali and Dante Caputo also leaked. The minutes cited Mr. Caputo as 
saying--now this is May 24, and the very day before, May 23, the father 
of one of these excellent Delta Force senior sergeants that was killed 
by a warlord in the streets, the filthy alleys of Mogadishu, Somalia, 
the father of a posthumously awarded Medal of Honor hero refused to 
shake the President's hand in the White House in the East Ballroom 
because he said the President had no concept of military operations and 
was not fit to be the Commander in Chief--the next day after that, May 
24, here is this Caputo leak in his meeting with Boutros-Ghali who 
wants to be a world military leader using American blood. Boutros-
Ghali, that is.

  ``The Americans will not be able to stand for much longer until 
August at the latest''--and here we are on August 3--``the criticism of 
their foreign policy inside their own domestic front. They want to do 
something. They are going to try to intervene militarily.''
  The notes from that Caputo/Boutros-Ghali meeting said that Caputo 
expected Aristide to condemn the intervention after having asked for 
it, and that:
  ``Mr. Caputo predicts a disaster. The United States will make the 
United Nations bear the responsibility to manage the occupation of 
Haiti. With Aristide as President during 2 or 3 years, it will be 
hell.''
  In other words, the people in the White House know that this Bertrand 
Aristide, this fallen away radical ex-priest who hates the Pope and 
calls the United States and the U.S. Government satanic, that he is 
going to be a disaster.
  One of the most brilliant leaders in the Black Caucus told me and 
everyone else at the Intelligence Committee meeting a few weeks back 
that Aristide can probably get elected any day in the week but he never 
ever will have the ability to govern that country.
  Coming back to the leaked information on this Caputo meeting:
  ``It is not so much the armed intervention itself that we have to 
avoid. What we do not want is to inherit a baby,'' I think he is 
referring to Baby Doc Duvalier, another one of the misfortunes of 
Haiti, the father and son set up their ugly, vicious, murdering secret 
police, the Tom Tom Macoutes. Not so secret. They walked around all day 
long in their fedoras and their sunglasses, beating up people with 
truncheons or shooting them arbitrarily in alleys.
  ``For the Americans are fixing to leave quickly. They would not 
intervene if they had to remain.''
  Think of that last line. If Clinton knew he had to stay there, if 
Secretary of Defense Perry knew that he would have to stay in Haiti as 
long as Perry is predicting we are going to be in Rwanda, for over a 
year, we would never go in.
  Here is a fabulous article here that I want to ask unanimous consent 
to put in about what happened when the Americans were in Haiti for 19 
years, pulling out in 1934. Nothing else changed.
  Finishing up on the Caputo meeting with the Secretary-General of the 
United Nations:
  ``To the Minister's question, a U.N. minister, about the existence of 
another alternative, Dante Caputo replies that the United States acted 
as a brake to a diplomatic solution, creating a situation where the 
intervention has now become inevitable. The Secretary-General fears 
that the United States will take a unilateral decision and that it will 
repeat the Somalian experience,'' that when 5 or 3 or 4 or 2 Americans 
get killed by some of this limited but still working artillery and 
small arms fire, when the mothers and fathers go on Hard Copy, First 
Edition, Inside Edition, and the evening news and start to tell their 
story of how they lost their son who was about to get out in a month, 
who had written them at home, reading from their letters that they were 
sweating out there, stacked up on these marine expeditionary deployment 
assault carriers without even understanding the policy of what was 
putting them there, when Bob Dornan comes to the floor and talks about 
flying flags as I did on Thanksgiving or the Fourth of July for these 
young heroes that died for this tyrant and that I called the parents 
and got their viewpoint and bring that word to this House floor, to put 
the Members on the other side of the aisle, to put them up against 
their own convictions that we should expend our blood for this erratic 
Aristide?
  Listen to how this ends. You bet it can repeat the Somalian 
experience.
  ``The Secretary-General himself concludes, it should not be forgotten 
that the Haitian people suffer now because of the U.S. sanctions and 
the U.S.-asked-for increased sanctions. A final confidential ``Notes 
for the File'' describes a May 19 meeting between Dante Caputo and the 
Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister, Andre Ouellet:''
  ``Dante Caputo stresses the different options for a solution and 
relates, for the Minister's benefit, the reactions observed in Paris 
and Washington. The first option consists of waiting for the sanctions 
to be put in place''--that has happened--``to produce the desired 
effect, the military leader's departure.''

                              {time}  1850

  General Cedras; it has not happened.
  However, stresses Dante Caputo, the United States would not be ready 
to wait several months for this to produce the desired effect, 
concerning the United States position, ``such as that laid out by 
Strobe Talbott.'' They even have his name misspelled with one t.
  ``Dante Caputo thinks time is short, and that the situation cannot 
last beyond July. Dante Caputo emphasizes that Haiti represents a test 
case for which the United States has to have found a solution before 
November.''
  Mr. Speaker, again, I am betting that at the press conference 
tonight, in an hour and 10 minutes, the press will bore in on 
Whitewater, on the committee hearings and probably open up, which they 
should, with a great many questions about the crime bill, where it is, 
why it is still bogged down, what is holding it up, when he expects to 
have it on his desk. Hopefully, they will ask him about some of these 
dance classes, some of the social money in the crime bill where we are 
going to allocate money to teach people in prison to dance. Since our 
prisons are separated, males and females, who gets to lead at those 
dances? Do we have murderers lead one week, child molesters the next? 
Is it going to be step dancing, is it going to be the tango, are we 
going to bring back the jitterbug? What is this midnight basketball? 
Why not at 9 o'clock at night to keep them from the heavy burglary 
hours from 9 to 1 o'clock in the morning? I do not know or understand. 
So much money is squandered in that crime bill. But all of this 
questioning is probably going to prevent key questions on Haiti.
  Mr. Speaker, I put in the Record yesterday my Cap Weinberger/Bob 
Dornan Ten Commandments. I wish the press would just go down these 
commandments with the President and say: ``Would you explain to us, Mr. 
President, what vital interests there is to the United States or our 
allies in Haiti? Would you explain to us what other options have been 
rejected, like covert options? If you want to take Cedras out, why not 
kidnap him and fly him to the Riviera in France? Is there a commitment 
to achieve some kind of victory, or are we going to pull out? Are there 
clearly defined political and military objectives? What is the 
commitment of our force if we are stuck there for a few months and 
Congress does not want to fund it? What will happen if the American 
people turn on you along with Congress, will you pull out immediately 
as with Somalia, because there are dead young men and families to 
account for,'' like the tremendous Green Beret father of Casey Joyce 
who testified so brilliantly on the Senate side.
  Mr. Speaker, I am going to put in my Ten Commandments again. So let 
me finish in the last few minutes and put in the Harry Summers article, 
the historical article about what we learned from our 19-year 
occupation in Haiti in the past, and again the American Spectator 
article.
  The materials referred to follows:

       The 10 commandants for committing U.S. combat forces are as 
     follows:
       1. Thou shall not commit U.S. combat forces unless the 
     situation is vital to U.S. for allied national interests;
       2. Thou shall not commit U.S. combat forces unless all 
     other options already have been used or considered;
       3. Thou shall not commit U.S. combat forces unless there is 
     a clear commitment, including allocated resources, to 
     achieving victory;
       4. Thou shall not commit U.S. combat forces unless there 
     are clearly defined political and military objectives;
       5. Thou shall not commit U.S. combat forces unless our 
     commitment of these forces will change if our objectives 
     change;
       6. Thou shall not commit U.S. combat forces unless the 
     American people and Congress support the action;
       7. Thou shall not commit U.S. combat forces unless under 
     the operational command of American commanders or allied 
     commanders under a ratified treaty;
       8. Thou shall not commit U.S. combat forces unless properly 
     equipped, trained and maintained by the Congress;
       9. Thou shall not commit U.S. combat forces unless there is 
     substantial and reliable intelligence information, including 
     human intelligence; and
       10. Thou shall not commit U.S. combat forces unless the 
     commander in chief and Congress can explain to the loved ones 
     of any American soldier, sailor, Marine, pilot or aircrewman 
     killed or wounded why their family member or friend was sent 
     in harm's way.
       As it becomes increasingly likely that the current 
     Administration will use U.S. military personnel to force a 
     solution in Haiti, I would like to bring to your attention 
     the following article from Sunday's edition of the Washington 
     Post. It would be very unwise and dangerous to forget the 
     lessons of history with regards to American intervention in 
     this country.
           Best regards,
                                                 Robert K. Dornan,
                                                 U.S. Congressman.
                                  ____


                    When We Last Invaded Haiti * * *


          we stayed a long time: history's cautionary lessons

               (By Hugh De Santis and Kenneth J. Dillon)

       As pressures mount on President Clinton to send a military 
     expedition to Haiti, he may want to reflect on the lessons of 
     our last intervention there. Nearly 80 years ago, Woodrow 
     Wilson dispatched Marines to Haiti for many of the same 
     reasons that appear to be motivating Clinton. That 
     intervention led to a 19-year occupation that ended in a 
     failure to foster democracy.
       There are, of course, many differences between 1915 and 
     1994. Eighty years ago, when Secretary of State William 
     Jennings Bryan was intrigued by the fact that black Haitians 
     were capable of speaking French, it was the ``white man's 
     burden'' that inspired American intervention. Today the 
     leading advocates of intervention are in the Congressional 
     Black Caucus. In 1915, we excluded other nations from any 
     involvement in Haiti; now we eagerly solicit their 
     participation under the aegis of the United Nations.
       Still, there are cautionary lessons to be learned.
       In 1915, the immediate grounds for intervention were a 
     collapse of public order in Port-au-Prince. Haiti's peasant 
     mercenaries, known as cacos, had revolted against President 
     Vilbrun Guillaume Sam. In retaliation for the execution of 
     167 political prisoners by his police chief, a mob burst into 
     the French legation where Sam was hiding and dismembered him, 
     parading the corpse through the streets. Enter the U.S. 
     Marines.
       This was not the first time the United States had 
     intervened in the Central American-Caribbean region, either 
     to protect the Panama Canal or to reinforce American 
     domination in the area. But Wilson justified the occupation 
     of Haiti on legal grounds. Like Theodore Roosevelt and every 
     other American president after 1823, in accord with the 
     Monroe Doctrine Wilson was prepared to defend the security of 
     the Western hemisphere against European incursions.
       Missionary zeal also prompted Wilson's decision. Like 
     Secretary of State Bryan. Wilson was a self-conscious 
     evangelist of democracy who believed that the United States 
     was obligated to inculcate its values into other societies. 
     Indeed, Wilson drew a distinction between de facto 
     governments, even those more or less popularly elected, and 
     de jure governments that adhered to American liberal-
     democratic principles.
       Following the Marine intervention and the gradual 
     occupation of the whole of Haiti, the American admiral in 
     charge saw to it that the National Assembly elected a 
     president who was politically acceptable to the United 
     States. To ensure order, the United States seized the customs 
     houses, declared martial law and muscled through the Haitian 
     legislature a bilateral treaty that gave it control over the 
     country's financial and administrative affairs. To sanctify 
     its presence and, not insignificantly, protect its interests, 
     the United States drafted a new constitution that became the 
     law of the land in 1918.
       The Marines quickly mopped up the bands of cacos, and for a 
     while the occupation went smoothly. As one American officer 
     in the expeditionary force noted. ``No matter what we did, 
     nothing could be worse than their old regime''--a comforting 
     thought that is doubtless occurring to some Clinton 
     administration officials today.
       But for Haitians the humiliation of subjection to foreign 
     rule, the racist attitudes of the invasion forces and abuses 
     in the public works programs set up by the occupation 
     authorities were intolerable. In 1918, a major rebellion--
     Second Cacos War--broke out, leading to the deaths of some 
     1,500 insurgents and 15 Marines. The U.S. soldiers put on 
     blackface and hunted down Charlemagne Peralte, the leader of 
     the rebellion. They then strung up his corpse on a post, took 
     a photograph and distributed copies throughout the country in 
     an effort to break the spirit of resistance. This bit of 
     psychological warfare backfired when many Haitians compared 
     their slain leader's posture with that of Jesus Christ on the 
     cross.
       Eventually Americans wearied of imposing tutelary democracy 
     on a recalcitrant Haiti. The anti-democratic nature of 
     America's presence in the region proved an embarrassment. In 
     1929, when Marines fired into a threatening crowd in a 
     Haitian town, killing a dozen demonstrators, President Hoover 
     ordered an investigation into the occupation. In 1934, the 
     Marines departed. Despite their prolonged stay, Haiti 
     remained unaffected by democracy.
       How applicable is history to the current crisis in Haiti? 
     While there are many differences, the attitudes that underlie 
     the Clinton administration's deliberations bear striking 
     similarity to those that galvanized American intervention in 
     1915.
       True. Haiti poses no strategic threat to the United 
     States--but the prospect of hundreds of thousands of refugees 
     is its psychological equivalent. An American military 
     presence on the island might stem the tide of migration. 
     Moreover, the Haitian military's armed challenge to democracy 
     might give sustenance to anti-democratic tendencies elsewhere 
     in the Western Hemisphere. When Clinton expresses his concern 
     about the security implications of social unrest in Haiti, he 
     is implicitly invoking Theodore Roosevelt's corollary to the 
     Monroe Doctrine whereby the United States can intervene to 
     bestow order and civilization on the region as much as to 
     preserve American security.
       There is also the moral dimension. Clinton and Secretary of 
     State Warren Christopher (Like Wilson and Bryan) are latter-
     day evangelists of democracy. They feel duty-bound to ensure 
     that Jean-Bertrand Aristide--the de facto and de jure 
     president of Haiti--fulfills his mandate.
       The consequences of American intervention, should Clinton 
     decide to invade Haiti, are likely to be similar to those 
     that the United States experienced between 1915 and 1934. As 
     in the past, armed intervention would probably meet little 
     resistance from the ill-equipped and poorly trained Haitian 
     military, and it is bound to be supported by the pro-Aristide 
     public. In all likelihood, however, an occupation is almost 
     certain to last longer than the Clinton administration, the 
     liberal hawks in Congress, and such activists as Randall 
     Robinson think.
       The danger is likely to lie less in clashes between 
     American forces and cacos-type guerillas, although that 
     cannot be entirely precluded, than in confrontations between 
     occupation forces and unruly crowds such as the one that 
     occurred in 1929. It is not hard to imagine protracted 
     violence between pro- and anti-Aristide forces that would 
     make Americans prisoners of their own occupation. And the 
     longer the occupation, the more the United States would 
     expose itself to criticism of its imperialistic behavior, and 
     not only from foreign countries.
       The very constituencies that today are prodding Clinton to 
     intervene may hold the administration responsible tomorrow if 
     it fails to preserve democracy in Haiti--the probable outcome 
     in a country with ingrained traditions of dictatorship and 
     political violence--at the possible expense of the 
     president's domestic agenda, not to mention his reelection.

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