Getting Set for a Splendid Little War : Clinton was right on Vietnam, so why in Haiti does he want to take us down the same path?

The feeling is inescapable that Bill Clinton is desperate for a splendid little war to win before the November congressional election. How else to explain his insistence on intruding into the affairs of Haiti? Secretary of State Warren Christopher admitted as much when he invoked the precedents of Grenada and Panama to justify the current war talk as well as the constitutionality of bypassing Congress. “The Republican presidents got to have their fun, why not us?” he might as well be saying.

But Reagan and Bush were wrong then and Clinton is wrong now. As Sen. George Mitchell said in 1990, when he blasted George Bush for attempting to go to war in the Gulf without a declaration from Congress: “The President has no authority, acting alone, to commit the United States to war.” Now the Democratic leadership in Congress is awkwardly silent and Mitchell has even declared that “it’s not legal or necessary” for the President to seek congressional approval.

Surely Clinton knows better. Doesn’t he remember that when he and millions of others opposed the war in Vietnam that they did so, in part, because Congress had not declared war? This was not some minor detail. They argued correctly that the failure to gain the approval of Congress defined the deceit.

If the war made sense, why was the case not made forthrightly and persuasively to the only branch of government constitutionally mandated to declare war? Instead, the deliberative body was consistently lied to by an executive branch that randomly changed the premise of its intervention to suit the needs of its own political survival. That’s why those demonstrators, whom Clinton joined in London, termed the Vietnam War illegal and argued that no good purpose could be served by deceiving the public and the Congress by pretending that our troops were merely “advisers” involved in a “police action.”

Yet those very words are now employed by Clinton to make a full-scale invasion of Haiti seem as benign as a voter-registration drive. Once again, we will use our fire power to impose a democratic alternative. Once again, we claim the role of “monitors” of another people’s progress toward our promised land. And once again the “we,” the American people, are kept in the dark about where all this is headed.

Easy to say, as the President does, that all we care about is the restoration of democracy. But in Haiti, political and economic democracy cannot be separated. Aristide was elected with 70% of the vote on the promise that he would revolutionize Haitian society by destroying the wealthy oligarchy and sharing their wealth with the oppressed masses. Will we continue to support him if he attempts to make good on that noble promise? More likely he will be deposed and the United States will be ruling Haiti for the next 19 years as we did after the U.S. invasion of that country in 1920. What we bred was not democracy, but rather one of the most vicious dictatorships in modern history.

We should not presume to control the destiny of Haiti, Somalia or any other country, because we are only playing at colonialism. At least our French, Spanish and English predecessors had serious plans for colonization that created an infrastructure of schools, churches, plantations and government. What we offer instead is an erratic commitment to poorly defined notions of democracy as long as the political decisions go our way.

Do we have a serious alternative model to offer Haiti, a country with resources so limited as to make Bangladesh look good? How much foreign aid are we prepared to put in and for how long? We have heard alarmingly little about how we intend to run Haiti after we conquer it. Before we get started, there should be a clear commitment from Congress, and through it the American people, as to the how much, how long and toward what end.

Clearly Clinton is afraid to take his case to Congress because very few people in that body or in the larger public give a damn about Haiti. Sadly enough, the only real interest, outside of the Congressional Black Caucus, is to prevent Haitian refugees from landing on our shores.

If that is the case, Haiti does represent a bigger problem than Grenada ever did; Haiti does have more than 6 million people whereas the entire population of Grenada could have fled here and still have been accommodated in the Rose Bowl.

But why treat the refugees as a threat? Why not simply welcome them as we did those fleeing Cuba, Vietnam and the former Soviet Union? How can we claim to care about the humanitarian needs of Haitians when we lock them up in camps or return them forcibly to the country they have fled? The fact is that we don’t really care, which is why we should butt out.