It is an inexact art, psychoanalyzing the president of the United States. But when the administration was threatening to enter a military conflict both senseless and unpopular, there was nowhere to look for possible explanations but inside Bill Clinton’s head.
Certainly there was precious little enlightenment in the president’s speech Thursday on why we could see our way clear to invade Haiti. With a listlessness at odds with his usual sidewalk-preacher oratorical style, Clinton couldn’t drum up one compelling reason that a tiny nation whose economy is in shambles and whose military is a shadow of our own posed a risk to national security.
He was reduced to quoting George Bush and referring to Grenada as though it were Guadalcanal. It evoked the movie “Dave,” in which the president is impersonated by someone else after he falls ill. Who was that man playing Bill Clinton?
From the isolated perch of the presidency, Clinton has become a leader reviled not only by the Republicans but by many liberal Democrats as well. He is seen as a man who would bargain away nearly any principle. From an unworkable “don’t ask, don’t tell” resolution of the issue of gay men and lesbians in the military, to the slow erosion of the promise of universal health care from all to many to some, Clinton has negotiated much and satisfied few.
This perception may have reached its zenith when Garry Trudeau, whose cartoon strip “Doonesbury” frequently is the country’s most revealing and most punishing social commentary, recently began to portray the president as a floating waffle.
If George Bush was at least partly motivated in his mano-a-mano with Saddam Hussein by a powerful inner urge to show that he was not a prep school wimp, it seems just as likely that Clinton was trying to show the world Thursday night that the waffle can stand fast. The problem is that he has chosen the wrong time and the wrong place to do so.
The atrocities and deprivation he described in Haiti are horrible and real, it is true. But if they justified military action, we long ago should have sent troops into Bosnia and even Rwanda. (And when Clinton intoned “executing children, raping women,” it sounded as much like New York or Chicago as Port-au-Prince.)
The recalcitrance of the military junta is unarguable. But that argued not for military intervention but for continued diplomatic pressure, sanctions that target the well-to-do, humanitarian aid for the poor and economic assistance when the tyrants are overthrown by the Haitian people.
Like the gulf war, fought largely for access to Middle Eastern oil, the Haitian invasion also had been styled an economic necessity. Clinton said in his speech it would stanch the flow of Haitian refugees, an expensive result of the political terror and the economic embargo the United States has imposed.
A return to democracy would stop the flight, Clinton suggested, which does not explain why citizens living in peace under the duly elected president of Mexico keep pouring over the border into Texas and California.
Evoking Panama and Grenada, two other foolish mini-wars, Clinton had said that any incursion into Haiti would be “limited and specific.” But soldiers would die, and civilians too, particularly if riots spread through the streets of that deeply anti-American island and we were, once again, forced to destroy the village in order to save it.
Perhaps if that was done, Clinton would have saved face in some fashion. That was the theme of his speech: that he had told the military junta over and over to get out and now he had had enough. American credibility was at stake, he said, although it seemed more Bill Clinton’s credibility than the nation’s.
Besides, to whom must we prove our mettle? The former Soviet Union? North Korea? St. Croix?
The president of Haiti had accused the president of the U.S. of planning an invasion to assure a Democratic victory in mid-term elections. His political instincts are as bad as Clinton’s. With public and political opinion so arrayed against intervention, the very best result from an invasion would have been a wash-no gain, no harm. The best case was that Haiti, like Grenada, would become a bit by Jay Leno, a throwaway line by David Letterman, Clinton’s little war, remembered less as an exercise in foreign policy than a crisis of self-confidence.
