Though nearly all other United Nations peacekeeping troops in Haiti have left, President Clinton has ordered several hundred American troops to stay behind, as part of a mission that is unclear and open-ended. Those two factors alone would make any U.S. peacekeeping venture an unacceptable risk.
But in Haiti we have a third factor: A country that remains a bomb with a lit fuse, one that a U.S. military invasion, massive U.S. and international occupation and hundreds of millions of dollars in economic aid have not been able to extinguish.
It would be foolhardy for our troops to be there if the bomb goes off. Congress should not renew the authorization–which expires Dec. 31–to maintain a U.S. contingent in Haiti.
The official U.S. rationale is Clinton double-talk at its most exasperating. “Have I made an indefinite commitment? No,” the president explained. “But I have made a definite commitment to continue to be involved . . . in ways that I think are appropriate.”
So the 300 to 500 U.S. troops remaining in Haiti will be treading warily in a dangerous twilight zone between a definite and an indefinite commitment.
U.S. involvement began three years ago with the deployment of a massive military force of 20,000 that was gradually replaced by UN peacekeepers. Since then, the Haitians’ dismal fortunes have barely improved. Both the government and the economy are nearly prostrate, and there are no credible leaders or solutions in sight.
The mission of the remaining American troops is dangerously ambiguous. U.S. soldiers are supposed to help with infrastructure projects such as building roads and digging wells. But in reality, by holding a pickax with one hand and an M-16 with the other, and being able to drive both a bulldozer and a Humvee, the U.S. troops are meant to function as a deterrent to renewed violence and bloodshed.
When such a vague mission will end is impossible to predict. So far the U.S. has suffered few casualties in Haiti, but that could change at any point as the situation in the country continues to unravel.
Haiti’s misery is hard to ignore, but impossible to remedy by remote control. During the last three years the U.S. has done far more than its share to help Haitians help themselves. We now can, and should, declare our $2 billion mission accomplished and go home with a clear conscience that we did all we could.
