Editorials
COMMONWEAL Summit gazing he world will be better off when it doesn't need summits. If the Gorbachev-Reagan meeting is to have a genuinely positive long-term outcome, it won't be due to the...
...Only when the majority of murdering opposition leaders are under lock and key should the U.S...
...One is the effort of the superpowers to halt the vicious cycle of weapons development that promises to drag down both nations—or at the very least their economies—into a whirlpool of threat and counterthreat...
...Don't be fooled, warns one chorus of observers, Mr...
...Henri Namphy earlier on...
...Articulating that definition will be a major responsibility of political leaders when the INF treaty comes before the Senate next spring...
...The ups and downs of glasnost and perestroika are charted with an attention to daily fluctuations usually reserved for the weather or the stock market...
...Free elections are necessary, and should be insisted upon by pro-democratic nations everywhere...
...The first rules out any starry-eyed trust in "Uncle Mikhail," and frankly, despite the favorable impression the Soviet leader has made on public opinion, we think American distrust of the Kremlin is a more than sufficient barrier to runaway enthusiasm...
...Economic pressures may force an election by destabilizing the Namphy government...
...pressured Gen...
...The November 29 massacres in Haiti, led by former Duvalierist thugs and abetted by soldiers of Haiti's provisional government (CNG), claimed the lives of thirtyfour innocent voters, wounded seventy-five others, and signified without ambiguity just how elusive democracy can be...
...But elections are only a first step...
...Both choruses are right...
...The summit will prove its value only insofar as it plays a part in a much larger process...
...A bloody revolution beyond anyone's control is a real possibility we may have to accept, but not until all else fails...
...he's interested in efficiency, not freedom...
...What is the U.S...
...The regional approach — in which the OAS or U.N., for instance, acts as a mediator and patrols an election, if necessary — is essential, particularly in light of anti-American feeling in Haiti fueled by the U.S.'s consistent support of Namphy...
...Internal developments, not foreign carrots or sticks, have produced the "revolutions" of Mr...
...That process has two dimensions, and they are delicately linked...
...While Namphy has promised elections on February 7, there is no reason to trust his pledge...
...In keeping with its usual holiday practice, the next issue of Commonweal will be dated January 15, 1988...
...should not rush in alone...
...Gorbachev has broken with the Soviet past and set in motion a process that regardless of anyone's intentions, may lead the USSR toward a genuine decentralization of power and a significant reduction of its military hypertrophy...
...Something in addition to popular will and foreign help is necessary, along with the correct amount and combination of these...
...resume its assistance to the Haitian government...
...If these pressures don't work, it is possible that the U.S...
...That is the urgent question...
...It won't even be due to the INF agreement, however welcome that may be...
...The difficult thing for Americans to accept, whether hawks or doves, is the extent to which the important new developments in the two great Communist empires can only be marginally encouraged by our actions...
...Marines were asked to keep order in Haiti and they stayed until they were thrown out, nineteen years later...
...Instead, as soon as possible, some regional monitoring body should sit down with the slate of presidential candidates and the members of the Election Council (and the CNG if it is willing) to work out some plans...
...expressions of "shock" impossible to believe...
...Taken together, the two choruses would suggest a cautious openness, a readiness to press steadily forward by considered steps, none of them irreversible, all of them taken with a due regard for Western security—but also with a keen sense of the risks, monetary and moral as well as military, entailed in the status quo...
...The other dimension is the evolution of Communist systems, which in the Soviet case carries enormous implications for global peace...
...Here is something the U.S...
...Gorbachev's every move has been subject to such scrutiny...
...should not take to promote the democratic aspirations of the majority of Haitians, even if the correct path seems less than clear...
...The call by radical labor groups for a general strike has the same aim in mind...
...But then what...
...crying over spilt blood is quite another...
...support for the Duvalier dictators, there are certain paths the U.S...
...WHAT HOT TO DO IN HAITI Crying over spilt milk is one thing...
...Given the pattern of unsuccessful democracies all too familiar throughout Central and Latin America and the thirty years of U.S...
...If Sylvio C. Claude, Louis Dejoie, Gerard Gourgue, or Marc Bazin were in fact to become president, how long would the peacekeeping force have to remain to protect the new government, its appointments, its supporters...
...724: Commonweal...
...still should not rush to back the first leader who appears able to achieve a semblance of stability out of the chaos .unless such a leader enjoys popular support and espouses a vision for a democratic Haiti...
...And internal developments may carry these revolutions down long and tortuous paths in the years—the decades—to come...
...Neither conciliation nor confrontation can take credit for a process that, after all, has caught up both the China which 18 December 1987: 723 Washington has been befriending and the Soviet Union which Washington has been berating...
...Nothing is so predictable about history as its unpredictability...
...Election-related violence had escalated since last summer making the November marauding predictable, and possibly preventable had the U.S...
...El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua have had debatably free elections, but do not enjoy democracy...
...The second rules out instant dismissal of the Soviet changes as merely cosmetic, holding out little to the West except a trap and ensnarement—a view that is indeed entrenched in some important corners of the American political elite...
...Deng and Mr...
...If the Gorbachev-Reagan meeting is to have a genuinely positive long-term outcome, it won't be due to the hoopla or the personal relations, whether warm or frosty, that are established between the two leaders...
...or, preferably, a peacekeeping force such as a vivified Organization of American States (OAS) could intervene militarily to insure free elections in Haiti...
...or, for that matter, the rest of Latin America prepared to do when the terrorists refuse to lay down their arms...
...First, the U.S...
...Gorbachev is no democrat...
...Second, the U.S...
...Don't underestimate what's happening, warns another chorus of observers, Mr...
...If in the holy season that follows this summit, we contemplate the Creator's promise of peace—and offer thanks for whatever human approximations can be achieved—it should fortify us for the less spectacular but essential tasks of peacemaking that lie ahead...
...Third, if this best-case scenario does not work, the U.S...
...Such steps would include not only the contemplated deep cuts in strategic weapons but also a pact on weapons in space and an agreement on conventional forces in which NATO's manpower edge over the Warsaw pact was traded off for a sharp reduction of Eastern bloc tanks and artillery...
...The Chinese and Soviet developments are sure to be marked by setbacks and surprises...
...And the moral of that story...
...Then, in February the peacekeeping and monitoring forces should enter the country to facilitate elections...
...can control, namely, a calm and reasonable definition of its security needs, one that is not held hostage to every blip in the fever chart of Soviet change, but one that recognizes a national interest in limiting and not just building arms...
...It pertains to the other dimension of the process of which this summit may prove an important part—the superpowers' effort to rescue themselves and the globe from the nuclear hairtrigger...
...The summer incidents of a trigger-happy military make recent U.S...
...They need to settle upon which military leaders can be trusted to round up the terrorists and what system of justice would be prudent and effective to contain them after an election were held...
...and his steps toward reform are small and tentative...
...Shaking off the implanted control of a one-party dictatorship in the Soviet Union, for example, can be compared to the United States' shaking free from the grip that slavery had on a good part of its nineteenthcentury economy and politics—or the British crown's retreat from power to figurehead: both of those transformations were stretched over long periods of time and even involved civil wars...
...In 1915 the U.S...
...Still, there are limits to outside influence — even the Reagan administration's belated but potent policy of cutting off virtually all economic aid until free presidential elections are held...
...should not rush to pour in financial aid as soon as a president is elected...
...The outside group should work out an agreement to monitor an election and an agreement to withdraw its troops, contingent upon the containment of the leaders of the violent opposition...
...That is why Mr...
Vol. 114 • December 1987 • No. 22
