Why we are in Haiti

...They have to balance reconciliation with an abused population's legitimate demand for justice, to decide whether a truth commission will serve better than legal tribunals...

...But as long as the only sections of the left that still have a voice keep themselves locked inside, they will continue to miss clear moral issues staring them in the face...

...To have had the intervention's early success snatch the sure smell of his blood from their nostrils must have been maddening...

...In the end the catch proved decisive, for when the moment came there was no voice from the left arguing that the United States had a vital interest in democracy...

...It's difficult to expect people voluntarily to leave a fantasy world where effects have no causes, a Marine with his boot on a Haitian cop's neck is actually a Marine giving the Haitian cop a hand, and what you said yesterday implies no responsibility for what happens today or what you say tomorrow...

...Easiest to understand, and just as unrelated to Haiti itself, is the right-wing opposition: a shell of isolationism around the opportunistic core of politicians who have never had trouble finding reasons for American interventions...

...No one bothered to explain why the Haitian power structure, fattened off embargo, needed any shoring up, or why a multibillion dollar invasion was the way to do it...

...They have to keep American forces around long enough to provide security before the job can become international, but not so long that those forces become unpopular, as they inevitably will...

...With very few exceptions, they looked at Haiti and didn't see Haitians...

...As I wrote in the WINTER • 1995 • 9 Comments and Opinions Summer 1993 Dissent, these haven't been the strengths of Haitian politics (nor, recently, of American politics or American attitudes toward Haiti...

...They have to co-opt enough elites and officers to avoid creating powerful internal enemies, while forcing the recalcitrant to accept democratic rule...

...When the first picture of a dead American soldier comes back from Haiti, the clamor for withdrawal will start up again—perhaps even sooner, with a Republican Congress...

...I want my friend André Joseph, a trade unionist, to be able to end his three-year exile and go home with his family...

...Since then, the military has improvised a policy of ad hoc policing and disarming...

...From the left there was confusion, silence, and scattered protests...

...this too has a domestic counterpart in Charles Murray's "They're too dumb to succeed...

...The earlier position had simply ceased to exist...

...Haiti, 80 percent illiterate, totally deforested, per capita income $250 a year, will not be an exception: to say "The intervention will fail" is to be guaranteed the last hollow laugh, wherever General Cédras happens to be living...

...Ilaiti will never be as clear as it was on September 19...

...It's hard not to be bitter about this missed opportunity...

...The American intervention has given people like them hope and an opportunity...

...What's needed is for the idea of a unified society with mutual rights and responsibilities to take hold for the first time...

...Haiti is essentially a country of Bourbons and Jacobins, children crushed under the wheels of carriages, tumbrels rattling over cobblestones, prisons and guillotines...

...They have to reconcile national pride with the fact that Haiti will depend on the world's involvement for years to come...

...but in the long run this policy might lead to trouble, if enough of the structure of Haitian military and paramilitary forces is left in place with enough guns stashed away to sabotage the restored democracy and with it the American mission...

...no one knows what their strength could be in six months...

...military, since no one else was going to do it...

...They have to prevent a return to the violent street justice of the post-Duvalier days (so far the success has been amazing), and at the same time create judicial structures in a country that has never had any that worked...

...In private life this kind of thinking would be considered severely dissociational...

...Even now tolerance depends on whatever images are flickering across CNN...

...News footage from Port-au-Prince — the mobs looting sacks of flour, the crowds singing and waving leafy twigs, the wealthy riding in four-wheel-drive vehicles behind smoked glass— always reminds me of A Tale of Two Cities and France 1789...

...The public never supported the invasion—in the early days no poll showed even 50 percent in favor, a striking fact when you consider the usual initial response to military missions...

...But the attitude of the press toward Clinton's policy has the sound of a fight that was going on long before Haiti walked into the room...

...Where others were motivated by cynicism, indifference, ignorance, or partisan politics, on the left an abstract and reflexive habit of mind counted for more than actual human suffering...

...A month after its original editorial, the Nation ran another under the title "One Small Cheer": "Right now, President Jean-Bertrand Aristide and Lavalas, the political movement he represents, have a better chance of restoring democracy to Haiti than at any time since the 1991 coup...

...The point was self-evident...

...And as a result, American attitudes have revealed far more about our own politics in a time of rancor and disbelief than about the half-island being invaded...

...On National Public Radio, Jack Beatty of the Atlantic, ostensibly a liberal, scoffed that you can't impose democracy by bayonet—as if Haitians themselves weren't already dying so that it might be "imposed" on them...

...The first complication came within two days: Marines, under orders not to interfere, had to watch while Haitian police near the port beat demonstrators and killed a coconut vendor...

...All of this will require a great deal of compromise, moral subtlety, tolerance...

...That's a hard case to make any time, but especially now...

...Invasion was the easy choice...

...troops, along with the restoration of democracy and President Aristide...

...Haiti is so small, so unknown, so irrelevant, so seemingly alien, that Americans can think whatever they like about it without having to take the reality of the place into account...

...At this point the attaches are bruised and lying low...

...The press has generally reflected and encouraged this mood...

...A Haitian police captain serious about sabotaging democracy could take the opportunity, while Port-auPrince is full of cameras, to organize a band of attaches and ambush an American military police patrol: public support might evaporate overnight...

...But bound up with this, as with every position the Republicans take, is an extraordinarily strong instinct for destroying Clinton's presidency...

...President Clinton bears a good deal of the blame for this, since his meandering, often contradictory policies never made the case that Haitian democracy warranted the risk of American lives...

...For their commitment they've paid a terrible price...

...Sour as it may be, this is a deeply satisfying point of view, since in the end nothing really works out and it's always easier to point to failures...

...And yet this picture is incomplete, for there is also the strong influence of the modern world, especially in its American variety, and Haitians who are utterly committed to democracy among the poor, the middle class, and even—a few —among the rich...

...But in politics, especially American left-wing politics, where years of secure powerlessness have built up a thick insulation of unreality, it passes for a reasonable position...

...As long as no Americans are killed, Newt Gingrich and Bob Dole, who lost their voices about two weeks into the occupation, prefer not to call attention to President Clinton's most impressive foreign policy achievement...

...The intent is to minimize the risk to American lives, not just for the soldiers' sake but because Haiti is still such an abstraction back home that public support could vanish with the first serious casualties...

...It was missed because people who haven't had a fresh thought since 1975 didn't want to give up the comfort of a simple worldview...

...When CNN televised joyful Haitian crowds welcoming the Marines, the left knew what was "really" going on behind the pictures...

...Anna Quindlen did too...

...They didn't have to be instructed whose side to take: within forty-eight hours Haiti had become real for them...

...Typically, most of the scrutiny focused on the ins and outs of Washington power: thus the last-minute Carter mission, instead of being seen as a chance to save lives (which was its main effect), became one more sign of the president's terminal weakness...

...Meanwhile, Haitian democrats and their friends are faced with a number of terribly difficult balancing acts...

...It remained, then, for Americans on the left to make the case no one else was prepared to: that the reason was democracy, that the suffering in Haiti was intolerable, that we bore some responsibility for it, and that the only choice was to intervene or allow the suffering to continue indefinitely...

...This dramatic—really, almost historic—change in view carried no explanation, nor did it need to...

...in that sense reconciliation is the wrong word, since it implies an original state of harmony...

...It was the left's kind of case, and it presented an opportunity to fill a vacuum, defy right-wing know-nothingism, push public opinion in a certain direction, and make the left an important voice on a matter of foreign policy that will reverberate for years...

...In Haiti, rich and poor don't think of themselves as belonging to the same country...

...George Will thought so...

...Former Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney took the point further, making the cultural case that Haitian society is too poor and irrational for our ideas to take root there—a variation on the argument that black people aren't ready for freedom...

...even after Haitian units were disarmed, Evans Paul was restored to the mayor's office, Parliament reconvened, the shattered institutions of civil society began to stir, and Aristide himself returned, the left wasn't fooled...

...Where others saw a basket case, a quagmire, a black mob, the left saw the next move in America's imperial game of Risk...

...We owed Haiti at least that much...

...The Nation put it succinctly: "The occupation of Haiti has nothing to do with democratic renewal but is instead a design for restoring the slightly raveled fabric of U.S...

...At the moment, Clinton's policy has earned him a measure of WINTER • 1995 • 7 Comments and Opinions approval, but it's a false dawn: in our time any appeal to cynicism will win hands down...

...There will be no question about accepting the IMF's $550 million plan of privatization, budget cuts, and foreign investment: Haiti can't afford to do anything else...

...strategic and economic control that has held for most of this century...

...8 • DISSENT Comments and Opinions In the weeks between the invasion and Aristide's return, an anti-intervention coalition's flyers around Boston called for the immediate withdrawal of U.S...

...since September 19, its remarkable success has won lukewarm support in some quarters and willful indifference in others...

...In the days leading up to the bloodless invasion, it was nearly impossible to find any American backers outside the White House and the congressional Black Caucus...

...A month earlier, the intervention had nothing to do with democratic renewal...

...November 1, 1994 10 • DISSENT...

...I want the people I met in Port-au-Prince to be able to resume the work they were doing before the coup without worrying that they'll be the next ones shot in the head...

...It was essentially a moral case, responding to concrete human facts and bringing to bear ideals whose flag the left has always carried: justice, freedom, dignity...

...The soldiers were horrified at what they saw, and horrified not to be able to stop it...

...While reporters in Haiti, such as the New York Times's Rick Bragg, were assembling horrific details into a compelling case for humanitarian intervention, their editors back home, along with opinion makers in Washington, fell into an unexamined consensus that we had no interest in intervening, that Clinton was embarking on folly...

...And then who will there be to argue against them...

...It's a message that part of the public seems eager to believe...

...The day after President Aristide's triumphant return, the New York Times punctuated its editorial in order to give Clinton the stingiest credit possible: "For President Clinton, it is a foreign policy victory but by no means an undiluted one" —not even a comma's pause before the bad news resumed...

...from then on everything becomes more complicated...

...Cynicism about government in general and contempt for Clinton personally have bled beyond our borders, so that appeals to high-minded values like democracy and human rights get an echo of "failed liberalism," and Haiti becomes one more doomed waste of taxpayers' money, like health care reform and public schools...

...They have to bring confidence to a historically corrupt government stripped clean by three years of mafia-type rule, and they will have to do it under the discipline of the International Monetary Fund...

...If there's any principle in the conservative attack, it's the principle of not intervening for the sake of democracy...

...In the short run, then, don't look for trouble...

...On balance, its response added to the national consensus that intervening in Haiti was the wrong thing to do...

...There was, of course, a catch: the intervening would have to be done by the U.S...

...In part that's thanks to Bill Clinton...

...Though I've argued for intervention on the basis of principles like democracy and human rights and international responsibility, at bottom my reasons are emotional...

...From the beginning, the response here has had very little to do with Haiti itself...

...But if the plan is carried out mindlessly, without regard to hardship in a country where three-fourths of the children are undernourished, then Haiti's poor will come to think democratic government just as illegitimate as the other kind...

...It's as if Haiti has been perpetually frozen in the historical moment of its birth two centuries ago...