Peanut Diplomacy in Haiti
SCHORR, DANIEL
Washington Notebook BY DANIEL SCHORR Peanut Diplomacy in Haiti GIVEN THE strong opposition to a Haiti invasion in Congress and among Americans generally, President Bill Clinton was probably...
...Secretary of State Warren M. Christopher had been less ready than White House advisers to leap at any arrangement Carter could conclude, and he held out for a date certain (October 15) for the junta to step down...
...Nor would the United States recognize a general amnesty voted by a stacked Haitian Parliament...
...There came a steady drumbeat of attacks from conservatives saying the bill was too much too late, and from liberals saying it was too little too late...
...Muscle Flexing HAITI, in any event, adds a new note to the history of American armed intervention in the Western Hemisphere...
...When he announced his Presidential candidacy in December 1974, Carter said his dream was "a country [that would] set a standard within the community of nations of courage, compassion, integrity, and dedication to human rights and freedoms...
...For matters now came down to Who Killed Cock Robin?—who would get the blame for the failure of this massive undertaking...
...True, the puppet civilian government that had been scornfully dismissed as "the de factos" was treated as a legitimate authority...
...Indeed, it sounded like more of the same when the Clinton Administration announced in July that amphibious units were being sent into Haitian waters to protect and possibly evacuate thousands of Americans...
...The tragedy of Jimmy Carter is that he let his zeal for mediation overcome his zeal for human rights...
...True, the Haitian Army and police force remained intact, though increasingly under the watchful eye of the American forces...
...No doubt he did not foresee that he would one day be involved in wheedling "respect" for torturers and making pacts with oppressors...
...troops did not leave before the pro-Castro government there had been replaced...
...The Marines stayed 17 months, and when they departed an American-supported military junta was in control...
...Yet his moment of triumph—and chance for the Nobel Peace Prize that eluded him after Camp David—left Carter feeling not exhilarated but unappreciated, and the State Department not grateful but resentful of this freebooter who was so scornful of the ways of established government...
...And the CIA shared duties with Lieutenant Colonel Oliver L. North in supporting Right-wing forces in Nicaragua and El Salvador...
...But winning agreements and leaving it to the scorned bureaucracy to pick up the pieces of rash promises and misunderstandings is a dangerous game...
...A senior Administration official also pointed to long-range benefits that he said would derive from the expedition: renewed confidence in the efficacy of multilateral action, which had been taking a buffeting from Bosnia to Somalia, and renewed belief in the President's credibility...
...CONFESSIONS OF AN ELDER STATESMAN...
...Carter's Haiti accord may have rescued President Clinton from having to carry out a forceful invasion, but it left him to wrestle with a situation full of ambiguities...
...Instead of overt invasion, the U.S...
...The American military made clear that General Cedras, that newly-minted "man of honor," would not be free to use traditional police head-bashing methods against his people...
...That line was soon dropped, however, in favor of defense of democracy and human rights in Haiti, and defense of American borders against a flood of refugees...
...He cut his mediator's teeth on the Arab-Israeli conflict: 13 days of marathon sessions with President Anwar Sadat of Egypt and Prime Minister Menachem Begin of Israel that produced the Camp David Agreements...
...Washington Notebook BY DANIEL SCHORR Peanut Diplomacy in Haiti GIVEN THE strong opposition to a Haiti invasion in Congress and among Americans generally, President Bill Clinton was probably well-advised to accept the cliffhanger accord with the Port-au-Prince junta brokered by ex-President Jimmy Carter on September 18...
...The "street value" of the President's word has now risen, the official said...
...Time to give health reform a decent burial and provide for its rebirth," wrote Democratic Representative John D. Dingell of Michigan, an advocate of the program, in a letter to the President...
...Senate Minority Leader Robert Dole of Kansas and House Minority Whip Newt Gingrich of Georgia probably delivered the coup de grace with a threat to hold ratification of the gatt treaty hostage...
...Carter further found that he has a talent for reconciling intractably opposed positions, in part by using his prestige and personality to establish relationships that break the shell of hardenedpositions...
...Bitterly disappointed over his rejection by the voters in favor of Ronald Reagan in 1980, he dedicated himself to improving his place in history by good works—mediating disputes in Third World countries, monitoring elections, and trying to bring together those whom hate and poverty had rent asunder...
...But Carter, like some ambassadors, was surely suffering from "clientitis" when he criticized Christopher, whom he had once praised as the finest public servant he had ever known...
...So it was in Pyongyang, where Carter, defying Administration policy, agreed with Kim Il Sung that United Nations sanctions against North Korea should not be sought...
...Then came President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the "good neighbor policy," involving a pledge of nonintervention...
...Belatedly it was realized that before the public became bewildered by competing plans, it had expressed a wish for a more rational system of health care that would ease the insecurity of millions of Americans...
...Human rights abroad became, for him, an extension of civil rights at home...
...Military intervention, if resorted to, had to be justified on the grounds of safeguarding American lives...
...Without an official mandate from the White House, he got the late Kim Il Sung to freeze his nuclear program and resume North Korean-U.S...
...To achieve a murky accord he compromised his principles...
...But rebirth was unsure, and so was a decent burial...
...True, the leaders of the regime were allowed to stay in Haiti despite repeated Administration assertions that they must go...
...Mitchell said they had resolved 90 per cent of the issues on a bill that would cover 94 per cent of Americans by the year 2000...
...Developments since September 18 have underscored both the strengths and the weaknesses of Carter's approach...
...He would have tried to make peace with Saddam Hussein of Iraq if President George Bush had let him...
...Now there would be a lot of explaining to do about why government does not respond to the popular will...
...It's hard to argue with peace...
...Maybe...
...So it was in Port-au-Prince, where Carter went to the extent of telling General Raoul Cedras that he was "ashamed of United States policy...
...The Clinton Administration soon made clear that, Carter to the contrary notwithstanding, the embargo on Haiti would not be immediately lifted...
...It seemed likely that before November 8, there would be a lot of partisan effort to place the bloody glove in the garden of the opponents...
...As President he elevated human rights from principle to high policy...
...Jimmy Carter's role deserves some examination...
...But it was not to be...
...At one tense point he disarmed them with the greeting, "Shalom y'all...
...In 1983 President Reagan invaded Grenada to protect 1,100 Americans, most of them medical students, and U.S...
...The signal that the health care battle was all over came from President Clinton on September 20 when, after a meeting with Congressional leaders, he listed legislative priorities for the rest of this session that did not include health reform...
...History is witnessing a new chapter in the flexing of American muscle south of the border...
...planes had to be actually on their way before the junta was persuaded the threat of invasion was real...
...In 1989 President Bush cited the harassment of American servicemen as the immediate reason for invading Panama...
...When that was over, strongman Manuel Noriega was in jail in Florida and Panama had a new government...
...negotiations...
...With authority from a beleaguered President Clinton, he brought his ambassador-conciliator career to a spectacular climax in Haiti...
...The main benefit for Clinton of the ex-President's intercession was averting the specter of "Clinton's war...
...Thus, in 1965 President Lyndon B. Johnson sent Marines into a civil war in the Dominican Republic ostensibly because "American lives are in danger...
...In the days of the Monroe Doctrine and "manifest destiny," the United States invaded and occupied countries like Cuba, Haiti and Nicaragua with impunity...
...But then, explaining whose fault it is is what politicians do best...
...As a longtime admirer of Jimmy Carter, I write that without pleasure...
...His strategy obviously is to identify himself with the person he is seeking to influence, flatter him, say nice things about his country and his wife, and even side with him against Washington to forge a personal relationship...
...Congressional pressure for early withdrawal of the American troops was minor compared to the clamor that would have ensued if the Americans had stormed ashore...
...The Central Intelligence Agency became the chosen instrument to depose Guatemala's Left-leaning President Jacobo Arbenz Guzman in 1954, to preside over the Bay of Pigs invasion by Cuban exiles in 1961, to destabilize Chile's President Salvador Allende Gossens in 1973...
...There was a chilling moment at the White House on that Sunday afternoon when it was perceived that Clinton's credibility was so low, U.S...
...turned to covert action...
...Health Failure FOR A FLICKERING moment it looked as though the Haiti accord would free Congress for a last-minute spurt on health reform...
...Senate Majority Leader George J. Mitchell of Maine, who had passed up a seat on the Supreme Court to place this capstone on his Senate career, was plugging away in private with a bipartisan coalition...
...Against all that, the President had to weigh the lives spared by an uncontested entry, the chances for an orderly transfer of power to President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, and the avoidance of another searing wound in the American body politic...
...His spiritual roots, he says, were planted in the South's civil rights conflict, in his memories of riding to school on a bus while blacks walked...
Vol. 77 • September 1994 • No. 9
