Destination Haiti

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

NO ONE COULD ACCUSE BILL CLINTON OF FAILING TO give peace a chance. Even as American warships reached their invasion stations off the shores of Haiti, and the President faced the moment when he would have to issue the order for U.S. troops to go in shooting, a tense weekend of negotiations was devoted to the possibility that strongman Raoul Cedras and the rest of the ruling Haitian military clique had finally got the message and were ready to quit. At the 11th hour, the President proved willing to talk.

At week's end the outcome of those negotiations was still less than clear. But in a crucial sense, the conditions of the ruling gang's departure would not make much difference. One way or another, under fire or in a friendly takeover, with Cedras in power or in exile, American troops were on their way in. Sweeping aside the Haitian army was the least difficult, least important part of their mission. Ahead loomed the far tougher job of imposing and keeping order in a country ripe for mayhem, then laying the ground for a self- sustaining democracy to take root in a land that for centuries has known + little but grinding poverty and bloody dictatorship.

Ahead as well lay the uncertain prospect of American casualties -- losses that could further envenom what was already a passionate post-cold war debate. The verbal battle over invasion was at bottom a difference of opinion over whether Haiti was worth any American deaths at all, whether they occurred during an invasion or in an attempt to police an unruly and often violent country. It also touched on a perennial national anxiety: when and under what circumstances the U.S. should ever use military force abroad.

Just when it seemed that Clinton had finally, after so many false alarms, determined to invade, he seized a startling penultimate chance to talk the junta out. He had just finished his TV address to the nation Thursday night, explaining why he was on the verge of ordering a Haiti invasion -- because there seemed to be no other way to force that nation's brutal military dictators into yielding power. Only minutes after the cameras stopped rolling in the Oval Office, the President sat down with Vice President Al Gore, White House chief of staff Leon Panetta and National Security Adviser Anthony Lake. They shared a secret that only three or four other people in the entire government were aware of: there might, after all, be one more chance to resolve the crisis diplomatically.

The group talked for a few minutes and then started making phone calls. To whom? To an unlikely trio indeed: former President Jimmy Carter, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell, and Senate Armed Services chairman Sam Nunn. The urgent conversations went on until Friday afternoon. By then the last U.S. warships in a 23-vessel armada were nearing their battle stations off Haiti, and Pentagon briefers were telling reporters that American forces would be ready to begin the invasion anytime after dark Sunday.

Suddenly came the White House announcement hardly anyone expected: Carter, Powell and Nunn were going to Port-au-Prince to make one last try at persuading the three top Haitian leaders to take the money and run. Literally take the money and run. The delegation was authorized to discuss just one thing with the Cedras crowd: how they would pack up to leave. U.S. officials denied they were offering any extra cash to the clique, but the three could in effect collect their own money -- the substantial wealth they are believed to have stashed abroad. And Washington would be happy to provide planes to fly them, their wives, mistresses and hangers-on out of Haiti into comfortable exile anywhere they chose. That meant they had to make it clear by Sunday noon, said a senior official, "when they would leave and under what circumstances." But the last-minute diplomacy, warned another official, did not stop the clock ticking on the invasion "by one minute or one second."

Mindful of Carter's reputation for free-wheeling -- as he had done when he followed his own agenda on a mission to North Korea last June -- Clinton Administration officials insisted that this time the former President was being held to a tightly limited brief. The delegation was not permitted to make any deals with the three Haitians, who all had to go: Armed Forces Commander Cedras, the de facto dictator; chief of staff Philippe Biamby, now thought to be the strongest of the trio; and police chief Michel Francois, once the chief tough guy. The Americans could only negotiate on "the modalities" of getting the three out of the country: how many family members each leader could take with him, how big a plane he would need, when it would take off and where it would go. If they could not decide by Sunday noon, Carter, Nunn and Powell were to come home and the invasion would proceed -- perhaps as early as the wee hours of Monday morning. But on Saturday, as they anxiously monitored the delegation's progress, some Administration officials acknowledged that Carter had already overstepped his limits by meeting with Emile Jonnaissant, Haiti's illegitimate president, something Clinton did not authorize or agree to.

It was hard to see how dispatching the Carter mission to Haiti could do Clinton anything but good. If it failed, and the President had to give the order to invade, he could at least contend he had really exhausted every possibility of reaching a peaceful settlement -- despite his declaration on Thursday night that he had already exhausted every diplomatic effort. He could call on three respected elder statesmen spanning a fairly wide political spectrum -- and all announced opponents of the invasion -- to back up that claim.

If the mission succeeded, Clinton would be spared, at least for the moment, what Democratic Senator John Glenn of Ohio calls "the Dover test." The reference is to the Air Force base at Dover, Delaware, where the bodies of U.S. servicemen and women killed overseas are taken; the test is to explain to grieving family members why their loved ones had to be brought home in flag- draped coffins. The President could claim that by displaying firmness and consistency and pushing right to the brink of invasion, he had finally scared Cedras and colleagues into a peaceful departure.

If the public was surprised by Friday's overture, policymakers were not. The junta, while publicly professing defiance, had been putting out feelers about leaving for at least two months. All their offers bore conditions unacceptable to the U.S.: that ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide not be allowed back, that Jonnaissant, Cedras' 80-year-old puppet president, stay in office, that only one or two of the Cedras-Biamby-Francois trio leave.

Yet there were some interesting aspects to the offers. A common theme was that the Haitian leaders wanted to leave with "dignity." Another key ingredient was Carter, whom Cedras had come to know under what would seem like unpromising circumstances: the former President was one of the international monitors observing the 1990 Haitian elections that Cedras' eventual foe Jean- Bertrand Aristide won with almost 70% of the vote in the only genuinely free balloting Haiti has ever known. If the dictators were going to bail out, they wanted to say yes to a respected statesman.

The feelers came with increasing frequency as Washington beat the war drums louder. Last week U.S. intelligence intercepted communications from Cedras to colleagues in which he said he would determine his course after seeing how the American people reacted to Clinton's speech Thursday night. Publicly, both sides put on a vigorous display of bluster. Clinton in effect called the Cedras clique a gang of murderers. He ticked off a catalogue of their atrocities -- "executing children, raping women, killing priests" and said the U.S. had only one message for them: "Your time is up. Leave now, or we will force you from power." Cedras replied by telling Dan Rather of CBS News, "I am ready to fight."

Apparently, though, he noticed that quick polls in the U.S. showed a decline in public opposition to invasion -- to 60% against in one ABC News poll, from 73% earlier in the week. While that was still far too high to comfort any President planning a major military action, it still constituted movement in what for Clinton was the right and for Cedras the wrong direction.

By the post-speech meeting in the Oval Office, Clinton was already settling on Nunn and Powell as other members of a potential Carter mission. Nunn, in the White House view, was in a particularly good position to warn Cedras that Congress had no chance of stopping an invasion, a convincing message from the head of a powerful Senate committee who is personally strongly opposed to an invasion. Powell would appeal to Cedras as both a military man and an African American; as the successful planner of the Gulf War he would give the mission credibility among Clinton's Republican opponents.

But the mission only became a live possibility when Carter received a call from Cedras Friday morning saying he would receive a delegation led by the former President. In a pathetic show of legalism, Cedras added that he would first have to get the approval of the figurehead president Jonnaissant. By 3 p.m. Friday Cedras called Carter back with (surprise!) Jonnaissant's O.K. Clinton had Lake announce a short while later that the delegation would be going to talk to "the de facto leadership of Haiti" -- a marked softening of rhetoric from his chief's talk the night before about "Cedras and his armed thugs." Talking to them even now, said senior Administration officials, is important domestically and internationally to show that they have not passed up a chance to resolve the situation peacefully out of foolish pride. Even though many Administration officials could not hide their optimism on Saturday, they all insisted Clinton might in the end have to order the first major military incursion of his presidency. It would come in defiance of intense public and congressional opposition that his Thursday night speech had only begun to soften. A TIME/CNN poll on Friday showed that 58% of Americans still opposed sending U.S. troops to oust Haiti's dictators. Nor was Congress impressed: Monday was the date for lawmakers to take up resolutions opposing an invasion, which, if a vote took place, were likely to pass overwhelmingly. Critics already were denouncing an invasion ordered without the legislature's approval as unconstitutional, and TIME's poll showed that 67% of the public agreed. Opponents would scream all the louder if the President acted not just without the consent of Congress but after it had declared its official opposition. The White House, however, hopes the Carter mission would soften some congressional wrath by demonstrating that Clinton had made an honest try to avoid shooting.

While waiting for the outcome of the Carter mission, both sides speeded up preparations for a fight. Clinton spent part of Saturday in the Pentagon's secure "tank" reviewing details of the assault. Secretary of Defense William Perry assured the public that resistance, if any, from the Haitian armed forces could be overcome "in a matter of hours, at most a day or two." Even so, he added somberly, there would be casualties, both American and Haitian.

In Haiti, there were reports Friday that some of the country's 7,000 soldiers were already shedding their uniforms and melting into the civilian populace. But that could have been in preparation to fight rather than to give up; some Haitian Americans insisted that if it came to war, Cedras and others would hide in the mountains to conduct a guerrilla campaign against U.S. troops, concentrating sniper fire on white soldiers. Some Haitians even maintained that the voodoo gods were on their side: they had sent Frank Corder's plane to crash into the White House lawn last Monday as a warning, and followed up by telling Clinton he must try to work things out with Cedras.

Even if they didn't have to go in shooting, American troops would still be landing in Haiti this week. Though no one would use the words, they will in effect be an occupation force, charged with pacifying the country and keeping order while the exiled President Aristide, thrown out in a military coup led by Cedras in 1991, sets up a new government. While much of the 20,000-strong takeover force is supposed to come home before the November elections, several thousand U.S. troops will stay on as part of a U.N. peacekeeping force until at least February 1996, when Aristide is pledged to yield power to an elected successor. It could well be tricky and dangerous duty that could end in a Somalia-style debacle: withdrawal of U.S. and U.N. troops followed by another coup that returns Haiti to the savage oppression from which the U.S. hopes to rescue it.

There is a strong chance that the worst violence will occur not between armed forces but in the streets -- and it could endanger U.S. troops even if they arrive in what Pentagon officials call a "permissive environment." Minutes before Clinton's speech on Thursday, Cedras told CBS that the landing of U.S. troops would trigger "a massacre starting with a civil war." Self- serving as his statement was, it accurately reflected just how ferocious the country's animosities have become.

Cedras' backers are widely thought to have drawn up a hit list of opposition members who would be gunned down as U.S. troops were about to land, peacefully or as an invasion force. At the head of the list, supposedly, is Port-au- Prince Mayor Evans Paul. Some Aristide supporters were said to have asked the U.S. to give them two or three days' warning of an invasion so they could go into hiding.

On the other side, Cedras' supporters are afraid that Aristide's partisans will seek blood revenge on the soldiers and attaches -- successors of the infamous Tontons Macoutes of the Duvalier years -- who have terrorized and tortured them for the past three years. The soldiers' fear is so great that Cedras, Francois and Biamby are said to think they need protection from their own followers if they decide to decamp. Otherwise, soldiers who feared they were being abandoned to the fury of popular vengeance might turn on their former chiefs and kill them before they got out of Haiti. The Pentagon is worried that U.S. troops will land in the middle of a reciprocal bloodbath that they would have to risk their own lives to stop -- or face opprobrium for not stopping. The U.S. hopes to blanket Haiti with enough heavily armed soldiers landing at enough different spots to squelch any disturbances quickly.

Clinton got a start -- very, very late -- toward making the case for invasion in his TV address to the nation last Thursday night. He reworked a draft so heavily and so late that by 6 p.m., three hours before airtime, the White House was able to release only excerpts for quotation on the night's TV news shows; aides joked that Clinton was locked into those sentences but that everything else was up in the air. When the cameras finally started rolling in the Oval Office, however, the President was in good form, speaking calmly and firmly, as befits a Chief Executive about to order troops into battle, but with a notable lack of histrionics.

The President skated over one fundamental motive for entering Haiti: his own credibility. Rather than address the painful pattern of threat and retreat that has marked his foreign policy, given him a personal reputation for fecklessness and made the U.S. seem an unreliable superpower to friends and foes, he spoke only tangentially of living up to "American commitments." Translation, in words the Administration would certainly not use: Clinton had got himself into a box by repeatedly threatening to invade Haiti in order to scare the Cedras clique into leaving. If the Carter mission could not talk them into decamping, he would really have to do it -- or send the world a message that threats from Washington can blithely be ignored because when the crunch comes, the U.S. will always shrink from using military force. The reason for toning down the credibility argument was all too clear: if Clinton has a problem, he brought it on himself.

Instead the President concentrated heavily on convicting the Haitian junta of a long list of atrocities. He spoke of "people slain and mutilated, with body parts left as warnings to terrify others. Children forced to watch as their mothers' faces are slashed with machetes." Permitting so brutal a regime to stay in power in defiance of its earlier agreements to get out would endanger continuation of a trend toward democracy throughout the Caribbean and Latin America, said Clinton, and might well unleash a new flood of refugees: "300,000 more Haitians -- 5% of their entire population -- are in hiding in their own country. If we don't act, they could be the next wave of refugees at our door." Consequently, he said, drawing out the words for emphasis, "we -- must -- act."

The next day Clinton produced Aristide before cameras in the White House to allay some of the fears that the Haitian's reputation as an anti-U.S. leftist and rabble-rousing demagogue have stirred. Speaking in careful English -- his native language is Creole French -- the slightly built Roman Catholic priest declared, "We say no to retaliation, no to vengeance." To dispel any thought that the U.S. might be installing by force a new President-for-life, Aristide pledged to abide by his country's constitution and yield his office to an elected successor in February 1996, when his five-year term expires, even though he has spent more than half that term in exile.

Gore told Clinton that he was about to make "a great speech" and that it might start a desired rally-round-the-President mood among the U.S. public. Nonetheless, it was not fully convincing. Despite the cloak of multinational support, this is from start to finish essentially a U.S. operation. Clinton pledged that the initial American forces would be withdrawn "in months, not years." But even though the U.S. would officially hand over responsibility to a U.N. peacekeeping operation that would stay until Aristide's successor is elected, the President failed to mention that as much as half that U.N. force, or some 3,000 troops, would also be American -- an arrangement similar to the one the U.S. came to regret in Somalia.

Though Republicans especially have pressed the attack in Congress, a clear majority of Democrats oppose invasion also, and for a reason that will not cease to be relevant however U.S. troops go in. Their basic argument: Haiti is simply not worth the sacrifice of U.S. lives. Even an American diplomat on the scene concedes privately that in the "narrow, traditional" sense of the words, Haiti is not a vital interest for the U.S. It has no strategic position, no economic importance in terms of raw materials, markets or U.S. investment. Its army is no threat to the U.S., the Caribbean, Latin America or anybody except the unfortunate subjects of the dictatorship. The sarcastic summary of this position is that "Haiti is a dagger pointed at the heart of Dade County," the Florida region around Miami that might be overwhelmed by a flood of refugees.

The Administration counters with a moral argument: the U.S. should do what it can to foster democracy and remove a murderous tyranny. Well, then, say critics, why not use military force in Bosnia or Rwanda, where worse atrocities have been committed, and on a much larger scale? Because they are far away and would require a major effort entailing heavy casualties with uncertain support from allies, Clinton's aides rejoin. The U.S. has a special obligation to promote democracy and oppose tyrannous atrocity in its own hemisphere. Haiti is one place where that can be done quickly, with worldwide backing and minimal loss of life. The U.S. should indeed promote democracy among its neighbors, reply the critics, but by political, diplomatic and economic pressure, not military force. Washington has no divine commission to impose democracy on its neighbors by brute strength.

Then, embarrassingly, there is the U.S. Constitution, which grants Congress the sole power to declare war, though it also makes the President the Commander in Chief of the armed forces and thus able to order them into harm's way. The debates over the constitutional status of an invasion of Haiti have been wildly distorted by partisanship. Democrats who insisted George Bush had to seek congressional approval to start the Persian Gulf War -- as he finally did, successfully -- contend that an invasion of Haiti would be a much smaller, less dangerous undertaking. Comparable, in fact, to the Reagan Administration invasion of Grenada and George Bush's pre-Kuwait invasion of Panama, which the Democrats now retroactively approve. Republicans who backed those invasions even though Congress was never consulted in advance now insist the plain sense of the Constitution is that the President must not send troops into combat on his own hook if it can be avoided. Discounting for hypocrisy on both sides, Clinton's critics would seem to have the better of the argument. In the case of Haiti, the President can hardly claim he must act quickly to ward off a threat to the U.S. or to save American lives -- the two traditional excuses for shooting first and telling Congress later.

All the doubts and arguments underscore the immense gamble Clinton was taking in pushing the Haiti confrontation to a crunch. By common consent in Washington, he was risking his presidency on the outcome -- and he would not necessarily win even if Carter and friends could persuade Cedras and friends to depart quietly, or even if a U.S. invasion were to succeed quickly with minimal loss of life. Either development might relieve the immediate crisis but raise the ante for the U.S. to help foster enough of a stable democracy in the unhappy island nation to prove it was not all in vain. "Haiti is not a one-day problem," acknowledges Admiral Paul Miller, head of the U.S. Atlantic Command, who will have overall charge of the U.S. forces taking over Haiti. "You have to factor the political, the military, the economic and the cultural into your planning and execution, and then figure out what is done the day after ((invasion)), the week after, the month after, the year after."

For the next 17 months or so, the U.S. must pin its hopes on Aristide. His 1990 election victory gives him an aura of legitimacy no other Haitian figure can come close to matching; the U.S. can hardly pretend to be restoring Haitian democracy if it backs anyone else. If he is a leftist and no admirer of the U.S. -- well, in a perverse way, that makes American intervention easier to defend against possible cries of Yanqui imperialism. Instead of overthrowing a populist reformer to install a military dictatorship friendly to the U.S., Washington will be doing the exact opposite.

But Aristide is a slender reed on which to lean. No one is certain whether to trust his promises of a program that sounds rather conservative. He says he intends to decentralize Haiti's government, cut the army to about 1,500 people, reduce the bloated civil service, lower tariffs and increase imports of food and other supplies the nation cannot immediately produce for itself, , concentrate on building up the private sector and court private and foreign investment. Pursuing his theme of reconciliation, last week he promised the Haitian army -- that supposed gang of murderous thugs -- that far from seeking revenge, "we will create jobs for you." But can he do it? The worry is that he does not have the temperament to succeed, and may only arouse hopes he cannot fulfill.

But suppose Aristide is assassinated? Some Cedras supporters make no secret that their intention is to kill him. The U.S., they figure, will have no one else to support and will lack the stamina to wait out a long and messy struggle. It will pull its troops out and let a dictatorship come back in, negating anything that might have been gained by pushing Cedras into exile and/or pulling off a successful invasion.

It does not have to be that way, of course. Quite the contrary; a successful restoration of Aristide in the next few weeks or so with little or no loss of American life could give Clinton great new prestige for adroit management of his worst foreign policy crisis. But the President's aides still worry that there is far more of a downside risk than an upside gain for the U.S. in Haiti. The public could well greet success with relief followed by a big yawn. Not so if things go wrong, and there will be many opportunities over the next year or so for things to go badly wrong.

CHART: NOT AVAILABLE

CREDIT: Source DIA

CAPTION: HAITI'S MILITARY

U.S. FORCES

THE SECOND WAVE: once the island is occupied

With reporting by James Carney, Michael Duffy, J.F.O. McAllister and Ann M. Simmons/Washington and Sam Allis and Bernard Diederich/Port-au-Prince