Hemispheric insecurity

(Washington, D.C.): Democratic Congressman Charles Rangel was absolutely furious over the weekend. The ostensible reason for his rage was the Bush Administration’s refusal to intervene in Haiti’s latest crisis until after its corrupt, despotic ruler, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, was removed from power.

Why the Rage?

To be sure, Rep. Rangel and his colleagues in the Congressional Black Caucus have been the most steadfast of ex-President Aristide’s supporters. They and like-minded members of the Clinton Administration were, in no small measure, responsible for the 1994 U.S. power-play that forcibly restored Aristide to the post to which he had been elected.

The anger being expressed by Rangel and Company seems curiously misplaced, however. Their man in Haiti proved to be everything that critics of the Clinton putsch had said he was: brutally thuggish, irremediably corrupt and mentally and behaviorally erratic. In fact, it was Aristide’s subsequent tyrannical misconduct, and not a lack of American political and financial support, that was most responsible for his country’s current slide into anarchy and despair – behavior that dissipated Aristide’s once considerable popular support in Haiti and contributed to his swift overthrow.

By refusing to prop up Aristide, President Bush has given Haiti what it was denied when Bill Clinton engaged in the sort of “nation-building” that gave the process a bad name: a chance to establish the institutions essential to representative, accountable governance. Rather than repeating the earlier mistake of investing (in the form of well-over a billion in U.S. tax dollars) in one man – without regard to his anti-democratic track record – on the grounds that he won a vote, the United States must now invest the energy and resources needed to promote institutionalized checks-and-balances that alone can protect against future misrule by his successor.

It Isn’t ‘the Economy, Stupid’

Rep. Rangel may be angry for one other reason, however. The crisis in Haiti is a sobering reminder of a larger point he and other Democrats seem to hope American voters will miss this November: The world is a turbulent, disorderly and increasingly dangerous place for U.S. interests.

At a time when the clear hope in Democratic circles is that the electorate will focus once again exclusively on “the economy, stupid,” it is inconvenient, to put it mildly, to have still more foreign entanglements developing – especially in our back yard. The fact that this particular problem in Haiti was unmistakably a legacy of the misspent Clinton years simply underscores the foolishness of engaging in such myopia once again.

Worse yet, Haiti is hardly the only indication that things are going seriously south south of our border. Consider the following sampler:

The Bottom Line

One thing is certain: The next President of the United States is going to confront trouble south of our border – trouble that will probably make the present turmoil in Haiti pale by comparison. It will take a great and visionary Commander-in-Chief to contend with the myriad implications of such trouble if, as seems entirely possible, it emerges as the next and most proximate front in the war on terror.

It will be a grave disservice to the voters if these unpleasant facts are concealed from them. The electorate will be even worse served, however, if they are not made fully aware of two others: One of the candidates for Commander-in-Chief, John Kerry, was a preeminent opponent of efforts to counter Latin America’s last generation of anti-U.S. leftists. And he routinely voted to cut our defense capabilities and force structure in ways that would have left us still less prepared to deal with the next one.