TIME FOR ‘ADULT SUPERVISION’: CLINTON’S HAITI INVASION IS FRESH PROOF OF NEED FOR CONGRESSIONAL CHECKS AND BALANCE

(Washington, D.C.) Last night, President Clinton
explained why the United States has to invade Haiti. Of
the four publicly stated reasons, only one rings true.
After all, in recent days Mr. Clinton has made a mockery,
first, of his purported concern for human rights and,
second, of his stated commitment to democracy. He has
done so by making deals with the hemisphere’s most
inhumane and anti-democratic tyrant, Fidel Castro —
deals that actually legitimate Castro’s
repression.

By his willingness to negotiate with Castro, Mr.
Clinton has also undercut the third argument, namely that
toppling a sitting government is the only option
available to prevent a Caribbean nation’s people from
creating an intolerable immigration crisis for the United
States. Clearly, in the case of Fidel’s communist regime
at least, President Clinton is willing to reward a brutal
dictatorship with improved relations for intensifying its
repression and preventing its people from fleeing.

The Real Reason for an Invasion

The only plausible explanation for why the United
States absolutely, positively has to invade
Haiti is the fourth one: U.S. credibility would be
irreparably harmed if the Nation fails to follow through
on the oft-stated threat to storm the island if Raoul
Cedras and Company do not depart. Or, put more precisely,
Mr. Clinton’s credibility would be shot.

A situation like this — in which presidential
ego rather than sober judgment about long-term
national interests appear to be driving an unpopular and
potentially costly national security initiative — seems
to be precisely what the Founding Fathers had in mind
when they drafted a Constitution with careful
“checks and balances” on executive power.
In particular, the possibility that self-serving reasons
might prompt a president impetuously to initiate
hostilities were a factor in their decision to vest in
Congress the authority to make war. When circumstances
permit the orderly functioning of constitutional
processes, it is clearly the legislative branch’s
responsibility to debate and give prior approval to such
actions.

If Not Now, When Will Congress Act?

Of course, even when circumstances do permit,
congressional checks on dubious executive branch actions
are not automatic. Debates have to be held and votes
taken. Unless both Democratic and Republican
leaders on Capitol Hill agree to act, the legislature
will not have an opportunity to correct the errors of the
President’s ways. And if that is true in the
case of Haiti, one can only imagine how difficult
Congress will find dissenting from other harebrained
ideas to which this President has recently committed
himself, and the country — notably, the
decision to deploy up to 25,000 U.S. troops to Bosnia and
who knows how many more on the Golan Heights as soon as
elusive peace deals in these areas are accomplished.

There are, in addition, other Clinton
decisions in the offing that will have much more
far-reaching implications for U.S. security even than the
incipient Haitian debacle:

Missile Defense: The
Administration continues to pursue agreements with Russia
and other successors to the Soviet Union that would
effectively foreclose the remaining options to defend the
United States, its troops overseas and its allies against
missile attack. It is hard to imagine a more inane and
irresponsible policy at the very moment that ballistic
missiles are proliferating around the world.

Like Saddam Hussein before him, Raoul Cedras
doubtless wishes he had a missile that could threaten the
United States with a chemical, biological or nuclear
weapon. For if he did, he could probably deter an
invasion since this country has no defense
against such an attack and is, therefore, even more
vulnerable to it than the White House is to airplanes
violating restricted airspace. That message is clearly
not being lost on the rest of the world’s rogue nations.
But it is being missed by most congressional figures
except the likes of Reps. Henry Hyde
(R-IL) and Robert Livingston (R-LA) who
have written Mr. Clinton repeatedly opposing his efforts
to make it more difficult to defend America.

Denuclearization: Equally
deserving of Congress’ scrutiny and corrective action is
the Clinton Administration’s effort to
“denuclearlize” the United States. Amidst the
preparations for invading Haiti, a major Nuclear Posture
Review is being finalized that envisions making further,
dramatic reductions in America’s remaining nuclear
deterrent forces. The plan, which may get Mr. Clinton’s
approval next week, reportedly envisions retaining as few
as 300 U.S. land-based ballistic missiles and makes sharp
cuts in the number of American ballistic missile
submarines. The U.S. is already far outstripping the
Russians in dismantling its strategic arsenal and these
changes would raise real questions as to whether what
remains will be adequate to the demands of a future,
potentially dangerous world. This is particularly true
given that the Department of Energy has shut down and is
rapidly dismantling the infrastructure upon which our
nuclear weapons stockpile critically depends.

The Bottom Line

All of these Clinton initiatives are evidence of the
urgent need for adult supervision of the Administration’s
conduct of national security policy. When the American
electorate hired a President who did not “do”
foreign policy, they had no idea that what he actually
would do might be so harmful. But they had — and
still have — every reason to expect that the Congress
will perform as it is supposed to: as an effective brake
on reckless executive branch actions at odds with the
national interest.