‘VOODOO FOREIGN POLICY’: HOW NOT TO INVADE HAITI

In 1980, George Bush introduced into
the political lexicon a term with real
staying power. To this day, America’s
political elite delights in using the
Bush phrase “voodoo economics”
to deride Ronald Reagan’s supply-side
theories of painless deficit reduction
through tax cut-induced economic growth.

One could be forgiven for expecting
that the same elite would exhibit no less
skepticism about what can only be called
“voodoo foreign policy” — the
idea that a U.S.-led invasion of Haiti to
put Jean-Bertrand Aristide back in power
will “restore” democracy to
that troubled island and do so virtually
painlessly.

Fact Versus Fiction

To be sure, if ordered to do so, even
the increasingly demobilized
American military will be able to invade
Haiti.⁽¹⁾
The sort of “massive” use of
force being called for by Sens. John
Kerry (D-MA) and Bob Graham (D-FL), among
others, should enable the seizure of all
key facilities within very short order.
Of course, doing so may entail casualties
— quite possibly in excess of the
eighteen that proved an unacceptable
price to pay for American
“nation-building” in Somalia.

What is more, a credible case can be
made that it is in the United States’
interest to undertake an invasion of
Haiti. That case would not,
however, be based on the contention that
Haiti is a major transfer point for
narcotics trafficking. This assertion is
apparently being manufactured out of
whole cloth so that the Panama
precedent for U.S. military action
against drug-dealing despots might be
cited. The one place in the world
through which drugs are exceedingly
unlikely to be reaching the United States
at the moment is the embargoed, blockaded
island of Haiti.

National Interest

Instead, a respectable case
for invading Haiti would rest on the fact
that the United States has a legitimate
national interest in finding a more
humane and effective means of stanching
the human hemorrhage from Haiti, a
tragedy that is imposing great costs on
American taxpayers and communities
obliged to deal with it.
Arguably, economic and political
conditions on the island needed to
encourage people to stay, rather than
flee, cannot be created absent the
termination of repressive military rule.

But two conclusions follow from this
contention:

First, if the U.S. interest is
indeed so compelling as to justify the
possible loss of American lives and the
expenditure of additional national
treasure associated with
invading Haiti, then this country must be
prepared to act alone. The
blessings of multilateral institutions
may or may not be desirable — depending
on the price we must pay to obtain them
— but, in the end, if the job is worth
doing, the United States has to be
willing to do it itself.

Such a proposition is, however,
anathema to the Clinton’s foreign policy
team. They want no part of unilateral
military action and profess a willingness
to consider an invasion of Haiti only
if it is sanctioned by the U.N. or the
Organization of American States and if
other nations are prepared to send
troops, too. At this writing, people like
Morton Halperin — the NSC’s point man on
“democracy” — are in a pickle,
however, since the French, Canadians and
others with an interest in Haiti have
refused to contemplate the use of force
there.

A second and related point is that, if
the United States has enough at stake to
oblige it for the second time this
century to invade Haiti, it had better
plan on being there for a long time.
There can be no cutting and running after
we have “restored order” à
la Somalia. There can be no fobbing
off on the United Nations or others the
daunting responsibility for creating —
to say nothing of sustaining — the
political and economic institutions
necessary to a stable society in Haiti.

What will be required — like it or
not — is a form of U.S. colonialism, a
long-term occupation entailing intimate
involvement in the internal affairs of
Haiti. Security will have to be
maintained, probably by force, during the
critical and probably quite lengthy
period needed for democratic and free
market institution-building. In addition,
Americans must display a commitment to
nurture the conditions necessary for such
developments in the face of potentially
explosive race, cultural, religious and
language problems.

Complicating matters further is the
risk that more casualties will be
sustained by any such colonial force as
recalcitrant anti-Aristide forces carry
out hit-and-run attacks against American
personnel. The toll may actually prove,
moreover, to be substantially higher over
the longer term: Significant health
problems must be expected to arise from
the open-ended assignments of U.S.
servicemen and women in a nation like
Haiti that completely lacks basic
sanitation and potable water services and
that is afflicted with airborne viruses
and AIDS.

Needless to say, the prospect
of the United States engaging in
neo-colonial activities is fully as
abhorrent to Clinton’s Haiti team and
their supporters as is the idea of
unilateral U.S. military action. More
importantly, this scenario entails
burdens that the American people have
expressed little enthusiasm for assuming.

‘You Do That Voodoo’

This is where the voodoo
comes in. The legislators, former
officials and activists who are
championing the military option claim
that all will be well if the invaders
simply put Aristide back in power. This
seemingly straightforward objective
allows them to argue that the use of U.S.
forces can be limited and of finite
duration, the arduous follow-on tasks
conveniently left to someone else.

Nothing could be farther from the
truth. As Elliott Abrams, a former
Assistant Secretary of State for
Inter-American Affairs and distinguished
member of the Center for Security
Policy’s Board of Advisors, noted in the
attached op.ed. published in the Wall
Street Journal on 6 May 1994:

“…Restoring power to Mr.
Aristide…would require the complete
destruction of all institutions of
power in Haiti that now reject him
(including the Parliament) and then
the systematic building up again of
all these institutions around just
one, destabilizing figure.”

In fact, it is absolutely predictable
that — assuming the U.N. could actually
return Aristide to Haiti and somehow
assure his survival in office for
even a few months — he would, in
short order, return to form: whipping up
nationalist anger at the U.S. and those
who may be “occupying” his
country, compounding Haiti’s economic
morass and suppressing real democratic
institutions there. Still worse might be
expected if intelligence reports that
Aristide is mentally unbalanced prove
true. In any event, it is clearly not
worth risking the lives of American
servicemen and women to accomplish such
undesirable outcomes.

The Bottom Line

It would be tragic if the Clinton
Administration’s persistent, wrong-headed
notions of “nation-building” —
to say nothing of a perceived need to
divert attention from Mr. Clinton’s own,
myriad personal and public difficulties
— were to precipitate in Haiti yet
another doomed American expression of
“mindless multilateralism.” The
people of the United States, and the
armed forces established for their
protection, must not be abused by
“voodoo foreign policy”
initiatives. At a minimum, they are
entitled to know the true
purposes to which the American military
is being used, the full extent of that
use and a realistic assessment of the
prospects for success.

Unless President Clinton strips the
voodoo from his emerging plan to invade
Haiti and “gets real” about
what is at stake and what is required
there, he may just find himself squarely
in what George Bush — in another of his
memorable contributions to the political
vocabulary — once called “deep
doodoo.”

– 30 –

1. That said, the
deployment of even as small a force as
25,000 combat troops — involving perhaps
one out of twelve infantry divisions
envisioned under the “Bottom-Up
Review” force structure, perhaps a
couple of Marine amphibious brigades out
of a total of five and accompanying naval
support — would cause appreciable
dislocation in the rapidly shrinking U.S.
military.