SysOp's Arsenal/SysOp's Arsenal 1 (Arsenal Computer).ISO/govwatch/0994wsj.txt

Text File | 1994-10-02 | 8.3 KB | 157 lines

A Soldier of the Not Great War
By MARK HELPRIN


Mr. President, Haiti is on an island, and its navy, which was built
mainly in Arkansas, is well characterized by the International
Institute for Strategic Studies as "Boats only." The Haitian gross
national product is little more than half of what Americans spend
each year on greeting cards, its defense forces outnumbered five to
one by the corps of lawyers in the District of Columbia.

With other than a leading role in world military affairs, the Haitian
army has retreated into a kind of relaxed confusion in which it is
also the fire department, captains can outrank colonels, and
virtually no one has ever seen combat. Which raises the question, why
has the leading superpower placed Haiti at the center of its
political universe?

Mr. President, in trumpeting this gnatfest at a hundred times the
volume of the Normandy Invasion you have invited challenges from all
who would take comfort at the spectacle of the U.S. in full fluster
over an object so diminutive as to be a source of wonder.

Anyone considering a serious challenge to the U.S. has been reassured
that we have no perspective in international affairs, that we act not
in regard to our basic interests but in reaction to sentiment and
ideology, that we can be distracted by the smallest matter and
paralyzed by the contemplation of force, that we have become timid,
weak, and slow. This is what happens when the leaders of the world's
most powerful nation take a year to agonize over Haiti. This is what
happens when the elephant ignores the jackals and gravely battles a
fly.

Why Not Cuba?

Given that Haiti is a nation doomed to perpetual harmlessness, that
it is not allied to any great power, that it does not export an
ideology, that it does not have an ideology, and that it is of no
economic consequence to any nation except perhaps the Dominican
Republic, you strained to justify intervention the way a prisoner
with his hand stretched through the bars strains for a key just out
of his reach.

In your recent address you mentioned rape three times, the killing of
children three times, and the words "dictator" or "tyrant" 18 times.
If we must act "when brutality occurs close to our shores," why not
now invade Cuba, or Colombia, or the South Bronx, or Anacostia? Every
year in the U.S. we are subject to more than 100,000 reported rapes
and 20,000 homicides. How do rape and murder in Haiti, no numbers
supplied, justify U.S. intervention? And if they do, where were we in
Rwanda?

Is it possible that having no idea whatsoever about the balance of
power among nations, the workings of the international system, and
the causes and conduct of war, you are directing the foreign
relations of the United States of America in accord with the
priorities of feminism, envi- ronmentalism, and political
correctitude? Why not invade Saudi Arabia because of the status of
women there, Canada because they kill baby seals, Papua New Guinea
because it doesn't have enough wheelchair ramps?

Haitian illegal immigrants (did you not mention AIDS because it would
offend the Haitians, or some other group?) have been to some extent
motivated by the embargo and are a minute proportion of the total
that seek our shores. If it is so that the best way to deal with a
country that spills over with souls is to invade it, que viva Mexico?
Should the U.K.  invade Pakistan; France Algeria; and Hong Kong,
Vietnam? For that matter, why have you not hastened forward to
Havana? In fact, the history of great-power interventions shows that
conquest does not prevent but, rather, facilitates population
transfers.

Your desire to wipe out the expenditure of $14 million a month to
maintain the leaky embargo that you put in place was not consonant
with Your robust urge to spend elsewhere. and was a rather dainty
pretext.  Fourteen million dollars is what we in this country spend
on "sausages and other prepared meats" every seven hours. If you
truly believe, Mr.  President, that "restoring Haiti's democratic
government will help lead to more stability and prosperity in our
region," then you, sir, have more Voo doo than they do. The entire
Haitian gross national product is worth but three hours of our own.
Were it to grow after intervention by 10~G and were the U.S. to reap
fully one half the benefit, we would surge ahead another nine
minutes' worth of GNP. This is not exactly high-stakes geopolitics.

Why, then, Haiti? Why are your subordinates suddenly so Churchillian?
Clearly, in a real crisis they would be so worked up that all their
bulbs would burst. The nations towed along for the ride (Poles?
Jordanians?) seemed not to know whether to be embarrassed by the
stupidity of the task or amused by the peculiarity of their
bedfellows. This the secretary of state described as "a glowing
coalition." Never in the history of the English language has such an
inept phrase been launched with such forced enthusiasm to miss so
little a target. Granted, the vice president's "modalities of
departure" did much to inspire the nation to a frenzy of war.

Why Haiti? Because, like the father in Joyce's story, "Counterparts,"
who bullies his son because he cannot fight his bullying boss, what
you do in Haiti says less about Haiti than about North Korea, Europe,
and the Middle East, where the real challenges lie. and where you
cannot act because you do not have a lamp to go by and you have
forced your own military to its knees.

Why Haiti? Because you have been unable to say no to the Black Caucus
as it stands like the candlestick on the seesaw of your grandiose
legislation, and because you are a liberal and in race you see
wisdom, or lack of wisdom; qualification, or lack of qualification;
virtue, or lack of virtue. And because the Black Caucus is way too
tight with Father Aristide.

Why Haiti? Because you have no more sense of what to do or where to
turn in a foreign policy crisis than a moth in Las Vegas at 2 a.m.
You should not have singled out Haiti in the first place, but once
you did you should not have spent so much time and so much capital on
it, blowing it out of all proportion, so that this, this Gulf Light,
this No-Fat Desert Storm, is your Stalingrad. Six weeks and it should
have been over, even including an invasion, about which the world
would have learned only after it had begun. All communications with
the Haitian regime should have been in private, leaving them the
flexibility to capitulate without your having to distract Jimmy
Carter from his other good works.

Though you and your supporters made a marriage of convenience with
the principles of presidential war powers, your new position is
miraculously correct, while that of the Republicans who also switched
sides in the question is not. You did have the legal authority to
invade Haiti. What you did not have was the moral authority. Despite
what you have maintained during the first 46/ths of your life, the
decision was yours, but your power was merely mechanical .

Dry Bones

Like your false-ringing speech, the dry bones of your authority had
none of the moral flesh and blood that might other vise have
invigorated even a senseless policy. The animation that you have
failed to lend to this enterprise was left to the soldiers in the
field, who with the greatest discipline and selflessness would have
taken on the task that, generations ago, you refused. I wonder if
your view of them has really changed. In your philosophy they must
have been pawns then, and they must be pawns now: The only thing that
has been altered is your position.

Though it is fair to say that I differ with your policy, if our
soldiers had gone into combat I would have been behind them 100%, and
I hope that, despite the orders in Somalia, you would have been too.
This is a lesson that you might have learned earlier but did not, the
truth of which you now embrace only because you have become president
of the United States. You are the man who will march only if he is
commander in chief.  Yours, Mr. President, has been a very expensive
education. And, un- fortunately, every man, woman, and child in this
country is destined to pay the bill for your training not because it
is so costly but because it is so achingly incomplete.

Mr. Helprin, a novelist, is a contributing editor of  the Wall Street
Journal.