Foreign Policy


Over and over we hear that President Clinton's Foreign Policy has been a disaster with fingers pointed mainly at Somalia, Sarajevo and Haiti. Not once have I heard a specific recommendation for what the President should have done or should do in any of these three cases....and I am not talking about a few disgruntled Republicans making these comments, but almost everybody from think-tankers, pundits and especially the press. I do not remember any such criticism during the past two administrations relative to the United States’s "foreign policy" in Grenada, Nicaragua or Panama for example. The fact that some of the same people are reproaching the president today who failed to notice anything unsavory in these other three misadventures makes me wonder about the audio-visual acuity of these observers.

Is there a sentient being who thinks Grenada was a military accomplishment? O.K. forget the Mickey Mouse Medical school in Grenada which our troops saved from imminent capture by the KGB. What about Panama? They couldn't even find the General (Noriega), and present day Panama is a mockery of democracy. What about Nicaragua? Were the Contras and Oliver North’s arms dealings with Iran somebody's idea of a good foreign policy? Year after year, scandal after scandal the press was mum about the truth of the villainy of the Reagan-Bush-CIA escapades in Central America. Did the press even try to defend one of its own, David Bonner, who first broke the story of the El Mozote massacre in El Salvador? Talk about bad foreign policy! My god, how much worse can it get than to support a regime that slaughters its own people and then to cave in to the government propaganda (White House and CIA stories that the massacre never happened and that the Salvadoran army was not guilty of human rights abuses, blah blah blah) I'm sorry, but I do not remember the press criticizing this aspect of the Reagan-Bush foreign policy.

But its a new world out there without the "Evil Empire" to hate and tack blame to. Haiti is a very, very complex, no-win situation. Haiti has always been the poorest, most godforsaken place in the western hemisphere; wracked and ruined by a series of tyrants beginning with Henri Christophe in the last Century through to the Duvaliers -- Papa Doc and Baby Doc until just a few years ago. It's desperate people survive hand-to-mouth putting their faith in a combination of voodoo and Christian rites. Their lives are tortured by the terrors of the Tonton Macoutes, paid bullies of the government. Haiti is so poor that virtually every man, woman and child can be bought for sex.

A couple years ago the Haitian people elected a priest as president. We are talking about a country which has lived under the military heel for its entire history. In every country where the majority of people are desperately poor you can be absolutely sure to find a few very rich people protected by a nasty little army. Haiti is no exception. Textbook military-commercial oligarchies do not capitulate to priests. To add to the travails of Haitians, the CIA decides it does not like Mr. Jean Bertrand Aristide and plants some disingenuous stories about his emotional stability which of course is picked up by the press. Does the press, which criticizes the president's foreign policy, jump on James Woolsey and the CIA for these ignoble fabrications? I don't think so.

So what is President Clinton supposed to do in Haiti? If he insists on restoring Aristide the Haitian military will surely protest and we will have to send in the Marines to maintain Aristide (if he were to survive even one night back in Port Au Prince). It is absolutely, unequivocally guaranteed that the Haitian Military would not tolerate the return of Aristide with guns holstered. No way. So do we then, want to send the Marines to Haiti? I don't think so. Meanwhile, thousands of Haitians are trying to escape from a life of torture and starvation in their flotsam and jetsam landing up and down the Florida coast. They are not political refugees as much as nature's attempt at survival, pure and simple.

It seems to me that Clinton's foreign policy vis a vis Haiti has been about as good as it could have been. There was an attempt to send in some sort of aid and we were rebuffed at the dock. So we backed off. Is there any crime in that? Should we have waded in to a quagmire of voodoo military cutthroats? Is there a single North American who wants to shed any blood over Haiti? Remember, we are dealing with a military junta so ruthless that they will not hesitate to assassinate government officials and judges and politicians right in front of the international TV cameras (in church even). This is not the sort of place where a few Peace Corps workers and friendly marines are going to change anybody's mind. Haitians are so poor and desperate and naive, they even allow themselves to be bought off by the tyrants to put on anti-American, anti-democracy demonstrations for the foreign press just to be able to put some food on the table for a few days.

Meanwhile, the CIA has been of almost no help to the White House (what else is new?). The only thing we now know for sure is that James Woolsey does not like Padre Aristide. I mean, the Haitian people elected Aristide. Why does the CIA have a problem with that? Why are there so many stories about the CIA playing footsie with the Haitian military Coup artists? Well, it doesn't take much imagination to realize that the CIA is chock full of dogmatic ex-Cold Warriors who prefer easily bought military dictators to independent-thinking, legally-elected politicians. And this is what Clinton has to work with. Can we blame him for waffling around a bit? Short of spending ten billion dollars to rebuild the western half of Hispaniola or allowing about two million Haitians to emigrate to the United States, I see no easy solution to a set of difficulties as old as colonialism itself. Frankly, I think President Clinton has followed exactly the right course with Haiti, which is to hang on and let things work themselves out without malfeasant interference by the United States.

Meanwhile, on the other side of "Spaceship Earth" along the East coast of Africa, just beneath the Arabian Peninsula, from where we get all that precious oil, is Somalia. Bill Clinton did not send troops to Somalia in the first place. He inherited a problem which, at the time did not seem as bad as it became. Again, I must blame the CIA for not having anticipated the ascendancy of War-lord, cum General Aidid and angry nationalists. The fact that a dozen and a half American soldiers died there is not something that should have been altogether unexpected. You send people with guns into rough places, somebody is going to start shooting. Bill Clinton surely thought he could help "democratize" Somalia but the Somalis throw sand in our face, so why not pull out? What do the pundits expect him to do? Before those guys were killed, if he had ordered some heavy artillery into Mogadishu you can be sure there would have been a deafening hue and cry about another "Viet Nam." And who would have thought a bunch of "savages" could nail down a squadron of high-tech US Marines? So what is Clinton supposed to do? Send in more troops to destroy Aidid and indeed, get involved in an African Viet Nam? or the alternative? Pulling out? Remember all that talk about not wanting to "lose face" by pulling out too quickly. What is the matter with pulling out as fast as possible if they don't want us there? (at least getting the guns out. The people asked for food, not bombs, for crying out loud).

And Sarajevo? Anybody who thinks there is the least possibility of a rational solution to the problems in Bosnia-Herzogovina has obviously spent too much time in the sun without a hat on reading comics rather than a few histories of Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Europe. Remember Otto (Bismarck)? Even he did not want anything to do with the bloody Balkans and you want that Bill Clinton should get us involved down there? Any major or minor treatise about Yugoslavia is a tale of unfathomable woe. In our pastoral, suburban comforts here in America we cannot begin to imagine the horror of centuries-old hatred coming to a boil. It's the Hatfields and McCoys to the tenth power. Again, I ask the pundits, what should Clinton have done? Are there people out there who think we could have bombed the Serbs into submission to free Sarajevo? Maybe.

But are the Serbs necessarily the bad guys? Remember, they got the short shrift in 1914 and then, they did help fight the Nazis (and in so doing, took an awful beating from the Moscow-friendly Croats) during World War Two). They don't seem like the sort of guys I'd like dating one of my daughters, but then again, I don't really know and that is the problem. It seems to us, comfortable in our dens, more or less protected by a First Amendment, that everybody down there in the Balkans has an uncanny knack for neighborly contumely and killing. To his credit, Bill Clinton, student of JFK, remembering The Bay of Pigs and Viet Nam, does not want to wade into places he doesn't belong.

Whether we send in troops or humanitarian aid, we must always act in concert with our European allies; after all, Sarajevo is on their turf. I think Clinton would have done anything reasonable that the European Community asked. They themselves could not, and cannot decide what to do about the Balkans. If they can't decide what to do, why should we? Sure, thousands of innocent people are dying, but are we prepared to go in and die ourselves for people who have made squabbling and genocide a national pastime? What do we do, go in and kill a bunch of Croat and Serb soldiers and install another Tito-like dictator? And who might that be -- especially without the usual credentials, "recognizable only by the CIA of course", of being a certifiable anti-Communist? I mean, that is a real possibility but I am not convinced the American people are ready for another major war. Bosnia-Herzogovina ain't no Iraq. We would probably be as successful there as the Russians were in Afghanistan. I think Bill Clinton has been thinking about all these possibilities and he has decided that until our national security interests are at stake or the European Community comes to him with a well-thought-out, long-term plan he is just going to keep his eye on the situation from a distance. I am happy for that because I do not want my children to die for a bunch of people who have written the book on anarchy. I am sorry as hell about the terrible suffering in Sarajevo right now...almost no food, water, medicine, bitter cold, surrounded by sniping Serbs. It is unimaginable horror. But maybe that is the way those people are and we would be foolish to try to change them overnight. I mean, there are some people who just love to hate.

For all those who think Bill Clinton's foreign policy has been a failure I suggest we contemplate appreciatively the relative peace we now enjoy. We could be at war in Somalia. We could be at war in Bosnia-Herzogovina. Haiti would not have been a war as much as a messy little Panama-like surgical operation with a few hundred American troops being wounded and killed and several thousand Haitians dying so we could install Mr. Aristide and then hang around a few years making sure he stayed in power.

Off and on over the years, I have heard some screaming and broken glass emanating from the Yahoos who live next door and twice I have gone over there to show an outside, rational, "neighborly" presence and calm things down, but really, those were, and are still, personal family squabbles and none of my business. I mean, I am not deaf to someone's pain or afraid to get involved. I would give up a great deal to feed the people of Somalia, stop the shelling in Sarajevo and restore the president of Haiti but all those things are more easily said than done. I am not an isolationist, but the fact is that we do have a few problems of our own. We played Demo-Cop for almost fifty years against the "Commie" thugs, can't we enjoy a brief hiatus to clean up our own mess now before the next Viet Nam, Desert Storm, World War or whatever Vladimir Zhirinovsky dreams up? Maybe the best foreign policy is a good health-care plan, peace on our streets, jobs and equally good education for all Americans so that the next generation will know how to make the right choices in an increasingly complex global community.