The geopolitical consequences of what had happened in Somalia were demonstrated almost immediately in Haiti. It was one of the places where the Clinton administration had been bedeviled from the start, and where, like Bosnia, its rhetoric had been grander than its willingness to act. Few countries in the Western Hemisphere had reached the latter part of twentieth century as poor and as cruelly burdened by the fates as Haiti. It had been governed for years by the Duvaliers, first Papa Doc, François Duvalier, who, upon election to the presidency, had changed the constitution to make himself president for life, thus becoming a role model for countless other dictators; and when his own tyrannical reign was over, by his son Jean Claude, or Baby Doc. The Duvaliers had ruled by fear, the instrument of their will the primitive violence meted out by the Tontons Macoutes, who were government-sponsored terrorists. Not many countries in the world, especially in the Western Hemisphere, presented so dismal a prospect for even the slightest chance of democratic growth. Over the years, talented, educated people either went into exile or were murdered by the Tontons Macoutes. The political act of choice in Haiti was assassination rather than the ballot. Only the poor and the terrified, it was said, had a chance to survive.
During the Cold War, the rule of the Duvaliers had been tolerated by Washington with marginal enthusiasm. They were an embarrassment, but an anticommunist embarrassment, an unlikable ward of the United States. American policy was to look in another direction when the subject came up. In 1971, Papa Doc had died, to be succeeded by his son, Baby Doc, a thin version of what his father had been; and in 1986, he was driven off the island, leaving in a style absolutely befitting a petty dictator whose time had come. Receiving his last political rites from a sponsoring superpower, he departed for the south of France aboard an American aircraft carrier.
In post-Duvalier Haiti, democracy did not exactly flourish. At first there was a military junta, but free elections were held December 1990, and Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a Catholic priest who had been defrocked by the Church because of his radical liberationist theology, was elected president with some 67 percent of the vote. He was not a man widely admired by foreigners for his emotional stability. If those in the West measuring Aristide were somewhat unimpressed and were made uneasy by his volatile and messianic nature, the answer from his supporters was that there was, in fact, no one better. Aristide was popular enough to have served as a rallying point for the Haitian opposition and had survived assassination only because he was a priest. His election was hailed both in Haiti and by the large exile community of Haitians in the United States. It was, after all, a country whose principal export for years had been its most talented, best educated, and most democratically inclined citizens. But after just eight months, Aristide was overthrown by another junta, headed by Lieutenant General Raoul Cedras, whom Aristide had appointed to a high post.
The Bush people tried to keep Haiti on the back burner. At first James Baker said that Cedras would be treated like a pariah, but soon the administration began to soften its criticism. The policy seemed to be that the less we and anyone else knew and said, the better. The one flex of muscle was to ban all commercial trade with Cedras’s island. Dick Cheney, as secretary of defense, once asked General Colin Powell what he thought of using military force to restore Aristide to office, and Powell answered that going in would be a piece of cake. “We can take over the place in an afternoon with a company or two of marines,” he said. Getting out was the problem. Seething with anger over injustice and poverty, the Haitian people might turn against any identifiable governing authority. The last time the United States had intervened in Haiti was in 1915, and the marines, Powell noted, had stayed for nineteen years. He wanted no invasion.1 So the Bush administration neither embraced Cedras nor moved him toward democracy. The Cold War might be over, but in the case of Haiti, the old Cold War divisions within the U.S. government remained powerful. The CIA and the Pentagon were generally comfortable with the status quo under Cedras, not so much because they liked him but because they saw no upside to supporting those who claimed the banner of a more democratic country. Therefore, they opposed any policy based on idealism and that might entail American military intervention.
In the summer of 1992, a CIA report portrayed Cedras “as a conscientious military leader who genuinely wished to minimize his role in politics, professionalize the armed services, and develop a separate and competent police force.”2 That was a singularly optimistic bit of reporting. Most independently minded people thought Cedras represented Duvalierism without the Duvaliers, and the junta’s principal interest in governing was self-enrichment from the country’s limited coffers, while violently suppressing any political opposition. The only American domestic political implication was once again the problem of refugees. By early 1992, the harshness of the Cedras regime, the rash of political murders, and the suppression of any kind of dissent led to a dramatic increase in the number of boat people—Haitians willing to risk their lives in unseaworthy, homemade boats to reach Florida. The Bush administration had returned those Haitians who had succeeded in making the perilous journey.
Then came the 1992 election, and Haiti appeared to be one of those issues where the two parties and the two candidates clearly differed. Clinton, young and idealistic and spotting a great issue with which to nail his opponent, called the Bush policy cruel and unacceptable and promised that he would reverse it. His words implied a clear commitment to a more humanitarian foreign policy. But as he was preparing to take office, the CIA showed him photographic evidence that his election had set off a huge new wave of boat building. Thousands of Haitians were hoping to take advantage of Clinton’s new immigration policy and sail to a now more tolerant and open America. The United States could expect as many as two hundred thousand new refugees, the CIA reported.
Clinton immediately backed off his campaign pledge. He was aware of the potential political consequences if too many (nonwhite) refugees arrived in the United States unwanted by local authorities, especially in an important swing state like Florida. As governor of Arkansas, he had tried to do a favor for Jimmy Carter, back in 1979, and had accepted a large number of Cuban refugees at Fort Chaffee to reduce the overload in Florida. Carter, Clinton liked to claim, said it was a short-term deal and the refugees would be moved well before the 1980 election. They were not. The mood both inside the camp among the Cubans and outside among the Arkansans had turned ugly, and Clinton was not pleased. “He [Carter] screwed me,” he said years later, convinced that it helped cause his defeat in 1980.3
Haiti had no domestic political constituency of any size. The issue was more about race than foreign policy. The Black Congressional Caucus took it seriously and was committed to Aristide’s return, but those Americans who cared about political life in Haiti were not likely to vote for the Republicans in any presidential campaign, which, as on so many other issues, diminished the Caucus’s leverage. But Clinton had spoken those words during the campaign, and they had been unusually clear. So upon entering office, he began to press for changes in Haiti that would expedite Aristide’s return. Pressures were exerted—economic ones at first. An international boycott against Haiti was launched, and the shortage of fuel became so acute that the American ambassador’s house was lit at night by generators operating on black market gas. Haitian assets in the United States were also frozen, and U.S. navy ships patrolled Haitian waters to stop any would-be refugees from arriving on American shores.
The Clinton administration was badly divided over what to do and how much force to exert against Cedras, divisions that the junta members were quite aware of. Tony Lake, with his special passion for the underdeveloped world, was an activist, more eager to end the junta’s rule and reinstate Aristide than most of the others. The Pentagon remained dubious. Driving Cedras out of power would be easy, but none of the senior military men, especially since they lacked confidence that the administration would give them a clear mandate, wanted to undertake a peacekeeping role in a country where the indigenous forces had so violent a history, and where, once they ended the power of the junta, there was so little hope for any true democratic improvement. Among the doubters was Les Aspin. In addition, the CIA was openly opposed to Aristide. Its reporting systematically portrayed him as both unstable and violent, little better than those he would replace. At one point the CIA leaked to conservatives on the Hill its psychological profile of Aristide. It showed that he was unstable, both a megalomaniac and a manic-depressive, and given to the same violent measures as the Cedras regime—among other things necklacing, a quaint Haitian custom of putting a tire around the neck of a political enemy, filling it with gas, and setting it on fire. One of the CIA’s principal people in Haiti was Emmanuel (Toto) Constant, the leader of a Haitian right-wing paramilitary group, FRAPH (Front for the Advancement and Progress of Haiti). He was, in fact, on the CIA’s payroll and was bitterly anti-Aristide.
The State Department did not appear to have strong views about Haiti. Clinton, those around the White House believed, was a bit more skeptical about Aristide than Lake, but felt that having made a commitment to return him to power, he should follow through. The CIA’s reports on Aristide’s instability did not bother Clinton greatly. “You know you can make too much of normalcy,” he told George Stephanopoulos when he heard about them. “A lot of normal people are assholes.” Then Clinton plunged into a long, oddly personal discourse on Abraham Lincoln’s profound melancholia.4
In early 1993, the United States continued to push for Aristide’s return, much of it done through the UN. Eventually an agreement was reached with the junta for a step-by-step transfer of power, and as negotiations proceeded, General Cedras seemed to be softening his resistance, apparently ready to accept Aristide’s return, though remaining unwilling to give hard assurances for his safety. In July, an agreement was finally signed to return Aristide to power on October 30. But then in late summer things, as they often did in Haiti, began to unravel amid mounting signs of General Cedras’s reluctance to relinquish power. An Aristide supporter was named prime minister as part of the brokered deal, and in return economic sanctions were dropped. But when the Aristide ally, Robert Malval, actually showed up, he was denied any instruments of power. In September an Aristide financial adviser was murdered, and shortly after that, his would-be minister of justice was also assassinated. The two shootings were like warnings; if Aristide returns, they seemed to proclaim, he’ll be number three.
Some foreign policy people believed that a major game of chicken was being played, that Cedras was testing the administration. In late September a group of about two hundred American soldiers and twenty-five Canadian engineers were assembled to go to Haiti, where they were supposed to work on nation-building projects under a larger UN agreement and, among other responsibilities, train the police and the Haitian military. Not everyone in Washington wanted them to go. At the Pentagon, Aspin felt strongly that the situation was too volatile to send them. Believing that Cedras was not reliable and might turn on the Americans, Aspin argued for delaying their departure. But others believed the soldiers were the rare bit of muscle in an otherwise weak agreement. Amazingly enough, though the potential for a foreign policy flap of the first order was in the air, the president did not participate in any of the critical discussions.
Off went the troops, the first of some thirteen hundred scheduled to participate in a program that, if it was not nation-building, was certainly nation-cleansing. Though Cedras was giving off every conceivable signal that he did not intend to keep his word, no one had really thought out the consequences. The policy was, as one administration member said, another based on hope and not much more. If the troops ran into trouble when they arrived, there was no backup plan, no real military force that could incrementally be applied. The denouement came on October 11, just a week after the tragic events in Mogadishu. The American soldiers, lightly armed, arrived at Port-au-Prince aboard the USS Harlan County but were unable to leave the ship because Cedras had broken his word about providing a docking slip. On the dock was an unusual welcoming party: a mob of more than one hundred jeering Haitians, many of them armed, shouting anti-American slogans and, of course, “Somalia! Somalia!”
It was as if there was a new domino effect. On the front page of the New York Times, the lead story was about the incident on the dock at Port-au-Prince with a photo of some of the thugs roughing up the car of Vicki Huddleston, the American chargé d’affaires. Under that was a story headlined “Senators Seek Early Pullout of U.S. Troops from Somalia.” What was especially pernicious about the incident was that the thugs on the dock were being choreographed by Cedras’s security people, controlled by Emmanuel Constant, still on the CIA payroll. We were, it appeared, helping to fund those who disrupted our foreign policy. For a time, the Harlan County hovered just offshore while Washington decided what to do: whether to bring in troops and get our men ashore by force, an act of gunboat diplomacy that would have serious unwanted consequences—a military commitment in Haiti—or to turn tail and depart in a singular humiliation. Any American force sent to escort the soldiers and technicians to their assigned roles might look to the rest of the world like an invasion and, worse, might well end up being one.
It was to be one of the most embarrassing moments in recent American history, and almost surely a low moment for the Clinton administration. The administration was, in fact, badly divided. The hawks were for using military force to land the troops, and the doves, principally Aspin and the Joint Chiefs, at the very least wanted to wait for another day or perhaps try other pressures before we sent in combat troops and possibly got ourselves impaled in a hopeless political environment—or Somalia Two, as it was called.
Certainly no one really wanted a full-scale invasion. Much of the interior debate was about spin and which would look worse—the Harlan County waiting out there day by day as they debated further in the White House, or the Harlan County turning back. On October 12, the ship pulled away, and on the dock the same Haitian mob danced and jeered. “The theater of the absurd,” Lawrence Pezzullo, Washington’s chief negotiator in Haiti, called the scene. The political consequences were obvious. “Never again, never again,” Sandy Berger, Lake’s deputy and Clinton’s close friend, a man much more tuned to the president’s political needs than Lake, was heard to say.5 A think piece in the New York Times a day later had a devastating headline: “Policing a Global Village: As Peace-Keeping Falters in Somalia, Foes of the U.S. Effort in Haiti Are Emboldened.” But no one was ready post-Somalia for any casualties in Haiti.
The return of Aristide would have to wait. Vice President Gore was designated to call Aristide, then in exile in New York, to tell him we intended to keep our promise to restore him to power. It would simply take more time and more planning. Gore expected to find the Haitian leader angry and bitter and was instead chagrined by Aristide’s delight at the news. “He’s ecstatic,” Gore reported to Clinton. The president was not surprised, but was relieved to find that the most important person in the Haitian matrix was not going to be criticizing him. “What would you rather do?” Clinton asked Gore. “Go back to Haiti or sip champagne in Harry Belafonte’s apartment?”6 Both in America and the rest of the world, it looked like another major setback at the hands of smallbore third-world tyrants.
Clinton was furious and blamed his NSC staff for putting him in a lose-lose situation. No small part of the problem, he decided once the incident was over, was the lack of positive spin his White House was putting on events, and he suggested to his NSC people that David Gergen, the former Nixon, Reagan, and Bush aide who had recently joined his team, be included in their decision-making. The Reagan people, Clinton yelled at Lake during a particularly violent tirade, were much better at the politics of foreign policy than his team. When Reagan’s people lost the marines in Lebanon, Clinton said, they had almost immediately invaded Grenada and that had kept their popularity up.7 A few minutes after the tirade, Lake sat down in his office with Sandy Berger and George Stephanopoulos and went over the presidential tongue-lashing he had received. “I couldn’t,” Stephanopoulos wrote later of their meeting, “believe what I was hearing. Grenada? That’s how we should handle things? Like Reagan? The answer to losing 250 marines in a terrorist attack is to stage the invasion of a tiny country? If you really believe that, then why’d we turn the damn ship around?” They were staggered, not just by the force, but by the nature of Clinton’s attack. “He’s just so angry,” Stephanopoulos later told Lake and Berger, “he doesn’t know what he’s saying.”8
Rarely had the United States looked so impotent, its mighty military driven away from a banana republic by a pip-squeak dictator and a hired mob. Robert Kagan’s words—that if you are the president of the United States, somehow foreign policy finds you—had rarely been more true. But it was a disaster of the first magnitude, a personal one, and Clinton knew it. Later in his presidency, Clinton was touring Russia when his own and Russian security officers picked up serious reports about a potential assassination attempt against him. Both security forces tried to talk him out of the stop. But he was adamant about making it. “I’m never going to wimp out like I did in Haiti again,” he told the people around him.
But in the meantime, even more damage had been done to the Clinton foreign policy team. No wonder then, a few months later, when a small country in the center of Africa imploded into genocidal conflict, the United States stood on the sidelines. Just after the Somalia tragedy and the Haitian debacle, Rwanda went on a barbarous spree of tribal warfare, all of it carefully planned, culminating in violence that, in the words of the writer Philip Gourevitch, represented the most “pure and unambiguous genocide since the end of World War II.” At least eight hundred thousand people, most from the Tutsi tribe, were murdered in only one hundred days in what was, Gourevitch added, “the most efficient killing since the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” The world sat by and watched. In the United States, in the months right after Somalia, a deliberate attempt was made to suppress the issue at the higher level so that the president would not be seen rejecting any option that included sending troops on an errand of mercy. Even the word genocide was to be muted in all public discussions. Once again the hope that the United States might stand for a more humanitarian impulse throughout the world was dashed.
Rwanda was, in the eyes of many nonwhite critics of Western geopolitics, the quintessential example not just of the indifference of Americans and Europeans to problems in Africa, but of the double standard used in Washington and other Western capitals to judge the value of African lives compared with Western or Caucasian ones. The West, or at least part of it, they believed, agonized over events in Bosnia, violence inflicted on Europeans by Europeans, but was almost completely unconcerned about violence inflicted on Africans by Africans. Africans were, after all, much more likely to be faceless, without, in Western terms, identities. Europe was historically viewed as the cradle of American society, closer to our shores, more vital to our national security interests. The violence that seeped across borders in Europe always had greater impact on American policy makers than violence that seeped across boundaries in Africa.
No story in early 1994 could have been sadder than that of Rwanda. It had once been known as Rwanda-Urundi, a German colony before World War I that was awarded to Belgium after the war, marginal booty handed off to the winners by the losers. Unlike the neighboring Congo, also Belgian, with its province of Katanga, which was immensely rich in minerals (the uranium for the first atomic bomb had come from Katanga), Rwanda-Urundi had no great mineral wealth. In 1962, independence came and the colony was split into two countries, Rwanda and Burundi. In Rwanda, two distinct tribes were struggling for power, and their antagonisms were historic: the Tutsis, tall, narrower of nose, and thinner of lips, and thus by Western standards of cosmetics, handsome; and the Hutus, shorter, flatter-nosed, and therefore seen as less attractive. Since the Tutsis looked more like a Western ideal, they had been presumed by the Belgians to be more intelligent and became the favored tribe, given key positions in the local hierarchy and a better shot at what limited education was available. The job of the favored tribe, in the way colonial powers operated in that era, was, of course, to help suppress the less favored one.
Since the Tutsis represented 15 percent of the population and the Hutus the other 85, and since colonial regimes were by their very nature brutal and racist, the potential for tribal violence was immense. In the late fifties and early sixties came the early stirrings of a change toward independence throughout Africa. But even before the coming of independence, the Belgians had made a virtually complete switch to favor the Hutus. In 1960, a Belgian colonel named Guy Logiest led a coup in Rwanda, and throughout the country Hutus replaced Tutsis in key positions in government, the police, and the army. When independence came two years later, the country had a Hutu dictatorship; and in the tradition of new African countries, the Hutu leadership did not lack its own instinct for cruelty. It emulated its former colonial masters, lashing out now at the Tutsis, who had long dominated them. Many Tutsis fled the country, others gradually formed into a military political force, the Rwandan Patriotic Front, an army in exile.
In 1990, right after the Berlin Wall fell, the Tutsis invaded Rwanda. The Hutu president, Juvenal Habyarimana, eventually agreed to a peace settlement with them, calling for the sharing of power. To the Hutu extremists around him that peace accord was a sign of weakness; they despised the idea of sharing power with the hated Tutsis, and they worked to destabilize the peace accords. In the uneasy peace, neither side was happy. The Hutu hard-liners were not to be underestimated, and new spasms of violence were launched semicovertly against the Tutsis in what Gourevitch called “the practice massacres of the early nineties.”9
The rumblings increased, and fearing some kind of explosion by late 1993 the United Nations decided to send in a small peacekeeping mission, UNAMIR (United Nations Assistance Mission in Rwanda), of about twenty-five hundred troops from a number of countries, including Belgium and Ghana. No one thought the mission would be difficult. As in Bosnia, the exact mandate of the UN forces was in some doubt—what they were to do if one tribe attacked the other, and what they could do in their own self-defense. But soon the leaders of UNAMIR learned that dangerous—almost apocalyptic—forces were at work. Major General Romeo Dallaire, the Canadian in charge of the UNAMIR troops, developed a valuable Hutu informant in Habyarimana’s inner circle, a member of his security staff. By early January 1994, Dallaire’s informant was telling him of very detailed Hutu plans to exterminate all Tutsis. It was nothing less than a blueprint for genocide. Forty secret cells of extremist militia, forty men each, all trained by the Rwanda military, were ready at the signal to kill Tutsis. The militia were known as the Interhamwe, or translated, “those who attack together.” The Tutsis were all to be registered by the government and then killed. The informant knew where all the secret arms caches had been hidden away by the Hutus.
Dallaire immediately cabled the details of the plot to his superiors in New York—the informant had been told that his one unit alone should be able to kill one thousand Tutsis in twenty minutes. Dallaire wanted to seize the militia’s weapons and head off the massacre. But UN headquarters refused to act. It recalled visions of Mogadishu, where the eighteen Americans and even more Pakistanis had been killed. Or as Iqbal Riza, the chief of staff to the secretary general, said, the feeling in New York was “not Somalia again.”10 Even worse, Dallaire was instructed by New York to tell Habyarimana what he knew, even though the Hutu ruler’s inner circle was where the plans had come from. The UN troops on location did not move; therefore it was only a matter of time before the Hutus struck.
In early April 1994, Habyarimana was flying back to Kigali along with the president of Burundi after additional peace talks when his plane was shot down by Hutu extremists. It was the signal for open genocide. Almost everyone in Kigali was stunned by how well organized, albeit primitive, the violence was. As local American cities have radio stations that report the traffic at rush hour, guiding drivers to certain highways, Hutu radio gave out instructions to Hutu murderers about where the Tutsis were hiding. Some of the Tutsi tried to take shelter with the UN forces, but they were badly outnumbered and unsure of their mandate. When a group of ten Belgian soldiers were surrounded, the soldiers were tricked into giving up their weapons. Then the Hutus murdered and mutilated them.
Much of the killing was done with machetes. Often Tutsi feet were chopped off to make them shorter in death than the Hutus who had murdered them. The Hutus believed that if some UN troops were killed, the UN would immediately pull them back. When the UNAMIR leaders cabled to New York that a massacre had begun, New York swept the news under the carpet and announced publicly that this was an internal matter, merely a breakdown in the cease-fire. At one school where some two thousand Tutsis had taken refuge under UN auspices, fearing the coming of the Hutus and knowing that their tribal enemies were doing most of the killing with machetes and knives, they begged the UN officer in command to use their machine guns on them. It was preferable to being hacked to death by the Hutus. What appalled the UN commanders was that it was not a powerful, well-drilled army committing such terrible crimes against innocent, unarmed civilians. It was nothing more than an armed mob. In their opinion, a tiny group of well-trained soldiers could readily have stopped the massacre and rounded up the leaders. As the killings continued, Western nations—France, Belgium, and Italy—sent troops to Rwanda, not to stop the massacre, but to extract their own civilians. In Washington, President Clinton spoke on television to reassure the country that we were doing all we could to protect the 255 Americans there. The genocide succeeded, the UNAMIR noted, because it took place in a moral and political vacuum. Soon the UN decided to withdraw almost all the UNAMIR troops.
Washington wanted no part of Rwanda. The political fallout from Somalia had caused enough damage. As few risks as possible were to be taken, and certainly none in Africa. The State Department’s press officers under Clinton, not unlike their predecessors under Bush when dealing with Bosnia, were even reluctant to call it genocide. On April 28, a reporter asked Christine Shelly, a spokesperson for the department, whether the department viewed the violence in Rwanda as genocide. “Well, as I think you know,” she said, “the use of the term genocide has a very precise legal meaning, although it’s not strictly a legal determination. There are other factors in there as well.” Reporters covering the department thought it a striking example of bureaucratese, a willingness to talk without saying anything, because anything you said was so morally damaging.
In mid-May as evidence of genocide became more apparent, the UN sent a larger force. The Americans were supposed to help out with matériel. Armored personnel carriers were to be sent to Rwanda to enable the UN troops to get around the country. But their movement through the pipeline was deliberately impeded by debates over the terms of the lease, the color of the APCs, and what kind of stenciling they would have.11 Week by week the death toll mounted. At one point, estimates placed it at over half a million and growing all the time, but the debate over nomenclature continued in Washington. If it was genocide, then the administration would be culpable for failing to respond. So the new line was that acts of genocide had occurred, not genocide itself. On June 10, Ms. Shelly said that the department had every reason to believe that acts of genocide had occurred. A reporter at the briefing asked how many acts of genocide it took to make a genocide. “That’s just not a question that I’m in a position to answer,” she responded.
“Is it true,” another reporter asked, “that you have specific guidance not to use the word genocide in isolation but to always preface it with the words acts of?” Shelly’s answer reflected a government that had lost its way: “I have guidance which, which, to which I—which I try to use as best as I can. I’m not—I have—there are formulations that we are using that we are trying to be consistent in our use of. I don’t have an absolute categorical prescription against something, but I have the definitions. I have a phraseology which has been carefully examined and arrived at.” George Orwell would have smiled at her confusion.
By mid-July the tribal war was over. Tutsi guerrillas had finally entered the country and defeated the Hutu Interhamwe. Some eight hundred thousand and perhaps as many as one million Tutsis had been murdered. In the words of reporters for Frontline, a Boston-based public-television show, the Hutus had killed at a rate three times faster than the Nazis in World War II. Some four years later General Romeo Dallaire, the Canadian commander, went on Canadian television and took full responsibility for the failure of UNAMIR, the failure to protect the Tutsis, and the failure to be able to protect his own troops. Rarely had a commander at such a tragic venue been so unsparing of himself, even though his superiors had not listened to his warnings. Then Dallaire spoke about the larger meaning of the events in Rwanda: “I haven’t even started my real mourning of the apathy and the absolute detachment of the international community, and particularly the Western world, from the plight of Rwandans. Because fundamentally, to be very candid and soldierly, who the hell cared about Rwanda? I mean, face it. Essentially how many people remember the genocide in Rwanda? We know the genocide of the Second World War because the whole outfit was involved. But who really is involved in the Rwandan genocide? Who comprehends that more people were killed, injured, and displaced in three and a half months in Rwanda than in the whole of the Yugoslavian campaign in which we poured sixty thousand troops and the whole of the Western world was involved there? . . . Who is grieving for Rwanda and really living it and living with the consequences?”12
Almost five years after the massacre, well into his second term, the genocide long over, Bill Clinton flew to Kigali, the country’s capital, to offer a partial apologia. He did not actually say he was sorry, and he did not actually apologize, but he did, on behalf of himself and his country, appear to be contrite. He said that he had come to pay his respects to all who had suffered and perished in the genocide. He spoke at the Kigali airport, as part of a larger African tour, met with the families of some of those who were murdered, and gave the president of Rwanda a plaque honoring the dead. In his speech Clinton used the word genocide eleven times. He was there a total of three and a half hours. He did not leave the airport, and the men piloting Air Force One never turned off the plane’s engines.13
• • •
If his administration wanted no part of Rwanda, the Haiti fiasco, coming as it did so soon after Somalia, had been a critical lesson for Clinton. Foreign policy might not help you, but it could certainly hurt you. That danger existed not because people took the new, post-Soviet generation of issues—Bosnia, Somalia, Haiti, Rwanda—that seriously or greatly favored alternative policies toward them. It could hurt you because, unlike most political decisions, what happened after you made them was so visible, a most palpable reminder of something larger and more significant: how the people of your own country measured you and your personal strength as an extension of their strength. Perceived personal strength might be as important, or even more important, than real strength. It had worked well for Ronald Reagan, while the apparent lack of it had significantly damaged Jimmy Carter. Now, however gradually, perceived personal strength became a central factor in the formation of Clinton’s foreign policy, a change that started in the middle of the second year of his presidency.
In the summer of 1994, the administration began to search for a policy for Haiti that would restore Aristide, end the rule of the junta, and, if possible, avoid bloodshed. The president’s frustrations were obvious. At one point in April, Randall Robinson, a prominent black activist and the leader of TransAfrica Forum, had started a hunger strike to protest American policy in Haiti. When reporters asked Clinton what he thought about Robinson’s strike, he amazed them by endorsing it. “He ought to stay out there. We need to change the policy,” Clinton said as if he were talking about some other president’s foreign policy. That greatly surprised Robinson: “To have the president suggest that a policy should change and I should stay out there on a hunger strike while he abdicates his responsibility is deeply disturbing.” Clinton, Robinson added, could change the policy with a stroke of a pen.
Clinton had little to build on. Aristide himself kept sending contradictory signals about whether he wanted to return. Somewhat reluctantly the civilians in the administration began to focus on the use of force, if necessary, to return Aristide and drive the junta out. “Our own Grenada,” one administration member called it somewhat skeptically. The politics of it were complicated. There was no immediate political upside; not many people favored a Haitian invasion. The Black Congressional Caucus was for it, but its leverage with Clinton on an issue like this was essentially marginal because it really had nowhere else to go. But now, because of Bosnia, Somalia, Rwanda, and Haiti, there was a sense that foreign policy was slowly affecting the way this administration was perceived; foreign policy was seeping into domestic political perceptions.
So the Pentagon was told to start planning a force for the invasion of Haiti. It became known as the Bookend policy. One bookend was potentially a bluff: we would go through the motions of an invasion and hope to bluff the junta out, assuming that it would have no desire to meet up with elite American combat units. If the bluff failed, the other bookend was the invasion itself, which would be carried out with considerable force in a quick strike. To make the point, a marine three-star, Jack Sheehan, the man who was putting together the planning of the invasion, was dispatched to meet with Cedras on several occasions. Sheehan was an impressive figure, six feet five, a combat veteran of Vietnam, and bedecked with medals. “I have two sets of uniforms,” he told Cedras on one occasion, “my dress uniform and my combat one. You can make the choice which one I’m wearing the next time we meet.”
Even if the planning was going ahead, the Pentagon remained cautious, uneasy about Aristide. Walt Slocombe, the undersecretary of defense for planning, was heard at a party to say that he had no intention of risking American lives “to put that psychopath back in power.” His colleagues Bill Perry and John Deutch had no doubt about how easy it would be to come in and take over the scene militarily, but they wondered what would happen afterward. The mission lacked clarity as the White House was discussing it. People feared being caught in the middle between feuding Haitian groups. Perry eventually came around on the idea, but slowly, always worried about the postvictory consequences. JCS chairman John Shalikashvili was probably more of an activist. The Clinton presidency, to which he was sympathetic, was obviously in trouble, and success in Haiti could be important in moving away from negative to more positive foreign policy and military images.
On the civilian side, Lake was the most obvious hawk, but Strobe Talbott, now the number two man at State, was a hawk as well. The vice president was also considered an activist. By September, the plan was mostly in place. The orders from the White House were that the invasion was to be kept to a force of under twenty-two thousand men—actually it would end up being closer to twenty-five. The 82nd Airborne would be launched from Fort Bragg. Elements of the 101st Airborne were sitting nearby on a ship ready to join in, and a force of about two thousand marines would hit the shores. To complete the assault, the Tenth Mountain Division would come ashore almost as soon as the airborne troops had landed. Even before the invasion was set in motion, some Special Forces units would go ashore to take out any Haitian armored vehicles.
By early September, invasion plans were fairly complete. Clinton might be getting what he wanted, but he was hardly happy about it. He did not like the current policy, which was, of course, a nonpolicy, he did not like the old policy, which had failed, and he did not like the new policy they had just signed on to because it might end in violence with considerable political repercussions. There were signs of the usual Clinton irritation as he dealt with things he didn’t like: “I can’t believe they got me into this. . . . How did this happen? We should have waited until after the elections,” he told the people around him.14
By mid-September they were ready for the invasion. Then things became complicated. Jimmy Carter, the former president, had valuable contacts in Haiti, including some with members of the junta. He understood that some form of invasion was about to take place and volunteered to lead a negotiating team to try to get the junta to leave peacefully. Clinton was delighted to avoid the outright use of force to remove the junta, but he was also wary of Carter. But he decided that there was no harm in having Carter lead a negotiating team that would permit a peaceful entry of American forces. Carter asked to have his fellow Georgian Sam Nunn for his team. Nunn, still a senator and respected along a broad political spectrum, had openly opposed the use of force in Haiti, which gave him a certain credibility with the junta. He in turn suggested adding Colin Powell to the team. Off they went, aware that a major invasion of military force was already in the works and the clock was ticking. Clinton remained wary of Carter: “Sometimes a wild card, but I took a chance on him in North Korea [in another collision of forces] and that didn’t turn out too badly,” he told Powell.15 What bothered Clinton privately was what he considered Carter’s considerable ego and his need to validate himself as a self-appointed international peacekeeper and, perhaps most dangerously, what was perceived as his desire to make peace at what might possibly be too great a price. Carter was hardly a White House favorite: the new Democratic president had gone to lengths from the moment he was elected to distance himself from the last Democratic president. Carter, the Clinton people had implied both during the campaign and in the days when they had first come to power, was something of a wimp, and they were going to be different, tougher, more centered. More, any use of him might imply that, if there were not two American presidents, then there were at least two secretaries of State. That of itself might diminish the idea of a Clinton presidency. That this was not a normal mission was obvious from the press release announcing the Carter trip. The original, being finalized in Tony Lake’s office, had begun, “With President Clinton’s approval, Jimmy Carter . . .”16 Stephanopoulos took one look and tried to stop it. Clinton had already approved the draft, Lake said. But, Stephanopoulos objected, presidents don’t approve missions like this, they order them. Clinton swung to Stephanopoulos’s side.
So it was a politically loaded, somewhat risky idea. In the eyes of the White House, Carter was hard to control, and he tended to freelance and thereby, they feared, play into the hands of the local bad guys. Still, if it was not an ideal option, nothing in Haiti was ideal, and one last effort for peace would be reassuring to other Latin American nations in showing that we had not wanted to practice gunboat diplomacy. So even as the invasion countdown was taking place, Clinton decided to send Carter, Powell, and Nunn.
At this point timing became crucial. The invasion was set for September 19. On September 17, Carter, Nunn, and Powell arrived in Haiti near midday. They had thirty-six hours to convince the Haitian junta to go peacefully. What Clinton wanted more than anything else was to get the deal done: he would prefer the large American force go ashore peacefully, but what he did not want was for it all to go this far and end without a clear and final resolution—it would seem too much the hallmark of previous stumbles, most specifically the debacle with the Harlan County. Whatever else, it must not end up inconclusively, with Cedras able to hedge again—and that was what Clinton began to fear was happening. More, there was a semi-silent player in this pushing him toward the more violent use of force, Aristide himself, who did not want a peaceful takeover, but wanted the American military to come in and wipe out the junta and its leadership for him.
The meetings had a comic-opera, albeit dangerous comic-opera, tone to them, the Haitian leaders talking vaingloriously about their willingness to die for their country, Powell in turn trying to explain what they would face, forces from two aircraft carriers, twenty thousand elite American soldiers, plus tanks and helicopter gunships. No sensible military code, he said, called for the needless sacrifice of lives of either officers or men. Their meetings began to drag on, with the deadline for the invasion, 12:01 A.M. on the nineteenth, getting ever closer.
Even as they were going back and forth on some of the details, the C-130s were leaving Fort Bragg with the 82nd Airborne, the Pentagon press corps had been briefed on the mission, and Tom Johnson, the head of CNN, was calling top people at the Pentagon telling them that CNN knew that planes with the 82nd had already left for Haiti—and it would be easy to figure out the time of the jump. In the Pentagon war room, Lieutenant General Sheehan pleaded with Johnson over the phone not to run anything on the network because it could get kids killed, and Johnson accepted the restraints.
At one point, as his negotiating team was closing in on a deal, Clinton, aware of how little time was left and the danger to them—they could even become hostages—ordered them to get out of the presidential palace and out of the country, but they demanded a little more time. Clinton’s order reflected not just the imminent deadline, but a growing irritation with Carter in the White House, which felt Cedras was stalling, and a fear that Carter might be going along with the stall. On the ground, however, it was not just Carter but Nunn and Powell who thought they were close to working out a deal that would allow a peaceful entry of American forces. Just when it seemed that things were at their most chaotic, Brigadier General Philippe Biamby, Cedras’s chief of staff, rushed in to tell him, “The Eighty-second Airborne is on its way!” Even then the tensions continued, the Americans buying a little more time from Clinton, the Haitians thundering a little bit more about their pride and manhood before they folded their hands. On board one of the aircraft carriers from which the first troops would debark, aware that time was running out, even as he went down his final checklist for the invasion, was General Hugh Shelton, who commanded all the troops. He and his staff were also watching CNN, where updated details on the negotiations were being fed regularly into the programming. Shelton and his staff would watch the news clips featuring Carter, Powell, and Nunn, then shout at the television set, “Get out of there!”17 And then, just at the last minute, the macho Haitian mood ended, reality sank in, and a date was fixed for the junta to leave and for Aristide to return. The American troops would arrive peacefully.
But with that, Carter became a problem as far as the Clinton people were concerned. Haiti had been successfully done, force threatened but not used, and Clinton wanted the credit. If it was not exactly a big-time success, it was not a failure, and it was the first foreign policy victory, one badly needed. But Carter did not seem to want to go away; he wanted to stay on and monitor the scene, irritating the White House, which wanted to minimize his role and maximize Clinton’s. In time, Carter’s phone calls from Haiti, which he had hoped would go through directly to the president or Lake or even Berger, were passed down the line, to be taken by General Sheehan, who had run the military side of it. But all in all, the White House was generally pleased. The president had been partially dewimped, it had been low cost, relatively easy to control. If Haiti would not easily be transformed into a democracy, if Aristide’s political world was almost as murky as the one that had preceded it, no one really cared that much. What Haitians did to themselves was always another matter. What mattered in the White House was that we had stood up to dictators, gotten them to leave (albeit on terms rather favorable to them), and reversed the image of the Harlan County. That was the lasting image. There were lessons there for the future.