Clinton Legacy #52: The Perils of ‘Nation-Building’

(Washington, D.C.): One showcase of the Clinton-Gore foreign policy legacy was supposed
to
be Haiti, where in 1994 some 20,000 American troops were sent to “restore democracy.” The
problem with this and all subsequent attempts at “nation-building” over the past eight years, as
amplified in the article below, is self-evident: Doing it half-heartedly and “on the cheap” does
not work. It generally proves to be enormously expensive relative to the minimal and ephemeral
benefits obtained. It forces U.S. troops into a role to which they are poorly suited and ill-applied.
It squanders in particular military resources and assets already in too short supply. And, in the
end, the fecklessness of the intervention generally serves to erode whatever positive attitude
towards or respect for the United States that might have previously existed among the affected
population.

Worse yet, as the editor of Newsweek‘s on-line edition, Joe Contreras makes
clear, these
interventions have actually detracted from U.S. foreign policy interests. In 1994, we installed an
anti-American leftist former priest in Haiti, only to see that nation metastasize ever since into an
increasingly authoritarian narco-state. According to Newsweek, the amount of
cocaine entering
the U.S. from Haiti since Aristide was installed has more than doubled — a particular outrage
insofar as a principal justification for the U.S. action against the previous, military-run
government in Haiti was that it had, at the very least, turned a blind-eye to drug trafficking.

Unfortunately, this is not an isolated incident. Under the Clinton-Gore team, America has
also
engaged in a number of other misguided initiatives, including: using its influence in support of a
Marxist coup d’etat in Albania; supporting a Communist thug’s takeover of the
“Democratic Republic of Congo”; aiding the Communist government of Angola in its
civil war against America’s Cold War ally, Jonas Savimbi’s UNITA; intervening in a
civil war in the former Yugoslavia in such a way as to prop up Serbian dictator Slobodan
Milosevic; and making common cause with the drug-running Kosovo Liberation Army in
Yugoslavia.

In every instance, the Clinton Administration’s “nation-building” has been a dismal failure,
not
the least because genuine and stable democracies are not imposed from above by foreigners.
They do not come about by artificially ending the outward manifestations of civil strife or by
elections engineered to produce results favorable to the West’s preferred politicians. Real
democracies require legal, political and social institutions. Their absence virtually ensures that
there will be no freely elected and durable governments.

By pretending otherwise over the past eight years, the Clinton-Gore Administration has
bequeathed to the next president a world much more wary of U.S. intentions and much less
inclined to view America as a reliable partner in bringing about democratic transformations. As
a candidate, President-elect Bush was harshly and properly critical of such insubstantial, yet
exceedingly costly “nation-building” exercises abroad. It is to be hoped that, as President, Mr.
Bush will apply this principle. If he does so, it will likely save American lives, treasure and
standing internationally.

NEWSWEEK WEB EXCLUSIVE, 28 November 2000

Haiti: A Shabby Epilogue:

After a distinctly undemocratic election, drug lords may have become the real
rulers of this
island nation

By Joe Contreras

Nov. 28 – It was an election that most voters ignored, that the international community
disavowed and whose outcome was never in doubt. In many respects, Sunday’s presidential vote
in Haiti was the polar opposite of the U.S. election that continues to garner headlines around the
world.

Former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide faced no serious challengers in a cakewalk contest
that
was boycotted by the country’s main opposition parties. Polling precincts that drew long lines of
voters for a legislative election only six months ago stood empty throughout much of the day.
And when Aristide begins his five-year term next February he will enjoy little legitimacy beyond
the shores of the impoverished Caribbean island nation.

But none of that stopped the onetime apostle of Haitian democracy from hailing the vote and
promising a role for the opposition in his future government. “We observed a huge majority of
the Haitian people expressing their right through their vote,” the 47-year-old Aristide told
reporters on Monday, during his first press conference in six years. “To have a peaceful Haiti, the
opposition is indispensable, and there will be a place for everyone in my government.”

But the nation’s main opposition leaders quickly spurned Aristide’s invitation, and his victory
provides a shabby epilogue to what the Clinton Administration once touted as one of its greatest
foreign-policy triumphs. In 1994, the United States dispatched 20,000 troops to oust a military
regime accused of involvement in drug trafficking and restore Aristide as Haiti’s first
democratically elected president. Washington then poured hundreds of millions of dollars in
development aid into the country as a sign of support for Aristide, who continued to wield
effective power after he was succeeded as president by a hand-picked political lackey named
Rene Preval in 1996.

By last May, though, the White House had run out of patience. The amount of cocaine
streaming
into the United States through Haiti had more than doubled since the years of military rule, and
Preval’s government was a democracy in name only. Haiti’s return to the ranks of the world’s
pariah states appeared complete-and as a sign of their displeasure, U.S. officials refused to
provide financial assistance or election observers to this week’s presidential vote in which an
estimated 15 percent of eligible Haitians bothered to take part. “The United States bet on a horse
that disguised itself as the (champion) of democracy,” says opposition politician Gerard
Pierre-Charles. “But the state doesn’t function, and drug traffickers could become the masters of
the country.”

Many believe that has already occurred with the consent of corrupt Haitian judges, legislators
and police. The State Department estimates that nearly 70 tons of cocaine moved through Haiti in
1999, and Drug Enforcement Administration officials say that at least 15 major Colombian drug
trafficking syndicates have set up shop in recent years.

Drug-related corruption is flourishing throughout the Western Hemisphere’s poorest country.
The
head of police at Port-au-Prince International Airport was fired last March after he allegedly
failed to seize a 405-kilogram shipment of cocaine, and U.S. officials have linked three
prominent senators from Aristide’s Lavalas Family party to drug trafficking activity. A senior
police commander says that up to three-quarters of the country’s 4,500-member police force have
accepted bribes from drug lords and their lieutenants, and the country’s justice minister says the
going price for a judge starts at $5,000. “There is no element of that system in Haiti you can’t buy
your way out of,” says one frustrated DEA agent. “(Traffickers) face a greater law enforcement
infrastructure anywhere else in the Caribbean.”

But Haiti’s newfound status as an emerging narco-state isn’t the only cloud hanging over
Aristide as he prepares to return in triumph to the gleaming white Presidential Palace in
downtown Port-au-Prince. Any remaining pretense of democratic rule under Aristide’s
designated stand-in Rene Preval evaporated nearly two years ago when the figurehead president
dissolved parliament. U.S. officials criticized the move, and their concerns hardened into loud
condemnation after Haitians went to the polls last May to elect a new legislature. A controversial
vote-counting formula awarded 18 of the 19 seats at stake in the national senate to candidates
from Aristide’s Lavalas Family party. Independent election observers argued that ten of those
seats should have been decided by a runoff vote, but the Preval government refused to hold a
second-round election. Washington retaliated by suspending aid for this month’s presidential
election and announcing plans to channel $75 million in US economic assistance exclusively
through private, non-governmental organizations. “Seldom in recent history has a country
received such a level of international support in its effort to establish democracy,” Luis Lauredo,
the U.S. ambassador to the Organization of American States, said last September. “The Haitian
people deserve better than this.”

Aristide is likely to get an even colder shoulder from George W. Bush if the Texas governor
is
sworn in as president next January. In one of his few clear-cut disagreements with Vice President
Al Gore on foreign policy, Bush vowed never to use American troops in any future
“nation-building” exercise and publicly cited Haiti as a failed example of that approach.
Republican Congressmen started taking aim at Aristide and his inner circle for alleged
involvement in drug trafficking long before the Clinton Administration soured on him. One of
their recurrent targets is Dany Toussaint, a former army major and longtime Aristide loyalist who
was elected to the senate last spring. Toussaint reportedly engineered the removal of a police
inspector general earlier this year who was investigating several police superintendents
implicated in the cocaine trade. The 43-year-old legislator dismisses those accounts as part of a
Republican smear campaign aimed at portraying the charismatic Aristide as a closet leftist who
will cozy up to Fidel Castro in short order. “All they are talking about is garbage,” shrugs
Toussaint. “They have to go through me to attack Aristide.” Now that he is president-elect,
Aristide may find himself more directly in the firing line.