19255: (Hermantin)Miami-Herald- If we go, let's stay until job is done (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: leonie hermantin <lhermantin@hotmail.com>

Posted on Wed, Feb. 25, 2004

If we go, let's stay until job is done

BY JOSEPH L. GALLOWAY


Whenever we tromp on their toes, Mexicans like to say, ''Poor Mexico! So far
from God and so close to the United States.'' The same could be said of
Haiti.

Three times in the last century, the United States has gone into Haiti with
arms and money to calm the political situation, pacify the population, get
rid of one homicidal dictator or another, and build some schools, clinics,
roads and bridges.

The question now is whether we will have to do it again as we read about
another uprising against another autocratic leader, born of the despair of
the most grinding poverty in the Western Hemisphere.

• The first and longest U.S. occupation of Haiti began in 1915, when
President Woodrow Wilson ordered in a brigade of U.S. Marines, 2,000 good
men and true, and they took and pacified the entire country with a loss of
only three Marines killed and 18 wounded. They stayed and ran Haiti until
1934. They built more than a thousand miles of highway with 210 bridges.

• In 1958, President Dwight D. Eisenhower sent in the Marines again, this
time to rebuild a shattered economy so communists couldn't get a toehold in
the hemisphere. This the communists did the next year in nearby Cuba. This
American incursion also helped prop up the dictatorship of the quite
bloody-minded Francois ''Papa Doc'' Duvalier.

• In 1994, President Clinton sent the Marines in yet again, this time with
the U.S. Army and U.N. peacekeepers from half a dozen armies. It was to oust
the latest military cabal, that of Gen. Raoul Cedras and his cronies, and to
reinstall the overthrown elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a former
priest who turned out to have a dictatorial streak of his own.

The American soldiers who came briefly on this last incursion found
themselves marching across the only things that still worked in modern
Haiti: bridges carrying little brass plates that said: ``Built in 1927 (or
1930, or 1931, or 1933) by the U.S. Marine Corps.''

Now the Haitians are rising up in rebellion again, seizing a clutch of towns
and cities. They're killing and burning and looting in hopes of overthrowing
Aristide, in part because they believe that he stole an election but mostly
because he has failed to give his people a shred of hope for a better
future.

I'm not much in favor of nation-building, being of the opinion that we can
provide seed money and technical assistance and then let the people build
their own nation.

But Haiti is different. In 1995, I visited 32 U.S. Special Forces A-Team
camps scattered across Haiti. What I saw convinced me that the Clinton
administration's plan to get out of Haiti as swiftly and cheaply as
possible, which we did, was wrong.

You can argue that what happens in Haiti is none of our business. You would
be wrong, given Haiti's proximity and the disgrace that Haitian poverty and
anarchy represents in the Americas. The island nation is an easy boat ride
from the Florida coast, a ride that many thousands have taken and that many
thousands more will take if things don't improve.

For me, the best argument for our fixing Haiti, even if it takes 25 years
and costs us billions, is that 7.5 million Haitians are worth saving.

In the poorest village on the parched Isle de la Gonave, the people built a
one-room schoolhouse out of the only material available to them: the thorny
twigs of a bush that grows there. Every day, the mothers shoo their
children, in uniforms freshly laundered and starched, off to school. Every
night, under the village's lone street lamp, those boys and girls gather in
a circle, reading and writing, as they do their homework.

''There is frankly no enthusiasm right now for sending in military or police
forces to put down the violence that we are seeing,'' Secretary of State
Colin Powell has said. But if that should change, the United States should
plan to stay this time, and plan to pay for a long reconstruction, until a
country that is in desperate need of help is rebuilt -- and those Haitian
children have a brighter future.

Joseph L. Galloway is the senior military correspondent for Knight Ridder
Newspapers.

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