Normally, senior aides to Bill Clinton do not speak with frankness about the roles, missions and vital interests at stake in Haiti. But last week they were all eagerly making themselves available to deliver one message: that, as an official put it, "there comes a point where it has to be clear that the U.S. means what it says."
The word has not yet got through to Port-au-Prince. Haiti's military junta called its supporters into the streets for what has become a familiar ritual of taunting the U.S. While onlookers sipped rum, 3,000 demonstrators screamed slogans into the microphones of foreign television crews and painted voodoo hexes on the crosswalk to hobble U.S. invaders when they arrive. As an expression of the diplomacy-of-defiance that constitutes Haiti's foreign policy, it provided a crude but telling glimpse of what Lieut. General Raoul Cedras thinks of Clinton's threats to topple him and his henchmen.
For weeks it has seemed that Cedras' contempt for the U.S. was matched only by the Clinton Administration's ambivalence over whether the Haitian leader could be shoved from power by force of argument or force of arms. Last week senior Administration officials staked out policy positions far in front of a President who has not yet made up his mind. "One way or another, the de facto government is going to be leaving," declared Secretary of State Warren Christopher. "Their days are definitely numbered."
From the corridors of the White House to the State Department to the Pentagon, officials insisted the debate was no longer about whether the U.S. would "forcibly enter" Haiti, but how and when. The flurry of highly public military preparations, said a White House official, "means we're going into an operational stage." When pressed, all these officials admitted Clinton had not set a date for invasion -- although Sept. 20, according to sources in the Pentagon, is looming as a likely deadline. "If the President doesn't invade," said another official, "he's going to be hurting. There's a sense of inevitability that it's going to happen."
To make that message convincing, the White House team moved on a broader, bolder front than ever before. Just after Clinton returned from his 12-day vacation on Martha's Vineyard, he sat down to discuss Haiti with his senior foreign-policy advisers. While the President gave no final go-ahead, the issues on the table boiled down to tactics: how to handle Congress; whether to set a public deadline for invasion; and who -- if anyone -- should be sent to deliver to the Haitian government a "drop-dead date" by which it must step down or be kicked out.