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Even if they didn't have to go in shooting, American troops would still be landing in Haiti this week. Though no one would use the words, they will in effect be an occupation force, charged with pacifying the country and keeping order while the exiled President Aristide, thrown out in a military coup led by Cedras in 1991, sets up a new government. While much of the 20,000-strong takeover force is supposed to come home before the November elections, several thousand U.S. troops will stay on as part of a U.N. peacekeeping force until at least February 1996, when Aristide is pledged to yield power to an elected successor. It could well be tricky and dangerous duty that could end in a Somalia-style debacle: withdrawal of U.S. and U.N. troops followed by another coup that returns Haiti to the savage oppression from which the U.S. hopes to rescue it.
There is a strong chance that the worst violence will occur not between armed forces but in the streets -- and it could endanger U.S. troops even if they arrive in what Pentagon officials call a "permissive environment." Minutes before Clinton's speech on Thursday, Cedras told CBS that the landing of U.S. troops would trigger "a massacre starting with a civil war." Self- serving as his statement was, it accurately reflected just how ferocious the country's animosities have become.
Cedras' backers are widely thought to have drawn up a hit list of opposition members who would be gunned down as U.S. troops were about to land, peacefully or as an invasion force. At the head of the list, supposedly, is Port-au- Prince Mayor Evans Paul. Some Aristide supporters were said to have asked the U.S. to give them two or three days' warning of an invasion so they could go into hiding.
On the other side, Cedras' supporters are afraid that Aristide's partisans will seek blood revenge on the soldiers and attaches -- successors of the infamous Tontons Macoutes of the Duvalier years -- who have terrorized and tortured them for the past three years. The soldiers' fear is so great that Cedras, Francois and Biamby are said to think they need protection from their own followers if they decide to decamp. Otherwise, soldiers who feared they were being abandoned to the fury of popular vengeance might turn on their former chiefs and kill them before they got out of Haiti. The Pentagon is worried that U.S. troops will land in the middle of a reciprocal bloodbath that they would have to risk their own lives to stop -- or face opprobrium for not stopping. The U.S. hopes to blanket Haiti with enough heavily armed soldiers landing at enough different spots to squelch any disturbances quickly.
Clinton got a start -- very, very late -- toward making the case for invasion in his TV address to the nation last Thursday night. He reworked a draft so heavily and so late that by 6 p.m., three hours before airtime, the White House was able to release only excerpts for quotation on the night's TV news shows; aides joked that Clinton was locked into those sentences but that everything else was up in the air. When the cameras finally started rolling in the Oval Office, however, the President was in good form, speaking calmly and firmly, as befits a Chief Executive about to order troops into battle, but with a notable lack of histrionics.