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The President skated over one fundamental motive for entering Haiti: his own credibility. Rather than address the painful pattern of threat and retreat that has marked his foreign policy, given him a personal reputation for fecklessness and made the U.S. seem an unreliable superpower to friends and foes, he spoke only tangentially of living up to "American commitments." Translation, in words the Administration would certainly not use: Clinton had got himself into a box by repeatedly threatening to invade Haiti in order to scare the Cedras clique into leaving. If the Carter mission could not talk them into decamping, he would really have to do it -- or send the world a message that threats from Washington can blithely be ignored because when the crunch comes, the U.S. will always shrink from using military force. The reason for toning down the credibility argument was all too clear: if Clinton has a problem, he brought it on himself.
Instead the President concentrated heavily on convicting the Haitian junta of a long list of atrocities. He spoke of "people slain and mutilated, with body parts left as warnings to terrify others. Children forced to watch as their mothers' faces are slashed with machetes." Permitting so brutal a regime to stay in power in defiance of its earlier agreements to get out would endanger continuation of a trend toward democracy throughout the Caribbean and Latin America, said Clinton, and might well unleash a new flood of refugees: "300,000 more Haitians -- 5% of their entire population -- are in hiding in their own country. If we don't act, they could be the next wave of refugees at our door." Consequently, he said, drawing out the words for emphasis, "we -- must -- act."
The next day Clinton produced Aristide before cameras in the White House to allay some of the fears that the Haitian's reputation as an anti-U.S. leftist and rabble-rousing demagogue have stirred. Speaking in careful English -- his native language is Creole French -- the slightly built Roman Catholic priest declared, "We say no to retaliation, no to vengeance." To dispel any thought that the U.S. might be installing by force a new President-for-life, Aristide pledged to abide by his country's constitution and yield his office to an elected successor in February 1996, when his five-year term expires, even though he has spent more than half that term in exile.
Gore told Clinton that he was about to make "a great speech" and that it might start a desired rally-round-the-President mood among the U.S. public. Nonetheless, it was not fully convincing. Despite the cloak of multinational support, this is from start to finish essentially a U.S. operation. Clinton pledged that the initial American forces would be withdrawn "in months, not years." But even though the U.S. would officially hand over responsibility to a U.N. peacekeeping operation that would stay until Aristide's successor is elected, the President failed to mention that as much as half that U.N. force, or some 3,000 troops, would also be American -- an arrangement similar to the one the U.S. came to regret in Somalia.