NEWS ANALYSIS : Indecisiveness Is Crux of U.S. Policy on Haiti

A White House official was taken aback this week when asked how the twists and turns of U.S. policy on Haiti fit into an overall American strategy. “We aren’t answering questions about strategy today,” the official snapped.

That may be the core of the Clinton Administration’s problem as it grapples with Haiti, a policy nightmare that has come to torment officials out of all proportion to its size.

American attempts to staunch the flood of refugees from the impoverished, military-ruled country have produced only disarray--and television images of drowning refugees. Its attempts to rattle the saber of American military might at the regime in Port-au-Prince have frightened members of Congress but apparently not members of the Haitian junta.

As a result, the Administration has found itself lurching from crisis to crisis, from one attempted quick fix to another--and is now finding itself drawn toward an unwanted decision on military intervention.

“The President is in a peculiar and dangerous position on Haiti,” warned Georges Fauriol of the private, nonpartisan Center for Strategic and International Studies here. “He has said the military regime must go. He has put his credibility on the line. But he doesn’t have any way to make them go . . . unless he launches an invasion.”

Clinton and his aides have insisted they would prefer to see Haiti’s generals leave peacefully, under the pressure of the economic and political sanctions that the United States has imposed.

But it could take months for the sanctions to topple the regime, if they do at all. Meanwhile, the near-collapse of Haiti’s economy, coupled with U.S. promises to treat refugees humanely, has touched off the exodus of more than 15,000 people in the past three weeks.

“Eventually, the sanctions might work,” Fauriol noted. “But at this rate, the flow of refugees will overwhelm everyone first.”

To reinforce the sanctions, Clinton and his aides have warned publicly that the United States might invade Haiti and overthrow the generals by force. This week, they announced that a task force including 2,000 Marines with helicopters and landing craft was on its way to the Caribbean. The stated reason was to be prepared in case U.S. citizens in Haiti should need protection. They also confirmed that the Army and Navy have staged an exercise in Florida to simulate a landing in Port-au-Prince.

But the saber-rattling fell a bit flat when Clinton’s special envoy to Haiti, William H. Gray III, said the United States still does not want to invade and suggested that the regime’s deadline for stepping down is the end of the year.

“This is another sign that the Americans aren’t serious,” said a Haitian business leader now in the United States. The military “will see it as yet another fake deadline . . . a signal that they have another six months.”

Fauriol said: “The Administration has made it quite clear that it is reluctant to intervene. They’ve watered down their own announcements (of possible military action). That doesn’t work. If you’re going to play the game of gunboat diplomacy, just do it.”

Part of the problem, officials said, is that Clinton is genuinely undecided on the issue and still hopes he can avoid military intervention. Another part is his Administration’s seeming inability to make clear decisions and make them stick--as with its move to send Haitian refugees to Panama, a quick fix that the Panamanians abruptly rejected Thursday.

But another reason is broader: Since the end of the Cold War, Americans and their leaders are less ready to commit troops to combat overseas.

“The whole issue of military intervention is more difficult since the end of the Cold War . . . and the generals in Haiti know that,” said Michael Mandelbaum of Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies. “It doesn’t help that we pulled out of Somalia. Neither does it help that half the Congress and half of the country don’t want to intervene. . . . And it doesn’t help that our interest in Haiti is not as clear as it could be.”

During the Cold War, Mandelbaum noted, U.S. military interventions--from Korea in 1950 to Grenada in 1983--were all justified on the grounds that they were somehow connected to the global struggle with the Soviet Union. “The American public has been willing to shed blood if it had something to do with self-defense,” he said. “But that rationale is gone now.”

Indeed, he noted, Clinton has reinforced the nation’s reluctance through his brushes with intervention.

In Somalia last year, after an ill-conceived military mission resulted in 18 American combat deaths in October, Clinton announced that the cost was greater than the U.S. interest and brought the troops home. In the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Clinton declared that the United States had a deep interest in achieving a settlement--but not deep enough to warrant sending any ground troops. “In Bosnia, we have set the standard for intervention rather high,” Mandelbaum said.

And in Haiti, Clinton ordered U.S. military trainers aboard the tank landing ship Harlan County to withdraw last year in the face of an ugly crowd on the dock. That was the only gunboat diplomacy Haiti’s leaders have seen so far, and it ended in a quick American retreat.

“That did not strengthen the credibility of our threats of intervention,” Mandelbaum said. “There’s an argument that can be made now that invading Haiti would be good for U.S. credibility. But how important that credibility is depends on what the stakes are. . . . And since the Cold War, the stakes just don’t seem as big as they used to be.”

Times staff writer Kenneth Freed contributed to this report from Miami.