Commentary : PERSPECTIVES ON HAITI : Soldiers’ Blood, to Fill a Vacuum : Restoring an eccentric leader to turn the tide of refugees is a cynical, racist response to an artificial problem.

As I write this, our country is preparing for the invasion of Haiti. There is now a clock on the operation. U.S. Army aircraft are embarked on U.S. Navy ships, and since Army aircraft are not designed for use at sea, a salt-corrosive environment, the play-or-pay decision will have to be made in fairly short order. Before examining the policy-making process involved here, such as it is, we can briefly consider other recent similar actions.

In the case of Grenada (October, 1983), the precipitating event was the imminent danger to several hundred American students on the island. A coup eliminated one oddball government for another of unmistakably savage proclivities (a demonstration of people supporting the previous government was machine-gunned). The Operation Urgent Fury was laid on so rapidly that a friend of mine aboard the Independence went to his ship’s library to learn about the island of Grenada from the Encyclopedia Britannica. He would later win a Distinguished Flying Cross for rescuing 13 U.S. soldiers whose helicopter was shot down. The returning American students were quite clear in reporting the danger they sensed on the island, and we need to remember that the lives of our citizens are, in the final analysis, our most important national-security concern.

In the case of Panama (December, 1989), the precipitating events were the murder of a Marine officer and the near-rape of the wife of a Navy officer. In addition was concern for the security of the Panama Canal, a vital national-security asset whose construction was, in fact, the first real step America took toward world-power status.

The Persian Gulf War was about the security of the world’s energy supply and stability in a region of vital interests to the entire industrialized world. It should be noted that some politicians on the left who opposed intervention there blithely support the invasion of Haiti.

Haiti is a country only in the sense that it occupies a place on the map and has a flag. It has no economy worth speaking about. Formerly a colony of France (the demise of French rule in Haiti went a long way toward making possible America’s Louisiana Purchase), Haiti was liberated by its own citizens in the early 19th Century. That was about the last good thing to happen there. Ruled since by despots characterized mainly by brutality and indifference to their fellow citizens, Haiti has accomplished little and suffered much. The people on that half of the island of Hispaniola live in abject poverty; many of them walk across the border to the Dominican Republic, where they are cruelly exploited as stoop labor. All these things command our sympathy.

But sympathy and concern are not the same as a vital national interest. No American citizens appear to be at risk. Haiti possesses nothing vital to American national-security interests.

Haiti has had something approaching a democratic election. The president elected, a former priest named Jean-Bertrand Aristide is, according to a published Central Intelligence Agency evaluation, slightly mad. This observation can be confirmed by anyone who watches the exiled president give a speech, and by his public support for the murder of his political opponents. Neither factor gives one great enthusiasm for re-establishing Aristide to power in his country.

We will recall that two years ago, candidate Bill Clinton excoriated President Bush’s policy of denying asylum to Haitian refugees as implicitly racist and grossly insensitive. There was justice in that observation. Unfortunately, President Clinton has failed to find anything approaching a peaceful solution, has in effect reinstated and sanctified the Bush policy and has now expanded it to Cuban refugees as well for no other apparent reason than that he doesn’t know what else to do. Unable to solve one problem, Clinton, for what seems the first time in U.S. history, has implicitly approved a Marxist country’s policy of keeping its citizens in slavery while agreeing to Fidel Castro’s demand to act as a safety valve, bleeding off stress to the only foreign leader who ever advocated the use of nuclear weapons against our country (1962, remember?).

Thus 30 years of consistent policy toward Cuba has been voided by a President who took back his own words regarding proper policy toward Haiti. And now, with no other intelligent ideas on the horizon, Clinton is preparing to do what many weak and indecisive people do when they cannot come up with something. He is preparing to order American men and women to risk their lives to underwrite a vacuum of policy.

What is the rationale?

If we do not invade Haiti, we will have more refugees? (In other words, we don’t want any more black people in America.) Is that not racist? Expanding the idea as we must--since we want neither Cuban nor Haitian refugees--it’s about immigration. I am sure that the Daughters of the American Revolution will be delighted to hear that their long-standing prejudice is now backed up by all the muscle the Pentagon can summon.

We must restore democracy in Haiti? But Haiti is a country whose history of democracy is as lengthy as its history of prosperity, and the leader we propose to reinstate is reportedly unstable and definitely possessed of an eccentric attitude toward political opposition.

We have a duty to help countries in need? Our military is not sufficiently large to bring justice to every nation on the globe that suffers under despotism. That is the reason we try to limit the use of force to arenas that bear directly on the security of our country. The people who wear our country’s uniform volunteer and train for that mission.

But Haiti does not meet that test. What we have here is policy by default. Unable to “smart our way” out of this entirely artificial crisis--and having expanded its implications to our relations with yet another country--we are now about to put the lives of our service people at risk.

Had Clinton not left his own country for another during time of war, perhaps he would know that entering another country under arms is quite a bit easier than leaving it in a peaceful condition. As a part of the Vietnam opposition, he ought to remember that engaging in armed conflict is never a trivial exercise, and most certainly not when the average citizen does not support the cause in question. And as one who evaded military service, perhaps he needs to be reminded that the young Americans in uniform are real people who bleed real blood and whose lives are supposed to be as important to the civilian officials who send them into danger as they are to the family members who will put flowers on their graves.