TURNING UP THE HEAT ON HAITI : Bush Spoke of Haiti Threat, Clinton Notes : Security: GOP leaders have criticized President. But his predecessor did not rule out use of force.

President Clinton, stung by Republican contentions that Haiti poses no national security threat, said Wednesday that President George Bush repeatedly described the country’s military dictatorship as a national security threat during the 1992 election campaign.

In fact, in a Sept. 30, 1992, message to Congress on “The National Emergency With Respect to Haiti,” Bush went even further. He declared, “The assault on Haiti’s democracy represented by the military’s forced exile of President (Jean-Bertrand) Aristide continues to pose an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security, foreign policy and economy of the United States.”

White House sources said that Clinton, who cited Bush’s comments in an interview with wire service reporters, probably will call attention to them in his speech to the nation at 6 p.m. PDT today seeking public support for the Administration’s plan to invade Haiti if its military rulers fail to step down.

Polls show that the public overwhelmingly opposes an invasion, and Bush and many other Republicans, as well as some Democrats, have spoken out strongly against the Administration’s invasion plans.

Bush, although saying he does not “want to be one more critic of our President,” has several times taken issue with Clinton’s threatened invasion. In an Aug. 15 speech to a National Hardware Assn. convention, Bush accused Clinton of vacillating on issues, including Haiti, and declared that an invasion would only “reawaken fears of gunboat diplomacy.”

And on Aug. 31, when Clinton was turning up the pressure on the Haiti dictatorship with threats of an invasion, Bush told a banking conference in Buenos Aires: “We should not use force against Haiti.”

But when Bush was President, he did not rule out the eventual use of force to oust the military regime. In an Oct. 4, 1991, news conference, for example, he emphasized that the United States was committed to restoring democracy in Haiti and said, “Let’s hope that can be done without any kind of force.”

Another Republican critic of the invasion plan, Bush Secretary of State James A. Baker III, also hinted several times while he was in office that force might be used to oust the military leaders.

But Wednesday at a political dinner in Houston, Baker called the prospect of an invasion “badly, badly misguided.” Baker said Clinton had not answered three “simple but critical questions”: What is the compelling national interest in Haiti? “How are we going to get out” after an invasion? And why would the United States invade now, three years after Aristide’s ouster?

Although Clinton’s own credibility is at stake after so many threats to invade, a senior official insisted, “Personal credibility is not involved. It is the credibility of the U.S. government and the United Nations.”