Perot Says Haiti Policy ‘Makes No Sense’ : Foreign policy: On eve of O.C. rally, former rival takes shots at Clinton for threatening invasion.

Former presidential candidate Ross Perot on Thursday described the threatened U.S. invasion of Haiti as a policy that “makes no sense” and accused President Clinton of concocting plans for the proposed military action in an attempt to win votes from black members of Congress for the recently passed crime bill.

Calling Clinton a “guy (who) doesn’t understand warfare,” Perot also said the Administration was inclined to invade Haiti because “little wars historically give a President a bump” in opinion polls.

“Here we have a commander in chief who would not risk his own life in combat as a young man,” Perot told reporters in a conference call from his Dallas headquarters before Clinton’s televised speech on Haiti. “Now he’s feeling a sudden urge to risk other people’s lives in combat without getting the approval of Congress.”

Perot also boasted about the role his United We Stand supporters have played as swing voters in recent elections and ticked off a number of races where they made a difference, including the New Jersey governor’s campaign and the Texas Senate race.

But the Texas billionaire, who captured 19% of the nationwide vote in the 1992 presidential election and 24% in Orange County, insisted he had no interest in another run for the presidency or in starting a new political party.

Instead, he said his goal is to see talented Republican and Democratic candidates run for office so that “our members can sit back and grin and say, ‘Heads, we win; tails we win.’ ”

Perot is scheduled to appear tonight and Saturday at rallies in Orange County and the San Francisco Bay area, part of a 10-city national tour aimed at recharging his backers for the coming elections.

The plain-spoken Texan offered no evidence to support his assertion that Clinton had signaled a willingness to invade Haiti in order to win support for the crime bill from African-American members of Congress, whom he did not identify. Perot, who has made the claim several times in recent days, said the Administration so far has failed to answer his questions about whether rumors of such a deal are true, but he said Clinton “has a habit of buying votes.”

In addition, Perot contended, health care is simply not the major problem it has been made out to be in Washington circles.

“All of health care is not in trouble,” he said. “It has some parts that need to be fixed.” He urged Congress to form a bipartisan commission to identify the problem areas, bring in experts to develop plans to fix them, then test them with pilot programs.

That way, he said, “you find out what your real costs are.” But he complained that if you bring up such ideas in Washington, “they act like you’re extraterrestrial.”

Perot also sounded familiar themes from his 1992 campaign, including the North American Free Trade Agreement, which he fought bitterly against. And he made it clear that he still expects to be vindicated on the issue, despite government figures indicating the pact has been a boon to the United States as well as its neighbors.

Since the agreement took effect Jan. 1, he said, the United States has lost one factory each day to Mexico. Jobs are also leaving the country for Canada, he said.

Perot also touched briefly on the issue of illegal immigration, although he said United We Stand officials in California had made their own decision about whether to play a role in the current Proposition 187 campaign to deny education and certain health care benefits to illegal immigrants.

United We Stand officials in Orange County, as well as the organizers of the Proposition 187 campaign, credit the Perot organization with gathering nearly half of the 600,000 signatures that were submitted to qualify the measure for the Nov. 8 ballot.

Perot made it clear that he understood--and to some extent, at least, sympathized with--the goals of the controversial initiative. “We can’t create incentives to come across the border, “ he said. “It would be nice to welcome everybody, but we just can’t.”

Perot is scheduled to appear at 8 p.m. tonight at the Sequoia Conference Center, 7530 Orangethorpe Ave. in Buena Park.