CRISIS IN THE CARIBBEAN : Democrats Relieved by Agreement to Avoid Invasion : Congress: But a key GOP senator says White House should have sought to end the crisis sooner by negotiating directly with Haiti’s military leaders.

Democratic leaders on Capitol Hill expressed relief Sunday night at the eleventh-hour agreement that avoided a U.S. invasion of Haiti, but a key Republican said the Clinton Administration should have negotiated earlier with Haiti’s military rulers.

“Thank God for the Carter delegation. Diplomacy has won over force,” said Rep. Bill Richardson (D-N.M.).

“I’m immensely pleased, and I think all Americans will be pleased, that our forces will not be going in under combat conditions,” said Rep. Lee H. Hamilton (D-Ind.), the House Foreign Affairs Committee chairman. “This points up the importance of a credible show of force. It represents a considerable victory for President Clinton, and certainly President Carter deserves the highest praise for managing this to a successful conclusion.”

Rep. Howard L. Berman (D-Panorama City), who strongly opposed the planned invasion, said he was relieved that the invasion was averted. “Fortunately, the threat of force worked this time. This was a game of chicken, with real stakes.”

But Sen. Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.), a critic of the Clinton foreign policy team, said an agreement could have been reached earlier if the White House had negotiated directly with Lt. Gen. Raoul Cedras, the Haitian military leader.

“This agreement was there all along. Cedras said he was interested in amnesty and in leaving in a way where he would not be disgraced. But our government has been so wedded to the Aristide position that we never bothered to listen to Cedras. For some reason, the President’s advisers took the view that we should not negotiate.”

It took the “intervention of some people who are not in the normal orbit” of the Clinton Administration to get an agreement, he said.

Richardson, who met with Cedras in July, agreed that the Haitian general could have been talked into leaving earlier. “I always believed that he (Cedras) would leave if he were allowed to save face,” he said.

While Lugar said he was pleased an invasion had been avoided, he said he remained concerned about an apparently open-ended commitment of money to aid Haiti’s recovery.

“We are once again headed down the same trail” that led to trouble in Somalia, he said. “This will be an extremely expensive operation, fraught with potential problems, and the Administration has bent over backward avoiding debate on it in Congress,” Lugar said.

The last-minute agreement avoids what could have been an ugly floor fight in the House today, when returning members of Congress were slated to begin debate on Haiti. The Senate planned to take up the issue Tuesday.

The House was prepared to vote on a resolution authored by Rep. David E. Skaggs (D-Colo.) that would have sought to block a military action without prior approval from both houses. Like other Presidents before him, Clinton has taken the position that the Constitution does not require him to obtain congressional approval before sending U.S. troops into action in situations short of all-out war.

“I think everybody in Congress is pleased to avoid a constitutional confrontation over this,” Skaggs said.

But he and Lugar noted with dismay that the planned invasion almost seemed timed to avoid any debate in Congress. “I’m still troubled about the executive branch mythology in regard to the President’s war powers,” Skaggs said.

Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.) went so far as to say Sunday in a televised interview that Clinton would violate his oath of office if he had unilaterally ordered an invasion.

He noted the charter of the Organization of American States, which the United States signed, says, “No state has the right to intervene directly, or indirectly, for any reason whatever, in the internal or external affairs of any other state.” The U.N. Charter has a similar provision, said Moynihan, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

The U.N. Charter “is not a social science experiment. It is a treaty about the use of force,” which the President is legally obliged to follow, Moynihan said.