Clinton Salutes Troops on Completion of Haiti Duty

President Clinton marked an official end to the U.S. intervention in Haiti on Monday, saluting a wind-whipped field of American troops who had just completed their part in a peacekeeping mission that he said had given Haitians back their purloined democracy.

Eighteen months after he sent 20,000 U.S. troops to the Caribbean island, Clinton distributed medals to recently returned soldiers at this central Louisiana Army base and hailed their performance as a “testament to the skill and performance of the American armed forces.”

The visit came during a one-day jaunt packed with favorite Clinton political themes. In 12 hours in the state, the president posed with camouflage-clad troops, talked of the success of his administration’s peacekeeping efforts, praised, in the bustling Port of New Orleans, the fruits of free trade and visited a black Pentecostal church in Alexandria, La.

With its large black population, Louisiana is considered one of the few Southern states the president may win in November.

The United States troops were sent to Haiti in September 1994, when a military junta refused to restore ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to power. In March 1995, a U.N. force assumed supervision of the peacekeeping operations. And last month, all but 700 U.S. troops had left.

Clinton, who will meet with Haitian President Rene Garcia Preval this month to demand further economic reforms, carefully stopped short of saying America’s involvement in Haiti had ended.

“We and the other nations will now have to help Haiti in the hard road ahead of it,” he said. “But the military job was done.”

Clinton awarded medals to five members of the Operation Uphold Democracy, and praised the performance of others: a soldier who was shot by bandits at a roadblock; another who risked his life saving a Haitian from an angry crowd; an airman who distributed food, toys and clothes to an orphanage and two sergeants who helped a woman give birth on a city street.

“We can’t be everywhere and we can’t do everything,” Clinton said. “But where our values and interests are at stake, we must act. That was the case in Haiti.”

Earlier, Clinton used the dedication of a terminal at the port to defend his free-trade policy.

Standing in a vast terminal before a huge painting of a cargo liner, Clinton recalled that 34 years ago, President John F. Kennedy warned that in the modern world, America’s choices were to “trade or fade.”

“We chose to compete,” he said. “I come to reaffirm that today.”

But Clinton took a relatively mild approach on an issue that has ignited controversy in the hands of others this campaign season. He said that the current political debate seemed to offer only two choices--between those who would “build walls” and those who would have “pure, open trade.”

He did not argue for an unalloyed free trade, but rather--in terms that echoed his 1992 appeal--for “trade that is both free and fair--truly open, two-way open trade.”

Clinton pointed to the example of the port, which generates $2 billion in wages and is responsible for 95,000 jobs in the region.