A Soldier of the Not Great War By MARK HELPRIN Mr. President, Haiti is on an island, and its navy, which was built mainly in Arkansas, is well characterized by the International Institute for Strategic Studies as "Boats only." The Haitian gross national product is little more than half of what Americans spend each year on greeting cards, its defense forces outnumbered five to one by the corps of lawyers in the District of Columbia. With other than a leading role in world military affairs, the Haitian army has retreated into a kind of relaxed confusion in which it is also the fire department, captains can outrank colonels, and virtually no one has ever seen combat. Which raises the question, why has the leading superpower placed Haiti at the center of its political universe? Mr. President, in trumpeting this gnatfest at a hundred times the volume of the Normandy Invasion you have invited challenges from all who would take comfort at the spectacle of the U.S. in full fluster over an object so diminutive as to be a source of wonder. Anyone considering a serious challenge to the U.S. has been reassured that we have no perspective in international affairs, that we act not in regard to our basic interests but in reaction to sentiment and ideology, that we can be distracted by the smallest matter and paralyzed by the contemplation of force, that we have become timid, weak, and slow. This is what happens when the leaders of the world's most powerful nation take a year to agonize over Haiti. This is what happens when the elephant ignores the jackals and gravely battles a fly. Why Not Cuba? Given that Haiti is a nation doomed to perpetual harmlessness, that it is not allied to any great power, that it does not export an ideology, that it does not have an ideology, and that it is of no economic consequence to any nation except perhaps the Dominican Republic, you strained to justify intervention the way a prisoner with his hand stretched through the bars strains for a key just out of his reach. In your recent address you mentioned rape three times, the killing of children three times, and the words "dictator" or "tyrant" 18 times. If we must act "when brutality occurs close to our shores," why not now invade Cuba, or Colombia, or the South Bronx, or Anacostia? Every year in the U.S. we are subject to more than 100,000 reported rapes and 20,000 homicides. How do rape and murder in Haiti, no numbers supplied, justify U.S. intervention? And if they do, where were we in Rwanda? Is it possible that having no idea whatsoever about the balance of power among nations, the workings of the international system, and the causes and conduct of war, you are directing the foreign relations of the United States of America in accord with the priorities of feminism, envi- ronmentalism, and political correctitude? Why not invade Saudi Arabia because of the status of women there, Canada because they kill baby seals, Papua New Guinea because it doesn't have enough wheelchair ramps? Haitian illegal immigrants (did you not mention AIDS because it would offend the Haitians, or some other group?) have been to some extent motivated by the embargo and are a minute proportion of the total that seek our shores. If it is so that the best way to deal with a country that spills over with souls is to invade it, que viva Mexico? Should the U.K. invade Pakistan; France Algeria; and Hong Kong, Vietnam? For that matter, why have you not hastened forward to Havana? In fact, the history of great-power interventions shows that conquest does not prevent but, rather, facilitates population transfers. Your desire to wipe out the expenditure of $14 million a month to maintain the leaky embargo that you put in place was not consonant with Your robust urge to spend elsewhere. and was a rather dainty pretext. Fourteen million dollars is what we in this country spend on "sausages and other prepared meats" every seven hours. If you truly believe, Mr. President, that "restoring Haiti's democratic government will help lead to more stability and prosperity in our region," then you, sir, have more Voo doo than they do. The entire Haitian gross national product is worth but three hours of our own. Were it to grow after intervention by 10~G and were the U.S. to reap fully one half the benefit, we would surge ahead another nine minutes' worth of GNP. This is not exactly high-stakes geopolitics. Why, then, Haiti? Why are your subordinates suddenly so Churchillian? Clearly, in a real crisis they would be so worked up that all their bulbs would burst. The nations towed along for the ride (Poles? Jordanians?) seemed not to know whether to be embarrassed by the stupidity of the task or amused by the peculiarity of their bedfellows. This the secretary of state described as "a glowing coalition." Never in the history of the English language has such an inept phrase been launched with such forced enthusiasm to miss so little a target. Granted, the vice president's "modalities of departure" did much to inspire the nation to a frenzy of war. Why Haiti? Because, like the father in Joyce's story, "Counterparts," who bullies his son because he cannot fight his bullying boss, what you do in Haiti says less about Haiti than about North Korea, Europe, and the Middle East, where the real challenges lie. and where you cannot act because you do not have a lamp to go by and you have forced your own military to its knees. Why Haiti? Because you have been unable to say no to the Black Caucus as it stands like the candlestick on the seesaw of your grandiose legislation, and because you are a liberal and in race you see wisdom, or lack of wisdom; qualification, or lack of qualification; virtue, or lack of virtue. And because the Black Caucus is way too tight with Father Aristide. Why Haiti? Because you have no more sense of what to do or where to turn in a foreign policy crisis than a moth in Las Vegas at 2 a.m. You should not have singled out Haiti in the first place, but once you did you should not have spent so much time and so much capital on it, blowing it out of all proportion, so that this, this Gulf Light, this No-Fat Desert Storm, is your Stalingrad. Six weeks and it should have been over, even including an invasion, about which the world would have learned only after it had begun. All communications with the Haitian regime should have been in private, leaving them the flexibility to capitulate without your having to distract Jimmy Carter from his other good works. Though you and your supporters made a marriage of convenience with the principles of presidential war powers, your new position is miraculously correct, while that of the Republicans who also switched sides in the question is not. You did have the legal authority to invade Haiti. What you did not have was the moral authority. Despite what you have maintained during the first 46/ths of your life, the decision was yours, but your power was merely mechanical . Dry Bones Like your false-ringing speech, the dry bones of your authority had none of the moral flesh and blood that might other vise have invigorated even a senseless policy. The animation that you have failed to lend to this enterprise was left to the soldiers in the field, who with the greatest discipline and selflessness would have taken on the task that, generations ago, you refused. I wonder if your view of them has really changed. In your philosophy they must have been pawns then, and they must be pawns now: The only thing that has been altered is your position. Though it is fair to say that I differ with your policy, if our soldiers had gone into combat I would have been behind them 100%, and I hope that, despite the orders in Somalia, you would have been too. This is a lesson that you might have learned earlier but did not, the truth of which you now embrace only because you have become president of the United States. You are the man who will march only if he is commander in chief. Yours, Mr. President, has been a very expensive education. And, un- fortunately, every man, woman, and child in this country is destined to pay the bill for your training not because it is so costly but because it is so achingly incomplete. Mr. Helprin, a novelist, is a contributing editor of the Wall Street Journal.