The Carter Connection

By Michael Kramer

Given the bloodshed predicted, Haiti proved to be a remarkable triumph last week. It is even possible that the deal may stick when the muscle behind it is withdrawn. So why does Bill Clinton's Haitian success have that insistent scent of failure about it? Was it only the stumbling way in which war was avoided? Or the spectacle of a former President in the lair of "thugs," declaring them to be men of honor and denouncing his own country's policy as shameful? It's tempting to focus on Jimmy Carter. We don't encounter him much these days. But that queasy feeling isn't all Carter's fault. It arises from the current President's breathtaking presumption that what is said with deep sincerity one day may be repealed with equal vigor the next. In the case of Haiti, the demonized dictators overnight became "de facto leaders." The diplomacy said to be exhausted when the President readied the nation for battle was actually still under way as he spoke. Indeed, a last-minute negotiation had been contemplated for days.

Bill Clinton at war has the disquieting countenance of Bill Clinton at peace: few principles seem inviolate; indiscipline and incoherence are the norm; careful planning falls to last-minute improvisation; steadfastness is only a tactic. At home that is not so remarkable. Political reality routinely demands compromise. And to be sure, Clinton has shown flashes of political courage and persistence, most notably in winning passage of NAFTA. But in the exercise of military power, and especially when one leads the world's lone superpower, retreat is contemptible. Consider the two other showcases of horror Clinton pledged to redress before Haiti. "History has shown that you can't allow the mass extermination of people and just sit idly by and watch it happen," said the President about Bosnia. That of course is exactly what we have done. It will be "open season on Americans" if "aggressors, thugs and terrorists . . . conclude that the best way to get us to change our policies is to kill our people," Clinton said of Somalia. But when 18 U.S. troops were gunned down in Mogadishu, the President changed our policy: We left. Reasonable people may disagree about the wisdom of those policies. That is not the point. The point is that the President's words cannot be counted on for meaning.

A world in which raw power is still held in the highest respect may be forgiven if it is unimpressed with a leader so patently averse to using it. In Clinton's world, intellectual effort is too often directed at blaming others. The President portrays himself variously as the victim of a public that fears change, a cynical post-Watergate nation or the fractionated, post-cold war world. What happens now that U.S. marines have drawn Haitian blood? If the Haiti policy doesn't go well, the Administration will revert to the story it had already begun retailing on "deep background" before the deal was even struck. In that scenario Jimmy Carter exceeded his brief from the start. If the President rejected Carter's deal, the former President would complain that Clinton had refused an agreement that promised a peaceful occupation. Clinton, in this version of the story, was his negotiator's hostage. He was boxed in.

In fact, of course, whatever the shortcomings of the squishy agreement Carter brokered, it could not have flown without Clinton's approval. And even if it works, it will still be true that at the point of maximum U.S. military and diplomatic leverage, at a point when America held all the cards, Clinton cum Carter folded to a bluff. Protectively, some in the Administration are already blaming the invasion deadline for the agreement's imperfections (or Colin Powell for arguing that the treaty's ambiguities would fall to the reality of American might on the ground). But the deadline was artificial. What Clinton most feared was Congress tying his hands. The invasion had to commence before his policy was repudiated, and the vote he knew he'd lose was scheduled for the very day the war was set to start.

Why was Carter Clinton's envoy in the first place? The President must have known that using the failed ex-President would remind many of Carter's own seemingly hapless Administration. Why would a President whose closest aides think the country is fast concluding he isn't up to the job voluntarily associate himself with a predecessor about whom that judgment is widely taken as fact? Perhaps the answer lies in their shared belief in salvation: Just as Clinton had raised the possibility of Saddam Hussein's redemption during his transition, Carter tends to accentuate the positive in the dictators he meets. Or perhaps in bringing Carter into it, Clinton was trying to embrace and convert a critic, as he has done to a fault so many times before. The most plausible reason, though, returns to the President's plastic sense of commitment and willingness to bend facts to his use. It is all too easy to see how this President -- fearful of war, facing a wall of public and political opposition, but desperate to salvage his credibility after threatening toughness for so long -- would simply reach for anyone, and any deal, capable of saving him from the image of body bags returning from Haiti. And there was Jimmy Carter.