The United States has a long history with Haiti, dating back to 1915 when U.S. Marines under orders of President Woodrow Wilson invaded the country under circumstances not unlike today’s — the assassination of its president, beginning an occupation that lasted until 1934.
Then in 1991, when Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the first democratically elected president in Haiti’s history, was overthrown in a military coup after just eight months in office, the Pentagon was asked by President George W. Bush to begin drawing up military options to put Aristide back in power.
“We can take over the place in an afternoon with a company or two of Marines,” Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Colin Powell told Defense Secretary Dick Cheney at the time, according to his 1995 memoir, “but the problem is getting out.”
Despite the fact that the Bush administration’s sanctions against the junta headed by Lt. Gen. Raoul Cedras had so worsened conditions in the impoverished Caribbean nation that desperate Haitians were using anything that floated in an attempt to escape to the United States, Powell was wary that sending in U.S. troops was the answer.
“We had intervened in Haiti in 1915 for reasons that sounded identical to what I was hearing now — to end terror, restore stability, promote democracy, and protect U.S. interests — and that occupation lasted 19 years,” Powell wrote. “These conditions did not yet justify an American invasion.”
By September 1994, with tens of thousands of Haitian refugees housed in makeshift facilities at the U.S. Naval base in Guantanamo, Cuba, President Bill Clinton launched Operation Uphold Democracy, which had been authorized by a unanimous United Nations Security Council resolution in July.
Colin Powell, by then a private citizen, was dispatched to Haiti by Clinton, along with Sen. Sam Nunn and former President Jimmy Carter, to deliver an eleventh-hour ultimatum to Cedras: Step down, leave the county, or face a U.S. invasion force that would easily crush the lightly armed Haitian military.
“Let me make sure you understand what you’re facing,” Powell told Cedras during a tense meeting at his military headquarters in Port-au-Prince. “I began ticking off on my fingers: two aircraft carriers, two and a half infantry divisions, 20,000 troops, helicopter gunships, tanks, artillery.”
At the very last minute, as paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne were in the air, Cedras capitulated, and the invasion of Haiti became a peaceful intervention.
U.S. troops landed in Haiti the next day, led by XVII commander Lt. Gen. Hugh Shelton, who would later serve as chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
While the operation was a success as Aristide was reinstated to the cheers of Haitians, Shelton became to have misgivings about the intervention almost immediately.
In his 2010 memoir, Shelton recounted how, shortly before he left Haiti, he paid a visit to Aristide’s personal residence, a secluded complex not far from the airport and a warren of squalid shacks and rundown homes occupied by average Haitians.
After touring the compound, which was under renovation, what he witnessed “turned my stomach,” he wrote.
“The house was opulent throughout, with fine marble imported from Italy, beautiful crystal chandeliers, and exotic fixtures. Amid such abject poverty Aristide was spending millions of dollars to live like this,” Shelton wrote. “I was sickened by the sight … I worried about the future of the nation that had the president we had just reinstalled.”
Corruption and poverty have been the twin ills plaguing Haiti since its slave revolt in the late 1700s freed the island nation from French rule.
But the cruel irony is that U.S. interventions and billions in aid to Haiti have only made things worse in the long run.
In the 11 years since the devastating 2010 earthquake that destroyed large swaths of the capital and killed a quarter of a million Haitians, some $11 billion in international aid has poured into the country.
But all that money had the perverse effect of suffocating political reforms and economic growth.
“You’re just pumping in money that is kind of almost like allowing the country to subsist. It’s almost like putting the country in a coma,” said Maria Abi-Habib, New York Times Caribbean bureau chief in a recent podcast.
“And what ends up happening is, you’re not building a system. You’re not building up institutions, like the judiciary or the police,” Abi-Habib said. “All of this foreign assistance, the institutions that fuel the state, from the police to the healthcare to the judiciary, they’ve actually just become even more hollowed out from before the aid started to flow.”
And unlike in 1994, there is no democratically elected president to restore to power.
In fact, there is no working government at all.
When Jovenel Moise was assassinated by a hit squad in his home on July 7, he had already overstayed his term as president, refusing to step down when his term expired in February.
Large protests had erupted in the streets of Port-au-Prince, with many Haitians upset about an internal government report that found millions in aid money was missing.
Now, with Moise gone, there is no clear successor to rule the country of 11 million people
“Haiti is now left with no functioning presidency, no functioning Parliament, and no functioning Supreme Court because the head of the Supreme Court died recently of COVID, and President Moise suspended several of the judges on the bench,” said Abi-Habib.
“The lesson learned of Haiti,” writes Shelton in his memoir, “is that while military forces have excelled in achieving military tasks such as establishing order, separating combatants, and safeguarding relief supplies, they are less effective in solving non-military problems rooted in persistent cultural, economic, and political strife.”
And so the Biden administration, having just extricated itself from a forever war in Afghanistan with no military solution, is unlikely to have any appetite for wading into the political morass that is Haiti.
Unless Haitians were to take to the seas once again in large numbers to seek asylum in America, in which case the U.S. military might once again be called on to fend them off.
Jamie McIntyre is the Washington Examiner’s senior writer on defense and national security. His morning newsletter, “Jamie McIntyre’s Daily on Defense,” is free and available by email subscription at dailyondefense.com.
