The Great Experiment by Strobe Talbott

Author:Strobe Talbott
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2008-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

EIGHT DAYS AFTER THE BLACK HAWKS went down in Mogadishu, a long-simmering crisis in Haiti boiled over. Two years before, in 1991, a military junta had overthrown Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a former priest who was the first democratically elected president in Haiti’s history, and driven him into exile. Bush had applied a combination of economic sanctions and political pressure. The Clinton administration was no more effective using essentially the same tactics. On October 11, 1993, an American warship, the USS Harlan County, tried to bring engineers to Haiti to help rebuild the infrastructure that had been destroyed in the violence that had occurred since the coup. This mission was to be the first step in a UN-brokered plan to increase international pressure on the military junta to give up power and allow the return of Aristide. The ship never made it to the pier in Port-au-Prince. It was turned away by a jeering, rock-throwing pro-junta mob. One of its chants was “We are going to turn this into another Somalia!”

By the spring of 1994, the deteriorating situation in Haiti was contributing to a domestic political crisis in the United States. As many as a thousand Haitians a day were fleeing the island in rickety boats, trying to make the nearly six-hundred-mile trip to Florida. Hundreds drowned or died of dehydration. The Congressional Black Caucus and human rights advocates were hammering the administration to do something. I was part of a team from Washington that dashed around the region trying to cajole governments into accepting refugees. We did our best to seem dignified, or at least not desperate. I doubt we succeeded. My only trip to Cuba as a government official was that spring, when my friend and counterpart at the Pentagon, Deputy Secretary of Defense John Deutch, arranged for the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay to convert facilities into housing for ten thousand refugees. That number soon doubled, but the ability of the base to accommodate all those prisoners did not. *

At one point when Clinton was coping simultaneously with Bosnia, Somalia, and Haiti, he remarked to me, with a wan smile, “Boy, do I ever miss the cold war.” I reminded him that if the cold war had continued, he would never have become president. “Yeah, yeah, I know,” he said. “I’m just saying we’ve traded in one big problem for a whole bunch of little ones. But they sure don’t feel little when they’re blowing up in your face.” 15

The world was rife with such explosive conflicts. The United States had neither the will nor the way to defuse all of them. Nor did the United Nations. A recurring challenge of the 1990s was identifying those that deserved priority, by dint of the human cost if the international community did not act effectively. Africa, in the first year of the Clinton administration, had been the scene of one such challenge. That continent provided us with another in our second year—this time, unlike in Mogadishu, with no loss of American lives but with vast loss of African ones.

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