Desperate to bring himself up in the polls just two months before the mid-term elections in November, President Clinton has apparently decided to start a war. Don’t Americans always rally round the President, in a burst of patriotism, after a war starts, even if they were not in favor of the war in the first place?
That, indeed, is the history of U.S. public opinion, but times have changed and Americans are not going to fall in step behind Clinton as he boards the boat for Haiti. We’re in the post-Somalia era. If there is a consensus about any political issue today it is that Haiti is not worth one dead American.
The slogan “restore democracy to Haiti” is so phony that it’s hard to see how even George Stephanopoulos could say it with a straight face. Haiti doesn’t know anything about democracy, even though it’s had the example of the United States as a near-neighbor for two centuries.
No U.S. national security interest is at stake. No foreign dictator has violated the Monroe Doctrine. It makes no sense to put our financial and military resources behind installing Aristide in power, a Marxist dictator who has publicly approved of the hideous practice of “necklacing.”
At his last televised news conference, Clinton was asked why he sought the approval of the United Nations to invade Haiti, but did not seek the approval of Congress. His response danced all around the issue, but never answered the constitutional question.
The argument that we are participating in a “multi-national peacekeeping” effort will not fool anyone. Americans may be deficient in mathematics, but they can plainly see that 266 soldiers from four Caribbean countries are just a fig leaf to cover the reality that a Haiti invasion is a Clinton political ploy from start to finish.
Nor has anybody in the White House come up with an answer to the question, why invade Haiti but not Cuba? If our mission is to “restore democracy” to other countries, Castro’s Cuba would be a splendid place to start.
We have George Bush to blame for starting our country on the risky road to what he called (but did not define) the New World Order. Bill Clinton is only too happy to define it for us.
New World Order under Bill Clinton means running to the overpaid bureaucrats in the United Nations for the go-ahead to assign our troops wherever he thinks American media attention should be diverted. It means having American soldiers dragged through the streets in humiliation during our “peacekeeping” efforts in Somalia.
New World Order under Bill Clinton means converting the best fighting force in the world into what is essentially today just a “peace corps,” whose mission is to pick up the pieces of the carnage created by warring tribes in faraway places like Rwanda.
New World Order under Bill Clinton means assigning U.S. servicemen and women to serve under foreign commanders. His signing of Presidential Decision Directive (PDD) 25 specifically asserts his authority “to place U.S. forces under the operational control of a foreign commander.”
New World Order under Bill Clinton means trampling on the United States Constitution by taking the power to declare war away from Congress and transferring it to the United Nations. New World Order under Bill Clinton also means flagrantly violating the U.S. Constitution’s requirement that treaties are valid only if ratified by two-thirds of the Senate, as he did with NAFTA last year and as he plans to do with the World Trade Organization this fall.
New World Order under Bill Clinton means signing the United Nations Treaty on the Rights of the Child, which would transfer traditional rights of parents over the upbringing, discipline and education of their children, to a new international bureaucracy.
New World Order under Bill Clinton means joining the World Trade Organization, which would put American jobs, trade and economy under the control of a foreign legislature (where we would have only one vote out of 117), a foreign unelected bureaucracy in Geneva, and a foreign supreme court of trade empowered to decide disputes in secret.
New World Order under Bill Clinton means signing the Law of the Sea Treaty, another international straitjacket designed to transfer American jobs, wealth and technology to Third World countries.
New World Order under Bill Clinton means a foreign policy directed by his Rhodes scholar pal Strobe Talbott, a lifetime advocate of world government and of ending what he calls the “obsolete” notions of nationhood and national sovereignty.
Clinton has misjudged American opinion on Haiti Gust as he misjudged public opinion on the health care issue) and the invasion could be another big negative for the Democrats as they face the November elections. Unless, of course, the Republicans in Congress wimp out and give him cover by chanting such shibboleths as “bipartisan foreign policy” and “support the President in wartime. “
The times are crying out for Republican leaders who will stand up against President Clinton’s foolish and unconstitutional foreign policies.
