kerry for aristide

John Kerry says in The New York Daily News that he would have dispatched the armed forces to keep Aristide in power.

It sounds like Kerry is just using this as an excuse to disagree with Bush, but I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he wants to see Haiti's fledgling democratic government endure. I still disagree with him.

There were more questions about Aristide's election than about Bush's. Whether we believe the Supreme Court gave him the election or think Gore should have won because of popular vote is to some degree irrelevant. He won the general election through the processes our nation has set up, and probably with no more corruption in his camp than was in Gore's. You can't say the same about Ti Tid's election. The reports of fraud were so bad there that many governments refused to recognize him as the legitimate winner and pulled their aid for the nation. The questions surrounding his election were one of the stated reasons for the insurgency.

Committing to keeping Aristide in power would be a costly move in terms of manpower, and probably in lives as well. True, our forces are better equipped and better trained than the Haitian military (although many of them graduated from West Point). But that hasn't exactly helped in Iraq, has it?

By the time the Marines removed Ti Tid from the national palace, the insurgents already had captured most of the nation's big cities. Cap Haitien, Gonaives, Jeremie and so on were all under their control. Aristide had Port-au-Prince, but that's about it. His biggest supporters, the people from the slums of Cite Soleil and Carrefour and other such places, were and are in those places (except where they've been executed), and they've demonstrated a remarkable tenacity and determination to fight, even after his departure. Failing to remove Aristide would have put these two positions in a position where they would have been fighting in close quarters, and would have left our troops in the crossfire.

And to be honest, having encountered some pretty appalling racism in our Marines stationed in Haiti, I can't say I would expect them to handle that situation with a lot of finesse. I can see a lot of unnecessary casualties in Haiti coming from a prolonged occupation of the type that Kerry is describing, with a comeasurate increase in anti-American sentiment.

Besides, with the American military backing his presidency, do you really think Ti Tid would *lose* the next election?

It's a difficult problem no matter how you slice it, but I think Bush did the best thing in this situation.