The crisis in Haiti came to a head in September. General Cedras and his thugs had intensified their reign of terror, executing orphaned children, raping young girls, killing priests, mutilating people and leaving body parts in the open to terrify others, and slashing the faces of mothers with machetes while their children watched. By this time, I had been working for a peaceful solution for two years, and I was fed up. More than a year earlier, Cedras had signed an agreement to give up power, but when the time came to leave, he simply refused to go.
It was time to throw him out, but public opinion and congressional sentiment were strongly against it. Though the Congressional Black Caucus, Senator Tom Harkin, and Senator Chris Dodd supported me, the Republicans were solidly opposed, and most Democrats, including George Mitchell, thought I was just taking them out onto another precipice without public support or congressional authorization. There was even division within the administration. Al Gore, Warren Christopher, Bill Gray, Tony Lake, and Sandy Berger were for it. Bill Perry and the Pentagon were not, but they had been working on an invasion plan in case I ordered them to proceed.
I thought we had to go forward. Innocent people were being slaughtered in our own backyard, and we were already spending a small fortune taking care of Haitian refugees. The United Nations was unanimous in supporting the ouster of Cedras.
On September 16, in a last-minute attempt to avoid an invasion, I sent President Carter, Colin Powell, and Sam Nunn to Haiti to try to persuade General Cedras and his supporters in the military and parliament to peacefully accept Aristide’s return and Cedras’s departure from the country. For different reasons, they all disagreed with my determination to use force to restore Aristide. Though the Carter Center had monitored Aristide’s overwhelming election victory, President Carter had developed a relationship with Cedras and was skeptical of Aristide’s commitment to democracy. Nunn was opposed to Aristide’s return until parliamentary elections were held, because he didn’t trust Aristide to protect minority rights without an established countervailing force in parliament. Powell thought only the military and the police could govern Haiti, and that they would never work with Aristide. As subsequent events would prove, there was some merit to their arguments. Haiti was deeply divided economically and politically and had no previous experience with democracy, no significant middle class, and little of the institutional capacity required to operate a modern state. Even if Aristide was returned without a hitch, he might not succeed. Still, he had been elected overwhelmingly, and Cedras and his crew were killing innocent people. We could at least stop that. Despite their reservations, the distinguished trio pledged to faithfully communicate my policy. They wanted to avoid a violent American entry, which could make matters even worse. Nunn spoke to members of Haiti’s parliament; Powell told the Haitian military leaders in graphic terms what would happen if the United States invaded; and Carter worked on Cedras.
The next day I went to the Pentagon to review the invasion plan with General Shalikashvili and the Joint Chiefs, and, by teleconference, with Admiral Paul David Miller, the commander of the overall operation, and Lieutenant General Hugh Shelton, commander of the Eighteenth Airborne Corps, who would lead our troops onto the island. The invasion plan called for a unified operation involving all branches of the military. Two aircraft carriers were in the waters off Haiti, one transporting Special Operations forces and the other carrying soldiers from the Tenth Mountain Division. Air force planes were set to provide necessary air support. The marines were assigned to occupy Cap Haitien, Haiti’s second-largest city. Planes carrying Eighty-second Airborne Division paratroopers would fly out of North Carolina and drop them over the island at the outset of the assault. Navy SEALs would go in early and scan designated areas. They had already done a test run that morning, coming out of the water and onto land without incident. Most troops and equipment were to enter Haiti in an operation called “RoRo,” for “roll on, roll off”; troops and vehicles would roll onto landing vessels for the trip to Haiti, then roll off on the Haitian shoreline. When the mission was accomplished, the process would be reversed. Besides the U.S. forces, we had support from twenty-five other countries that had joined the UN coalition. As the deadline for our attack approached, President Carter called me pleading for more time to persuade Cedras to leave. Carter desperately wanted to avoid a forced invasion. So did I. Haiti had no military capability; it would be like shooting fish in a barrel. I agreed to give him three more hours, but made it clear that any agreement he made with the general could not include another delay in the handover to Aristide. Cedras couldn’t have more time to murder children, rape young girls, and slash women’s faces. We had already spent $200 million taking care of the Haitians who had left their country. I wanted them to be able to go home.
In Port-au-Prince, as the three-hour deadline ran out, an angry mob gathered outside the building where the Americans were still talking. Every time I talked with Carter, Cedras had proposed a different deal, but they all gave him some wiggle room to hang around and delay Aristide’s return. I rejected them all. With the danger outside and the deadline for invasion at hand, Carter, Powell, and Nunn kept trying to persuade Cedras, to no avail. Carter pleaded for more time. I agreed to another delay, until 5 p.m. The planes with the paratroopers were scheduled to arrive just after dark, at about six. If the three of them were still there negotiating then, they would be in much greater danger from the mob. At 5:30 p.m. they were still in place and already in greater peril, because Cedras knew the operation had begun. He had had someone watching the airstrip in North Carolina, when our sixty-one planes carrying the paratroopers took off. I called President Carter and told him that he, Colin, and Sam had to leave immediately. The three of them made one last appeal to the titular head of Haiti, eighty-one-year-old President Emile Jonassaint, who at last told them he would choose peace instead of war. When all the cabinet members but one agreed with him, Cedras finally relented, less than an hour before the skies over Port-au-Prince would have been filled with parachutes. Instead, I ordered the planes to turn around and come home.
The next day General Shelton led the first of the fifteen-thousand-member multinational force into Haiti without a shot being fired. Shelton cut a striking figure. He was about six feet five inches tall, with chiseled features and a slow southern drawl. Though he was a couple of years older than I, he still did regular parachute jumps with his troops. He looked as if he could have deposed Cedras all by himself. I had visited General Shelton not long before at Fort Bragg, after a plane crash at nearby Pope Air Force Base had killed several servicemen. On Shelton’s office wall were pictures of two great Confederate Civil War generals, Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. When I saw Shelton on television as he stepped ashore, I remarked to one of my staff that America had come a long way if a man who revered Stonewall Jackson could be the liberator of Haiti.