Joseph L. Galloway
is the senior military correspondent for Knight Ridder Newspapers and a nationally syndicated columnist.
One of America's preeminent war correspondents,
with more than four decades as a reporter
and writer, he recently concluded an assignment
as a special consultant to Gen. Colin Powell
at the State Department.
Galloway, a native of Refugio, Texas, spent
22 years as a foreign and war correspondent
and bureau chief for United Press International,
and nearly 20 years as a senior editor and
senior writer for U.S. News & World Report
magazine. His overseas postings include tours
in Japan, Vietnam, Indonesia, India, Singapore
and three years as UPI bureau chief in Moscow
in the former Soviet Union. During the course
of 15 years of foreign postings Galloway served
four tours as a war correspondent in Vietnam
and also covered the 1971 India-Pakistan War
and half a dozen other combat operations.
In 1990-1991 Galloway covered Desert Shield/Desert
Storm, riding with the 24th Infantry Division
(Mech) in the assault into Iraq. General H.
Norman Schwarzkopf has called Galloway "The
finest combat correspondent of our generation
-- a soldier's reporter and a soldier's friend."
Whenever we tromp on their toes, Mexicans like to say, "Poor Mexico!
So far from God and so close to the United States." The same could
be said, with much more truth and feeling, of Haiti and its people.
Three times in the last hundred years, the United States has gone
into Haiti with rifles, bayonets and money and tried to calm the political
situation, pacify the population, get rid of one homicidal dictator
or another, and build some schools, clinics, roads and bridges.
The question now is whether we are going to have to do it again as
the front pages are filled with stories of another popular uprising
against another autocratic leader, born of the despair of the most
grinding poverty in the Western Hemisphere.
The first and longest U.S. occupation of Haiti began in 1915 when
President Woodrow Wilson ordered in a brigade of U.S. Marines, 2,000
good men and true, and they took and pacified the entire country with
a loss of only three Marines killed and 18 wounded. They stayed and
ran Haiti until 1934. They built more than a thousand miles of highway
with 210 bridges.
In 1958, President Dwight D. Eisenhower sent in the Marines again,
this time to rebuild a shattered economy so communists couldn't get
a toehold in the Western Hemisphere. This the communists did the following
year in nearby Cuba. This American incursion also helped prop up the
dictatorship of the quite bloody-minded Dr. Francois "Papa Doc''
Duvalier.
In 1994, President Clinton sent the Marines in yet again, this time
with the U.S. Army and U.N. peacekeepers from half a dozen armies.
This time it was to oust the latest military cabal, that of Gen. Raoul
Cedras and his cronies, and to reinstall the overthrown elected president,
Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a former priest who turned out to have a dictatorial
streak of his own.
The American soldiers who came briefly on this last incursion found
themselves marching across the only things that still worked in modern
Haiti: bridges carrying little brass plates that said: "Built in 1927
(or 1930, or 1931, or 1933) by the U.S. Marine Corps."
Now the Haitians are rising up in rebellion again, seizing a clutch
of miserable towns and cities. They're killing and burning and looting
in hopes of overthrowing President Aristide, in part because they
believe he stole an election but mostly because he's failed to give
his people a shred of hope for a better future.
I'm not much in favor of nation-building, being of the opinion that
we can provide seed money and technical assistance and then let the
people of this or that place build their own nation.
But Haiti is different. In 1995, I visited 32 U.S. Special Forces
A-Team camps scattered across Haiti. What I saw convinced me that
the Clinton administration's plan to get out of Haiti as swiftly and
cheaply as possible, which we did, was wrong.
You can argue that what happens in Haiti is none of our business.
You would be wrong, given Haiti's proximity and the disgrace that
Haitian poverty and anarchy represents in our hemisphere. The island
nation is an easy boat ride from the Florida coast, a ride that many
thousands have taken and that many thousands more will take if things
don't improve.
For me, the best argument for us fixing Haiti, even if it takes 25
years and costs us billions, is that 7.5 million Haitians are worth
saving. They're not lazy or slothful, nor accepting of a hopeless
future.
In the poorest village in a very poor country, on the parched Isle
de la Gonave, the people built themselves a one-room schoolhouse out
of the only material available to them: the thorny twigs of a bush
that grows there. Every day, the mothers shoo their children, in uniforms
freshly laundered and starched, off to school. Every night, under
the village's lone street lamp, those boys and girls gather in a circle,
reading and writing, as they do their homework.
Secretary of State Colin Powell said Tuesday: "There is frankly no
enthusiasm right now for sending in military or police forces to put
down the violence that we are seeing." But if that should change,
the United States should plan to stay this time, and plan to pay for
a long reconstruction, until a country that's a disgrace to the neighborhood
is rebuilt - and those Haitian children have a brighter future.
