White House has little appetite for troop request
WASHINGTON >> Haiti’s request for U.S. troops to help stabilize the country following the assassination of its president presents President Joe Biden with a difficult choice: Send forces to help a neighbor even as he is trying to pare down America’s military footprint overseas or refrain and risk allowing the chaos unfolding there to escalate into a refugee crisis.
Thus far, administration officials have expressed caution about any deployment to Haiti, reflecting the fast pace of events since attackers killed President Jovenel Moïse in his home Wednesday and a broader shift in American attitudes toward military interventions as the 20-year war in Afghanistan winds down.
Biden administration officials, though sympathetic to the humanitarian misery unfolding some 700 miles south of Florida and mindful of a potential mass exodus of Haitian refugees like one that occurred in the 1990s, nevertheless show no immediate enthusiasm for sending even a limited U.S. force into the midst of politically based civil strife and disorder.
The administration has said it will send officials from the FBI and the De
partment of Homeland Security to Port-au-Prince, Haiti, to assess how they
might help assist the government’s investigation into the murky circumstances of Moïse’s killing.
But Pentagon officials were taken off guard by the
Haitian request late Friday. Though they said it would be dutifully reviewed, there is little appetite among senior military leaders to dispatch U.S. troops.
“We are aware of the request and are analyzing it,” John Kirby, the chief Pentagon spokesperson, said in a telephone interview Saturday, noting that the request was broad and did not specify numbers or types of forces needed.
One senior administration official put it more bluntly late Friday: “There are no plans to provide U.S. military assistance at this time.”
For Biden, the prospect of a deployment of U.S. forces amid the chaotic aftermath of the brutal killing runs against his core instinct to consolidate America’s overseas military presence, not expand it. The request from the Haitians came just hours after Biden delivered remarks defending his withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan after a 20-year mission that came to be illdefined and entangled with dysfunctional Afghan politics. For now, Biden officials are focused on other ways to assist Haiti with its security needs short of military forces. That could include stepped-up training and assistance for Haiti’s police and military provided by the departments of State, Justice and Homeland Security.
Even limited military deployments come with risks. A small U.S. peacekeeping deployment to Somalia in 1992 led to an October 1993 gunbattle in the streets of Mogadishu during which 18 American soldiers and at least hundreds of Somalis were killed in a political crisis for President Bill Clinton. The episode later was memorialized in the movie “Black Hawk Down.”
Biden officials are not insensitive to the plight of Haitians who have struggled for decades to escape poverty, corruption and political dysfunction; many served in the Obama administration when a 2010 earthquake devastated Port-au-Prince. In addition to $100 million in aid for the country, President Barack Obama dispatched thousands of U.S. troops for several months to provide security.
That deployment was considered a success even if it did little to resolve Haiti’s deep-seated problems. But it did run “the risk of mission creep,” according to a 2013 study by the nonpartisan Rand Corp., which said that Haiti would have welcomed the mission “to continue indefinitely” and that it “could easily have evolved” into a longer commitment.
Biden would confront other problems with the deployment of U.S. soldiers. It is one thing to send troops to the aftermath of an epic natural disaster. It is another to step into an environment of political chaos, intrigue and dueling claims to power — not to mention an infestation of marauding armed gangs. Many Haitians, well aware of their country’s history of colonialism and slavery, already complain that their politics are shaped by mostly White foreign powers.
In 1915, the assassination of a Haitian president led President Woodrow Wilson to direct U.S. Marines to invade the country, beginning a two-decade U.S. occupation and years of unrest.
Another disincentive for Biden is the seemingly vague nature of Haiti’s request, including what it is U.S. troops would be expected to do.