WASHINGTON -- Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide has fled. The island country is in crisis. The United States is sending in Marines as part of a multilateral peacekeeping force. Instead of occupying yet another failed state, however, Washington should declare its era of nation-building to be over.
A decade ago the Clinton administration, fresh from its fiasco in Somalia, decided to save Haiti at the point of a gun -- or, more accurately, the guns of 20,000 American soldiers. Stated Deputy Defense Secretary John Deutch, "we are determined to return democracy to Haiti."
The military leaders fled. Aristide returned. America's democracy campaign triumphed.