Clinton and Haiti

Truman was famous for the sign he kept on his desk: "The buck stops here." David McCullough's biography of Truman appeared in 1992, prompting candidate Clinton and his opponent Bush to trip over each other comparing themselves to him. What comparison, we ask now, between the man who fired MacArthur and the man who backed into a large-scale commitment of U.S. troops in Haiti without duly consulting either American voters at large or their elected representatives and without a genuine willingness to perform the only task for which the intervention can be justified -- the restoration of order and security for the majority of terrorized Haitians and the peaceful restoration of the country's elected president -- and who, furthermore, lacks the requisite backbone even to wield his constitutional authority over his own country's military? The omens are not good for democracy in America, never mind Haiti.

-- The Bangkok Post