Dropping the Ball?

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HAITI. The Administration's inability to devise any strategy for returning freely elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to power, while a trade embargo impoverishes the populace without dislodging the renegade government, has earned the contempt of both sides. From his exile in Washington, Aristide last week denounced Clinton's policy of picking up would-be refugees at sea and sending them back as "racist" and a signal that American leaders "don't care." Six members of Congress got themselves arrested on the White House lawn for protesting the refugee policy. The Administration had earlier said it would ask the U.N. to tighten the embargo. And it allowed some 400 Haitian fugitives to land in Florida -- though officials insisted this was a special case, not a reversal of policy. Washington has started looking for a new special envoy to replace Lawrence Pezzullo, whom Aristide's backers distrust. None of these moves was likely either to satisfy Aristide or to impress the military thugs who ousted him in a 1991 coup. They refer to Clinton by a variety of sneering names, of which only farceur (comedian) is printable.

NORTH KOREA. The Administration is in a tough spot because the perils of using force against Kim Il Sung's nuclear-development program are too high to be reasonable, and even economic sanctions may not work, since China might veto any U.N. move to impose them. Though Clinton once spoke of destroying the country's society if it built and used atomic bombs, the U.S. has been lurching between confrontation and negotiation for 14 months. And as in other situations, the Administration has been unclear, possibly even to itself, on what its ultimate goal is. Should it try to keep North Korea from developing any nuclear weapons at all, as Clinton once insisted? Or should it aim only to keep Pyongyang from becoming a "significant" nuclear power, as Secretary of Defense William Perry later said -- which might imply that one or two A-bombs would be O.K.? The big danger is that having dodged one deadline after another for opening its nuclear facilities to inspection, Kim's regime will conclude that it can keep delaying until it is able to announce that it has a nuclear arsenal and to dare the world to do anything about it.

SOMALIA. When the U.N. branded warlord Mohammed Farrah Aidid a criminal it intended to arrest, American troops spearheaded the effort to seize him. But then his forces killed 18 U.S. service members last October, prompting Clinton to announce that all American troops would go home within six months. Shortly thereafter, the U.S. provided a jet to fly Aidid to a meeting of clan chiefs trying to cobble together a new regime. The flip-flops angered Italy, which also had troops in Somalia. "The U.S. didn't know how to calibrate the use of force," says Italian Defense Minister Fabio Fabbri. "They used too little in the beginning, when there were 30,000 troops there and all they did was give out food. Later, they used too much force in trying to get rid of Aidid. That brought the Somalis themselves into the battle, turning a humanitarian mission into urban warfare." With U.S. combat forces gone, gun battles among warring clans raged around Mogadishu late last week, threatening to plunge the country back into anarchy.