Research for Interventions

On 19 September 1994, U.S. troops began a permissive entry into Haiti. This occurred the morning after President Clinton stopped an invasion with airborne forces already in the air. Perhaps most appropriately called an intervasion, somewhere between an invasion and intervention, Operation Uphold Democracy came almost exactly three years after the Haitian armed forces overthrew the government of Jean Bertrand Aristide, the first democratically-elected president in Haiti's turbulent history. The 1991 coup and the use of military forces to restore President Aristide fit into a long-term pattern of Haitian political instability and violence. The United States led the international intervention (intervasion) to restore the democratically elected President to power. This paper reviews Haitian-American relations and events in Haiti leading to the operation, discusses the operation through its three phases, evaluated the intervention, and describes some potential lessons to be learned from it. Table 2 provides a list of US Operations in the Caribbean, 1991-1995.

On September 26 and 27, the Center for Naval Analyses brought together Soviet and American experts on the war in Afghanistan to dicuss the lessons of the war, its effect on Soviet society, and its impact on Soviet policy in the Third World. Contrasting interests and views produced a wide-ranging discussion that mixed analysis with anecdotes from the Soviet participants' own experiences in Afghanistan. From this variety of perspectives emerged a few common themes; key among them was that the Soviet army was sent into a country about which it knew very little to fight a war for which it was unprepared.