-Caveat Lector- From http://opinionjournal.com/forms/printThis.html?id=85000578 }}>Begin PRINT WINDOW CLOSE WINDOW THE BUSH AGENDA Harding's Lesson Leaving the Balkans now could prove costly. BY MAX BOOT Monday, February 12, 2001 12:01 a.m. During the presidential campaign, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice caused a furor by suggesting that a Bush administration would be interested in rethinking the U.S. commitment to Balkan peacekeeping: "We don't need to have the 82nd Airborne escorting kids to kindergarten." Now the whole issue is said to be "under review." As part of that process, Team Bush should look at a historical parallel that suggests getting out may not be easy or desirable. This isn't the first time a Republican president has come into office having criticized interventions undertaken by his two-term Democratic predecessor. So did Warren G. Harding in 1920. Woodrow Wilson had been even more interventionist than Bill Clinton, and for much the same reason. Both presidents believed that expanding democracy around the world was in America's interest. Wilson wound up not only getting America into World War I but also occupying Veracruz, Mexico (1914), Haiti (1915), the Dominican Republic (1916) and part of Cuba (1917); sending Gen. John J. Pershing deep into Mexico with 10,000 soldiers in pursuit of Pancho Villa (1916); and dispatching 15,000 soldiers to North Russia and Siberia in 1918 to safeguard Allied war supplies and cooperate with anti-Bolshevik forces. Although Wilson, like Mr. Clinton, succeeded GOP presidents who believed in a muscular foreign policy, by the end of his term he too found himself assailed by Republicans who claimed that U.S. troops were doing too much. During the 1920 campaign, in particular, Harding denounced "the rape of Haiti." This helped him appeal for the votes of blacks, then a Republican constituency, and it gave him a cudgel with which to beat the Democratic vice presidential nominee, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who as an assistant secretary of the Navy had played a prominent role in setting occupation policy. Harding vowed he would not "empower an assistant secretary of the Nav y to draft a constitution for helpless neighbors in the West Indies and jam it down their throats at the point of bayonets." Once in office, however, Harding found pulling out a lot tougher than it seemed. His powerful secretary of state, Charles Evans Hughes, launched protracted and laborious negotiations with Dominican politicians over the te rms of withdrawal. The last Marines did not leave Dominican soil until 1924, and then only after the U.S. had won agreement on a treaty that gave Washington a fair amount of say in the republic's financial affairs. As for Haiti, Harding deferred to Congress. A special Senate committee chaired by Sen. Medill McCormick of Illinois spent 11 months studying conditions in Hispaniola, taking testimony from both critics and supporters of t he occupation. The committee criticized some abuses committed by the Marines but did not find evidence of widespread atrocities. The senators concluded that a U.S. pull-out would lead to a return to the kind of anarchy th at had led U.S. troops to land in 1915. "We are there, and in my judgment we ought to stay there for 20 years," Sen. McCormick said. Harding followed this advice, even if it was at odds with his campaign rhetoric. The U.S. Marines remained until 1934 when, ironically enough, former Assistant Navy Secretary Roosevelt pulled them out. It did not take Haiti long to return to a state of despotism interspersed with periods of chaos. By contrast, the 1920s had been one of the most peaceful and prosperous decades in the country's troubled history--as the 1990s might have been, had Mr. Clinton not ended the second U.S. occupation so soon. While the GOP administrations of the 1920s stayed in Haiti, they did briefly abandon another military commitment, in Nicaragua. U.S. Marines had first been sent there by President Taft in 1909-12 to help depose a dictator who had destabilized Central America. Thereafter, a legation guard of 100 Marines remained in Managua--an implicit threat that an unconstitutional usurpation of power would be met with American military force. This helpe d ensure 13 years of relative stability. But in 1925 Calvin Coolidge, Harding's vice president and successor, decided to withdraw the legation guard. Within a month, Conservative strongman Emiliano Chamorro overthrew the Managua government. The opposing political party, the Liberals, raised the banner of revolt. By 1926 U.S. Marines were back in Nicaragua to protect Am erican lives and property from the ensuing civil war. The U.S. then supervised a fair election that resulted in a victory for the Liberal candidate. But a rival Liberal leader, Augusto Sandino, wanted power for himself an d launched a guerrilla campaign to seize it. The U.S. Marines would spend six frustrating years chasing the Sandinistas around the jungles of Nicaragua. All this might have been avoided had Coolidge not pulled out the legation guard. "Seldom if ever," wrote New York Times correspondent Harold Denny in 1929, with unnecessary exaggeration, "has a nation, having full knowled ge of the danger, taken deliberately a step whose disastrous results were more thoroughly a mathematical certainty than the United States took in ordering this withdrawal." This history is worth weighing as President Bush considers Candidate Bush's views on the Balkans. The benefits of withdrawing 11,000 U.S. peacekeepers from Bosnia and Kosovo would be miniscule--the Pentagon might save per haps 1% of its budget--while the potential risks are high. Should ethnic cleansing again break out, or should NATO splinter, critics would be quick to lay the blame at the administration's doorstep. The larger risk is tha t a quick exit would signal, rightly or wrongly, a general disengagement from world affairs. The U.S. last tried that in the 1920s-'30s--an inauspicious precedent if ever there was one. Mr. Boot, the Journal's editorial features editor, is writing a history of America's small wars. Copyright © 2001 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 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