WASHINGTON WATCH: HOW POLITICS BETRAY CLINTON'S WORLD VIEWPOINTS

WASHINGTON -- Postmortems on the Clinton health care plan pervade the media, as do projections about how many seats the Democrats will lose and Republicans gain in the coming fall elections. But it is foreign affairs* that dominate the discussion here. The asterisk connotes that even in "foreign" matters when it comes to the Clinton administration, domestic political concerns are the prevailing guide to decision-making.

Not that this is all bad. Domestic opinion has so far served as a roadblock to White House plans to invade Haiti, something the president's spokesmen have imprudently painted as "inevitable". And it has forced the Clinton administration to weigh carefully the options on Cuba, buying time in the short-term by sending Cuban rafters to settlement camps at the U.S. Navy base in Guantanamo Bay.

But setting foreign policy according to domestic politics is also how the president got himself into the current jam on Haiti. If he continues to make decisions without any guiding foreign policy principles, he threatens to thrust the United States into even stickier problems.

Unless the generals ruling Haiti step down soon, the White House has made clear its intentions to invade the country and reinstall the dubious democrat Jean-Bertrand Aristide. While the initial invasion is expected to be easy, it is what comes afterward that will be hard. Simply installing the erratic Aristide as president won't solve Haiti's problems. Haiti lacks a history of democracy, and deep and violent grudges permeate the land. Stabilizing the country entails protecting the new president, bringing peace to the streets, and developing an independent judiciary. White House attempts to find Caribbean peacekeepers to do these things have been unsuccessful. Thus, if an invasion goes through, the long-term nation-building headache will be the U.S. military's -- something it nor the American people want or believe it can do. If Clinton doesn't follow through on threats to invade Haiti, however, the U.S. leader stands to see his credibility evaporate even more -- both home and abroad. From Sarajevo and Pyongyang to Havana, from Bob Dole's hometown to Washington, D.C., a reversal reinforces the president's image as someone who talks tough and carries a twig."If we don't invade now, the administration will be accused of being wishy-washy," Sen. Richard Lugar, an Indiana Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee, said Saturday. "If we do invade, it will be a historical mistake."How did the Clinton administration get itself -- and the United States -- into such a mess? Driven in part by the Political Black Caucus, whose votes the president needed on last year's budget (and this year's crime bill), the Clinton administration has been sliding toward an invasion of Haiti since its first months in office. But the seeds were planted well before, as early as the 1992 presidential campaign when candidate Clinton harshly faulted the Bush administration's return of Haitian refugees -- and otherwise benign neglect of the island nation's problems -- as "racist." As Clinton should have found true on other issues, but doesn't seem to grasp, what sounds good on the campaign trail isn't so simple in office. Nor so smart. And irresponsible political rhetoric can return to haunt, especially when it leads to ill-conceived policy. When the Clinton administration embarked upon a policy of ratcheting up invasion threats in attempt to spook the Haitian generals into leaving, one wonders how much thought was given to the consequences if such threats didn't work. The New York Times reports that over a year ago the entire intelligence community -- from the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency to the State Department Intelligence Branch -- predicted that threats and sanctions alone wouldn't force the Haitian military junta from power. To whom, then, was President Clinton listening? Ten thousand American troops stand ready to invade as a result.

Domestic politics play a large part in American policy toward Cuba as well. Clinton hopes to win Florida in the 1996 election, and he believes his handling of the rafter issue may make or break him there. So far, local Florida opinion has encouraged Clinton to do something smart. The strong anti-Castro sentiment of the politically-active Cuban-American community in Miami and the anti-immigration feelings of the rest of the state have coalesced into support for a dual approach: the end of automatic U.S. citizenship for Cuban emigres and harsher sanctions against Castro. The bad news is that the current policy will eventually implode. Enhanced sanctions, thanks to Castro, increase the number of Cuban refugees, and Guantanamo Bay can only hold so many more. Meanwhile, the cost of the current policy exceeds $1 million a day -- and continues upward. President Clinton will have to establish a more comprehensive policy soon.

No easy solutions exist for today's foreign policy questions, and there is certainly no unanimity outside the White House. Republicans, too, grapple undecided among themselves, particularly with the challenge of Cuba. But the first rule of a president should be not to make matters worse. With Haiti, even before an invasion, President Clinton has failed. With Cuba, there still is hope.

Jon K. Rust, former editorial page editor of the Southeast Missourian, lives in the Washington, D.C., area.