Here, including calls for troops, financial support, and nation-building.

Whether or not the opposition comes to its senses, Haiti's people deserve protection. More than 70 lives have already been lost. The United States should quickly offer to build up the current force of 50 marines who arrived Monday to protect the American Embassy and make it the core of a multinational stabilization force that would also include soldiers from France, Canada and Latin America. Haiti's army was dissolved in 1994, and a modest international military force could go a long way. It should be in place before armed rebel elements grab power for themselves.

Once a stabilization force is established, an American-led international effort should be mounted to train professional, politically independent police officers and judges. It was the absence of such institutions that allowed Mr. Aristide to create a new authoritarianism behind a democratic shell. American police training programs during the Clinton administration did not reach far enough or last long enough to succeed. Washington should also make it easier for Haiti to earn its way out of poverty by eliminating the American rice subsidies that have contributed to pricing poor Haitian rice farmers out of the market.

Developing a durable democracy in this deeply impoverished country, which has no history of strong, independent civic institutions, will take plenty of time and effort. Failure to begin that effort now will surely result in future revolts, future dictators and future tides of desperate refugees headed for American shores.

I don't see calls for any U.N. resolutions, although calls for the participation of France, the only nation that really counts in liberal foreign policy, are there.

Short of generating refugees, I don't see Haiti presenting a clear and present threat to America.

I wonder if all this concern from the Left would be there if the current leader of Haiti wasn't another one of the Marxist south-of-the-border golden boys, like the leaders of the Sandinistas and many others, who were supposed to show us once and for all how to make a socialist paradise on Earth.