I am sure you have seen the picture by now--the Immigration Naturalization Service officer, wearing body armor and armed with a machine gun, has burst into the Gonzlez home and finds himself face to face with a terrified, crying Elian, who is hiding in the closet with the fisherman who plucked him out of the ocean a few months ago. The picture says the proverbial thousand words -- or at least, it raises a thousand words worth of questions. Most saliently, why did it take 20 heavily armed agents to break into a house to retrieve a six-year-old boy?
In short, we got to this point because the Clinton administration did not make the politically tough call in the beginning -- send the kid home. This case seems quite clear-cut to me -- a young child in his mother's care is left alone when she dies. The father is clearly the closest remaining kin and should be reunited with his son as soon as possible.
Suppose that Elian were from any other country, and suppose he were ugly -- he would have been on the next plane home. Unfortunately, Elian is Cuban and he's photogenic, and by failing to act immediately, the Clinton administration gave the issue the time it needed to balloon out of proportion. The media loved splashing Elian's cute little face across thousands of pages of newsprint, fanning the flames of the larger ideological struggle between Fidel Castro and the Cuban expatriate community of Miami.
Every day that passed, Elian became less and less a scared little boy and more and more a symbol of that struggle -- raising the stakes so high that neither side could give in. Predictably, the Clinton administration bailed itself out late, clumsily, and with force -- for God's sake, riot police, tear gas, and predawn raids for one little boy?
Referring to Elian's Miami relatives, deputy attorney general Eric Holder told the Times, "We were forced into the action we took by the intransigence of that family. We probably should have taken a decisive action sooner." Elian has been here since Thanksgiving Day -- a lot of time has passed in which no one had the wherewithal to take "decisive action."
Yes, it would have been politically unpopular to send the kid home months ago. To my mind, though, that is what good leaders are supposed to do -- stand against the crowd when it's the right thing to do. If Elian had been sent home right away by the INS, there certainly would have been some controversy. But Elian would have been able to get on with his life, the issue would have disappeared from the news within days, and a six-year-old boy would not be paraded through Cuba as a triumphant People's Victory over the forces of capitalism.
Now fast forward five months. The rhetoric on both sides had reached a fevered pitch. The entire Cuban community of Miami united behind Elian's Miami relatives, while Fidel Castro was announcing a special school, filled with Elian's friends, that would be created for no other purpose than to ease Cuba's most famous six-year-old back into life in Cuba.
At this point, who's to blame Janet Reno for thinking, as she told the "Times," that there might be guns in the Gonzlez house or among the crowd gathered outside? Of course the ensuing raid would look like another Waco -- the situation had already been allowed to balloon so far out of control that I am amazed no one was seriously hurt.
If there are any lessons to be learned from the whole mess, I think they primarily concern the executive branch. There are times when leadership should be about more than following the polls. We The People are not always right -- and we elect our leaders and give them substantial mandate so that they can sometimes make good decisions with which we, in the heat of the moment, may not agree.
Making those good but unpopular decisions may hurt a politician's poll numbers, but there are times when it is necessary. Sending a little kid home to his dad before the media circus sets up its tent and before he is turned into a pawn in an adults' war is one of those times.
