AS A GROWING BAND of ragtag rebels converged on Port-au-Prince last week, threatening to topple Haitian dictator Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the Bush administration's policy at first appeared hesitant. The situation was admittedly confusing. But happily, by the end of the week, the administration seemed to have reached a correct judgment that before any good can be accomplished, Aristide must go.

The United States has several long-term objectives for Haiti: achieving stable democratic government, building an economy out of aid capital, repairing ecological damage unequaled on the planet, forcing the Colombian cocaine underworld to stop using the country as one of its most important transshipment centers, and preventing a refugee crisis on our shores. Before it can achieve its long-term objectives, the United States can have only one goal in the short term: liberating Haitians from their corrupt and demagogic dictator. This in turn requires a recognition that the United States cannot turn its back on this nation 600 miles from Florida.

Aristide, of course, did not create Haiti's problems, but he profits from all of them. His ten years of direct and indirect rule have been a disaster. His regime has been democratic only in the Haitian sense of one man, one vote, one time. The last free and fair election in Haiti was in 1990, the closely monitored contest that brought Aristide to power. Even then, Aristide was making use of street violence orchestrated by his "vigilance committees." Forced to flee after a September 1991 coup, he spent three years in Washington lobbying for his restoration. In 1994, the Clinton administration intervened to restore Aristide to power, but things quickly went downhill. Four years ago, Aristide received over 90 percent of the vote in a presidential election so transparently corrupt that several American and European agencies reluctantly froze hundreds of millions of dollars in aid money. (Last week, the irony-proof Iowa senator Tom Harkin noted that in that electoral charade, "Aristide got a higher percentage of the vote in Haiti than Bush got in this country.")

With a mystifying regularity reminiscent of Saddam Hussein, Aristide has refused the simplest procedural inducements to unlock millions that could have been used to feed and treat his poorer compatriots. From humble beginnings as a Salesian slum priest (he was expelled from his order in 1988), Aristide has become the richest man in Haiti. How? Last Wednesday in Miami, the Haitian mafioso Beaudoin Ketant, go-between for three Colombian cartels, was sentenced to 27 years in prison for transporting 30 tons of cocaine between Haiti and Florida. At his sentencing, Ketant said that Aristide "is a drug lord. He controlled the drug trade in Haiti. . . . It's a one-man show, your honor. You either pay him or you die."

In the past two years, Aristide created a system of cooperative banks that paid absurd levels of interest. Once the Haitian middle class had invested much of its savings in these banks, the whole system collapsed in a manner reminiscent of the Albanian Ponzi scheme of 1997--perhaps because of a mysterious $90 million loan taken out either by Aristide or by one of his associates. This wipeout of Haiti's already-infinitesimal middle class gave an impetus to street protests against the regime, and led to demonstrations of thousands in front of the presidential palace.

But Aristide has until now been well defended against such unrest, not so much by the police that U.S. consultants had set up for him in the mid-1990s as by two irregular groups. First is his private security detail, made up of former U.S. Special Forces, working under private contract. Second are the lumpen hooligans and released criminals known as "chimeras," who, in whatever numbers are needed, can be armed and paid by Aristide loyalists for deployment against political enemies.