No sooner had the Haitian dictator, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, boarded a plane for his flight to exile than there gathered at a modest row house in the East New York section of Brooklyn a group of advocates of Haitian democracy who stand a

chance of going home again. They gathered for a sedate but warm celebration, with a little buffet that included chocolates and Napoleans and Haitian delicacies. And when Raymond Joseph, editor of the Haiti-Observateur (and our columnist), entered, he was greeted with a standing ovation and hugs all around.

The surge of optimism had nothing to do with the armed gangs that drove Mr. Aristide from the country. They, as Mr. Joseph reports, are some of the worst thugs in Haiti. But for the past five or so years, many in the room had been meeting every Wednesday at Mr. Joseph’s offices in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Even when Father Aristide, then but a Catholic priest, was standing for election the first time, the Haiti-Observateur, under Mr. Joseph’s famed brother, Leo, was frantically warning about the would-be president’s character. Later, when President Clinton insisted on sending in an American expedition to restore Mr. Aristide to the office he had lost in a bloody military uprising, Raymond Joseph tried desperately to warn him off.

They are encouraged to see that this time around the Bush administration has no illusions about the man who fled Haiti on Sunday. The White House spokesman made a point of blaming Mr. Aristide for the violence that has rent Haiti in recent days. It noted specifically that the gangs doing the looting and attacking people and property in Port-au-Prince were “armed and directed” by Mr. Aristide. It noted that the attacks were targeting innocent civilians, humanitarian programs, and international organizations trying to help the Haitian people. “The long-sim mering crisis,” the White House said, “is largely of Mr. Aristide’s making.” It made it clear that it was Mr. Aristide’s “own actions” that have “called into question his fitness to continue to govern Haiti.”

After Mr. Aristide, however, comes the task of getting Haiti on the right track to democracy. America failed twice to put the priority on democratic principles rather than individuals. The first time, in 1915, President Wilson sent in troops who ended up staying for 19 years, only to leave behind not a democracy but a gendarmery. In 1994, Mr. Clinton sent in 23,000 troops in support of a man, in Mr. Aristide, who used the rhetoric of democracy to seek to authenticate a faux freedom.

This time the premium will be on the building of institutions of democracy, a free parliament, a free press, free labor unions, and a liberal economy. This is the agenda of a group called the Plateforme Democratique, whose fate will bear watching. It was not the group that mounted the violence against the Aristide regime, but it is the custodian of the idea of democracy and of economic liberalism.

The tragedy of Haiti has much to teach those who are engaged in the hard and dangerous work of nation-building elsewhere in the world, including, we don’t mind saying, Iraq. In his remarks on Sunday, Mr. Bush suggested he grasped this essential point, urging the Haitian people “to give this break from the past a chance to work.” There are, to be sure, those who are going to disparage Mr. Bush for moving too slowly in the latest crisis. “Deplorable” is how Mr. Bush’s performance is described this morning in a New York Times editorial that was met with a snort of derision among the pro-democracy Haitians who’ve been waiting for some support from the Times during Mr. Aristide’s decade of depredations. The fact is that this administration has set the stage for a new start toward democracy in Haiti, which has nowhere to go but up.