virus: Re: virus: Déja vu All Over Again in Haiti

From: Erik Aronesty (erik@zoneedit.com)
Date: Fri Mar 05 2004 - 07:34:00 MST

  • Next message: Jonathan Davis: "RE: virus: Déja vu All Over Again in Haiti"

    We just didn't want a populist president in Haiti.

    The word is that we kidnapped the president.

    Standard US imperialist pattern: use the CIA to prop up a dictator, wait until he ruins country, then “rescue” the country with an invasion.

    -----Original Message-----
    From: Jei <jei@cc.hut.fi>
    Date: Fri, 5 Mar 2004 14:25:21
    To:virus@lucifer.com
    Subject: virus: Déja vu All Over Again in Haiti

    http://www.independent.org/tii/news/040302Eland.html

    Déja vu All Over Again in Haiti
    By Ivan Eland

    When Americans see unrest, violence, rebellion or civil war in other nations
    on the TV news, they often rightly sympathize with the plight of the foreign
    citizens put at risk. Yet news is.well,.news, not history. Americans rarely
    realize that their own government, somewhere along the line, most likely
    contributed to the crisis du jour.

    The United States is a superpower that meddles frequently-either overtly or
    covertly-in the business of nations all over the world. Americans just
    assume that such interventions have a positive effect in the countries
    concerned. All to often, however, what seemed to U.S. policymakers like a
    good idea at the time turns out to be counterproductive, and sometimes
    disastrous, in the long-term. For example, in the 1980s, the United States
    helped Iraq, which had invaded Iran, defeat and weaken that chief regional
    rival-all the while looking the other way when Iraq used poison gas against
    Iran and Iranian supported Iraqi Kurds. No longer worried about Iran after
    that victory, Iraq was then free to invade Kuwait, and the result was 13
    years of war between the United States and its former secret ally. Likewise,
    during that same decade, the Carter and Reagan administrations, to oppose
    their Soviet Cold War rival, funded and trained radical Islamic rebels in
    remote, non-strategic Afghanistan. After the rebels won that war, some of
    them turned on the United States and became al Qaeda-one of the most dire
    threats to the U.S. homeland in the history of the republic.

    And similarly, if we dig below the latest happenings in Haiti, we find much
    more than first meets the eye. Much of Haiti's current problem lies in weak
    civil institutions and no rule of law. Unfortunately, U.S. government policy
    toward Haiti has contributed heavily to that state of affairs. Throughout
    the 20th century, the U.S. military intervened repeatedly in Haiti. From
    1915 to 1934, the U.S. Marines even occupied the country. During that time,
    they dissolved Haiti's parliament, instituted martial law and created the
    thuggish Haitian army. That army-containing senior officers on the CIA's
    payroll- overthrew a democratically-elected Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 1991.
    The remnants of it, with U.S. help, have just done it again.

    In 1994, Bill Clinton, a Democrat, threatened to invade Haiti if the Haitian
    military did not restore Aristide to power. But George W. Bush, a
    Republican, having less use for the left-leaning leader, has now forced him
    out. But there is more to schizophrenic U.S. policy than simply left-right
    politics. In 1994, Haiti's internal strife was causing boatloads of refugees
    to make a mad dash for Florida, a key electoral state. Although Haitians
    then were fleeing mayhem, torture and other gross human rights violations,
    the U.S. Coast Guard forced them back to Haiti. Similarly, the final straw
    for George W. Bush during the current crisis was an attack on a Haitian
    Coast Guard installation by pro-Aristide supporters-an attempt to shut down
    the return of refugees. The number of boat people now fleeing the Caribbean
    nation is less than in 1994, but the chaos and potential all-out civil war
    there threatened to dramatically increase the flow. Keeping Haitian refugees
    out of the United States is the primary driver of policy for both Democratic
    and Republican administrations.

    Of course, both the Clinton and Bush administrations must bear the moral
    responsibility for directing a rich nation to turn away poor refugees, many
    of whose lives have been endangered. But the Bush administration is also put
    in the embarrassing position of ousting a democratically-elected leader
    after its high-flying rhetoric about invading Iraq to spread democracy.
    Granted, there were irregularities in Aristide's election win in 2000 and
    plenty of corruption (there always is in Haiti), but Aristide was elected
    twice and even peacefully turned power over to a successor in 1996.
    Furthermore, the opposition fighters-many formerly in the army, police and
    paramilitary-have thuggish pasts as bad or worse than Aristide's.

    No workable solution can be imposed from the outside on Haitians, least of
    all by a superpower that helped destroy Haitian civil society in the first
    place. Haitians have to learn to solve their own problems, instead of always
    looking to the United States to send troops to bring temporary peace. Racing
    in with military forces to quell disorder merely rewards those local forces
    perennially initiating violence to draw in the United States. Paradoxically,
    if the United States declared that it would not interfere in Haitian society
    in any way under any circumstances, more Haitian lives would probably be
    saved in the long-term and the country would likely be better off. That is,
    removing the reward for violence would likely lessen its occurrence.

    But instead, the United States has again sent the Marines to Haiti. Don't
    expect it to be the last time.

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