About 15 years ago, when the Clinton administration sent troops to Haiti to restore the democratically elected left-populist Jean-Bertrand Aristide to power, I joined a small group of hard-left demonstrators in a number of pitiful marches against the intervention. For the life of me, today I cannot tell you why.
George Packer, writing in Dissent, supported the intervention, and soon after, the magazine published a letter from me in strong disagreement. Packer replied back and tore me to shreds. That’s not how I saw it at the time, but it’s true. Unfortunately I don’t have these materials handy to post online.
My stance wasn’t entirely crackers. The U.S. had a long and dismal recent record in Haiti, propping up dictators, backing the Revolutionary Front for Advancement and Progress in Haiti (FRAPH), a grotesquely named right-wing death squad, and so forth. My leftist allies and I figured that in light of all that, any U.S. military intervention could only do harm. In other words,
the stance of Hugo Chavez right now. What we refused to acknowledge was that the White House was pursuing a noble policy, even as the CIA was pursuing ignoble policies through the back channel — a fact that ultimately gave FRAPH leader Emmanuel “Toto” Constant safe harbor in my own fair city, in nearby Queens. (Constant was
found guilty of grand larceny and mortgage fraud in 2008 and was handed a stiff sentence, with his Haiti crimes taken into account.)
All this to say that Haiti has been on my mind for a long time, though my outlook has evolved. Today the same myths persist — Chavez and the dinosaur left blast U.S. “occupation” while the Bill O’Reilly right blasts all aid attempts as a waste and Haiti as hopeless. Nick Kristof
demolishes the latter in an essential column. In short, Haiti is poor thanks to crippling debt, rampant deforestation, years of U.S.-backed dictatorship, on and on. Kristof writes:
…Haiti in recent years has been much better managed under President René Préval and has shown signs of being on the mend.
Far more than most other impoverished countries — particularly those in Africa — Haiti could plausibly turn itself around. It has an excellent geographic location, there are no regional wars, and it could boom if it could just export to the American market.
[…]
[L]et’s challenge the myth that because Haiti has been poor, it always will be. That kind of self-fulfilling fatalism may be the biggest threat of all to Haiti, the real pact with the devil.
2 Comments
On an interesting tangent, I find that the Zelaya situation in Honduras last year was also instructive. Note that the hard left spoke out against both – last year in Obama didn't go far enough in Honduras, this year he's going too far in Haiti.
Similarly, the hard right can't fathom that we would entangle ourselves in Honduras (unless we're using it as a means to funnel money to Nicaraguan insurgents, of course – but I digress), and now the same in Haiti. Back then, the extant government was used as reasoning that we need not get involved. This year, the collapse of government is used as reasoning that we need not get involved.
Fascinating how the extreme ends of the spectrum, though they may vary their reasoning, never seem to vary their ultimate "U.S. is doing it wrong" positions.
Kristof's column was indeed excellent. I was frankly appalled by David Brooks' column, wherein he declared that "some cultures are more progress-resistant than others" — and then cited "the influence of the voodoo religion." I thought he was smarter than that.