All you need to do to hear these things is to read my previous post. To recap:
It’d be wise because it’s kind of nice not to have countries next door to us run by violent, drug-running dictators. Protects our own interests (fewer refugees, fewer drugs imported from the country), and protects human rights.
This Democrat would’ve reluctantly supported Bush had he gone to the aid of this member of OAS.
In the end, such aid, such closer ties to Haiti, could’ve fostered democracy in that country, could have prevented the current bloodshed, could’ve prevented the usurpation of power by vicious criminals.
Let me know if you want me to repeat it again.
Daniel
I must retract and apologize for this. We’ve got so many acronymic shorthands for common phrases here that I mentally registered ‘LHoD’ as one more of those, but one whose meaning I couldn’t immediately recall. Somehow it eluded me, xtisme, that you were responding to Left Hand of Dorkness. Sorry about that.
LHoD claimed that it was US policy to undercut Aristide. It was not. Aristide was ousted back in 1991 when Bush Sr. was President. The UN did some years of ineffectual fooling around until 1994, when Clinton reinstated him essentially at gunpoint. I did not support that action, because I felt that it would do no long-term good. It did not, as yet another coup has ousted Aristide yet again, because of his corruption, use of politically motivated violence, and the fact that Haiti is one of the worst of the Third World sinkholes.
Not likely. No amount of aid, and no amount of military assistance, has helped up to now. No amount of aid, and no amount of military assistance, is going to help those who have staged the latest coup. Haiti has always been, is now, and will likely be for the foreseeable future, the worst shithole in the Western hemisphere. They have had, and will continue to have, coups, violence, poverty, and corruption. To blame the latest one on Bush because Aristide resisted the necessary reforms is unrealistic.
I am not lumping Aristide in with Castro or Kim Jong-il. Brain Glutton lumped Bush in with them, and claimed that he preferred to believe Castro and Kim above George Bush.
There is no evidence (other than the word of the ousted flake) that the US violated Haiti’s sovereignity or removed their head of state. You admitted as much when you posted:
So there is no indication that the US violated the sovereignity of Haiti.
I was also struck by these two quotes:
talking about Aristide, but
talking about Bush.
This has already happened, especially the second sentence. And based on nothing more than Aristide’s word, which some are willing to accept at face value - providing it gives them another excuse for Bush-bashing. Especially by those who prefer to believe anyone other than Bush.
Do you seriously believe that Haiti gets a “clean bill of health” from any human rights organization on earth? Or that Aristide was not using “roving bands of thugs” himself?
Criminals have taken over Haiti. They have been running that nasty little sewer since Papa Doc.
OK, so now Aristide has done exactly what you suggested we should get him to agree not to do. And there is a coup against him, again. This means the US staged it?
As I said, this is tin-foil hat thinking.
The problems of Haiti cannot be solved by US action or inaction. If we send them aid, they will have violence, corruption, and misery. If we try to get them to institute reforms, they will have violence, corruption, and misery. If we do nothing, they will have - well, you get the idea.
If we allow the coup and do not rescue Aristide, he will be murdered, and the paranoid Left will blame Bush for not acting. If we allow the coup and rescue Aristide, the paranoid Left will blame Bush for staging a coup. If we send the military to Haiti and stop the coup, the paranoid Left will blame Bush for “violating the sovereignity of Haiti”. And we will need a permanent military presence to prevent the next coup, brought about by the lack of reforms caused by the corruption of the leadership of Haiti. And the paranoid Left will start comparing Haiti to Viet Nam - and blaming Bush.
The problems of Haiti and its latest coup can neither be solved by, nor blamed on, Bush. But that won’t stop some people from trying.
Sure it is – but since it’s not remotely what I was arguing, why should I care? You’d do well to address the arguments put forward instead of distorting them into a silly form that you can easily knock down.
I never suggested that Haiti does get a clean bill of health from human rights organizations. I was pretty clearly suggesting that such a requirement be used as a carrot. IN fact, I was so clearly suggesting that, and so clearly not suggesting that Aristide would get such a bill of health, that I can only assume you’re deliberately lying about what I said.
And I also said that I didn’t think the US staged a coup. In fact, I said:
How you get from “I’m not saying he was an angel” to “would get a clean bill of health from any human rights organization on earth,” or how you get from “The US is standing by” to “The US staged [a coup]” is beyond me.
You sure you’re not channeling december here? These were exactly the sort of dishonest debating techniques that made him so despised.
Aristide WAS an angel compared to the Duvaliers. Further, he was elected by huge majorities by the people that live there , the people that remain far more qualified to offer any opinion of his compassion than anyone here. He remains the only Haitian leader to actually pursue social reforms, and for a limited time he was successful. That is, until he was abruptly cut off from humanitarian aid because of his refusal to privatize most of the country’s assets knowing that the prime bidders were American and had a track record of brutal oppression that Haiti is famous for, largely as a colony of plantations under various masters, notably the Americans in the last century.
I would ask to see any real evidence of brutal repression under Aristide. Any evidence whatsoever. Those who would cast comparisons between Aristide and Duvalier clearly have their reasons for doing so, but IMHO they are revisionist because no such similarities exist in the minds of the majority of Haitians, as clearly demonstrated by their ballots, and as noted by aid groups worldwide.
On the subject of ballots, there exists a definite agenda on the part of the American media to portray the last elections as fraudulent, when in fact voter turnout was high, the ballot count uncontested, and the only anomalies were the failure of the opposition parties to present their candidates at the required time. They defaulted, and no attempt has been made by anyone to equate this default with any intimidation by the elected government of the time, the one that was subsequently re-elected against U.S. wishes. No attempt, that is, by anyone but the Duvalier fan club.
It would seem that the Haitian people and Aristide in particular don’t wish to sell out their plantation pool to the U.S., and wish to have a democratically elected government in a desparate effort to gain self-determination. It is perfectly clear in the light of recent developments that the U.S. would prefer a return to the old ways of Duvalier, and in fact he is in the process of acquiring his entry papers. There are those in Haiti that would prefer to eat and let their families eat, so following the complete eradication of all aid programs and a long decay of their ability to self-sustain, they are being forced through hunger, destitution, and Bullets to the back of the head to accept the choice the U.S. has given them.
Slavery was never abolished, it’s just changed addresses. Some of the sickest and most brutal slave masters in modern history are being returned to Haiti to pick up where they left off. And they’re not carrying Kalishnikovs, they’re carrying M16’ and M4’s. Once the Marines leave, follow the trail of blood and money all the way to whoever is this year’s Dole or Chiquita or United Foods or whoever. Simple.
“Now that they’ve been starved out for a few years, them damn Haitians will know whose boots to lick now, right? We’ll teach 'em to be good little plantation niggers again.”
I quess Bozize, the Central African Republic President is a little worried and doesn’t want too much attention thrown his way, because after all he toppled former President Ange-Felix Patasse in a coup.
I’m sorry…I should have been clearer. I meant to say, list some GOOD reasons for the US to directly involve itself in Haiti’s mess at the cost of god knows how much money and the perminient stationing of troops…and most likely the bad will that this will generate IN Haiti towards the US and possibly the rest of the world as we nose into yet another countries internal problems.
IMO when a nation state commits itself to meddling in another soveriegn nations internal problems at a great expense in money, commitment of its combat forces, and maybe in lives and certainly in good will, it should do so for very good reasons and achievable goals…reasons that touch on the national security of the country committing itself. I see no good reasons from the US’s perspective of pouring money and effort, of committing our troops to god knows what, to proping up Aristide’s government. I also fail to see why it has to be the US anyway…where is the UN? THEY are the logical choice, if anyone, to go in and keep the peace in Haiti, to prop up Aristide if this is a worthwhile thing.
But let me address the points you made:
Ok, I can certainly see how not having the refugee problem would be a bonus. From a cost benifits standpoint though, I’m not seeing why the US should take an active stance in Haiti and not simply wait and see…and just deal with the refugees as they come.
Don’t make me laugh. Bush was damned if he did, damned if he didn’t. The Democrats wouldn’t have ‘reluctantly supported’ Bush if he had of taken an active part and committed the US to propping up Haiti. The left would have gone nuts as further proof that Bush was out to conquer the world was shown to them, and the OP would have written an anti-US screed about how the US was nosing into Haiti in order to take over, that they could have handled it all on their own without our intervention, and we really just want to start up the whole slavery thing again beginning with Haiti because we miss it so much, especially in the south…blah blah blah. You can’t seriously believe that there was anything Bush could have done that would have had the Democrats even reluctantly supporting him…well, anything short of keeling over dead that is.
All noble things…but at what cost? And what guarentee that it WOULD have worked out even if we were willing to pay the cost. Why the US? Why do WE have to do it? Because they are our neighbors we need to fix them? And how would the people of Haiti have felt if the US had of sent in the marines to prop up Aristide? Do you fantasize that we would have been welcomed there? Probably about as much as we were ‘welcomed’ in Samolia and in Iraq.
In conclusion, I feel sorry for Haiti. There are all kinds of shit holes in the world where people suffer constantly…and Haiti is one of them. But is it really the US’s job to fix the worlds problems? The world doesn’t seem to WANT the US to fix it, and I’m with the world…I don’t WANT the US to fix them either. Let Haiti look after itself. If anything, let the UN deal with it…thats what they are there for after all, no?
No worries.
Yep, I know he’s the Assistant Secretary of State for WHA. I guess it gets down to exactly what you thought he did. I assumed (perhaps incorrectly) that you were talking about the US having staged some kind of covert coup. And frankly he doesn’t have the power to do that without approval from higher up. If he’s simply poisoning the well or taking advantage of a situation, well, thats something different.
As to the aid thing…well, I don’t know. I always assumed that such decisions were made at a higher level and for better reasons.
My mistake then…I thought that was what you were saying. Whats the evidence that they HAVE created such an environment though. From what I have read a lot of the problems that caused the coup were self inflicted…many of them by Aristide himself, some by other factions in the country. Am I wrong about this?
I can understand why main stream Bushies wouldn’t like Aristide, but they don’t like load of others either…Castro comes to mind as someone they can’t stand and would love to plant in the ground or get rid of. Just because they don’t like them, doesn’t equate to them actively doing anything about them. They have all been pretty focused on Iraq with a bit to spare on such trivialities like the economy. I frankly find it hard to believe they have had either the time or desire to worry about something as meaningless as Haiti…no oil there, you know.
I just see no good reason (besides the paranoia of some about re-establishing slavery and fruit plantations) for the Bush administation to devote any energy to Haiti. Maybe I’m wrong about this…I’ve just not seen any really convincing evidence that this whole thing isn’t just US apathy towards Haiti coupled with Aristide jerking various peoples chain.
Post is getting long at this point so I’ll cut off here.
All right, then you did not state that you believed that the US staged the coup, and I apologize for accusing you of doing so.
You did suggest that the US should prevent Aristide from being overthrown in a coup providing Haiti “got a clean bill of health from human rights organizations” if I understood you correctly. And we are in agreement that Haiti could not get such approval from any reasonable human rights organization, to say the least. And we already used the withholding of aid as a stick to try to force Aristide to reform, with minimal results.
Thus, since Haiti has not reformed, the US should not have propped Aristide up. And they did not.
Thus neither the stick nor the carrot you recommended worked. And it is thus disingenuous to condemn the US for not intervening in the coup.
Apology accepted. I don’t trust the White House farther than I can throw it, but I won’t make accusations without evidence.
On this perhaps I was unclear. The whole “clean bill of health” thing is what should’ve been offered years ago, but it shouldn’t have been linked to basic infrastructure and food aid: it should’ve been linked to an offer of a limited alliance if either country were threatened. In other words, practice good, non-goon-squad-using government, and in case of an attempted coup, we’ll help you out.
The aid that WAS offered was, as near as I can tell, refused not based on human-rights concerns but rather based on financial concerns. Because Aristide valued education and health care over neoliberal economic policies, they were denied aid. That’s not at all the kind of carrot/stick I was talking about.
I think such a deal was implied, if not explicitly entered into. But Aristide did, in fact, use goon squads, and is therefore (IMO) not entitled to expect help from the USA.
I don’t think it is a quibble to say that I don’t think Aristide was ousted, or denied aid, because he valued education and health care over political violence and corruption. As we have agreed, Aristide is no angel.
Of course, Aristide, the representatives of the World Bank et al., the coup plotters, and the US all have different agendas. But no one involved has any right to complain (again, IMO) that the US should intervene to prop Aristide up again. It doesn’t seem to do any good. We tried it in 1994, and things did not seem to improve. Trying it again in 2004 is not likely to do any better.
Nor, unhappily, will those now in charge of the biggest shithole in the Western hemisphere.
This was not said about Haiti, but it might as well have been.
Far from saying the U.S. should intervene to prop up Aristide, perhaps they shouldn’t have intervened to undermine him. Haiti was one of the richest islands in the Atlantic in terms of food resources for many years, and for that reason historically had been treated as a slave colony. This trend continued long after the U.S. companies got involved, although they didn’t create it to be sure.
Aristide was re-elected by his people as soon as he was constitutionally allowed to be. This fact alone should be indicative of his real political situation, not the vilification we’ve become so used to in the American press.
It is noteworthy that he did NOT trash the Haitian constitution as did Duvalier or that other clown that ran the place in the early 90’s. What is clear is that Aristide was the only president to actively ATTEMPT to redistribute Haiti’s wealth among the poor through radical changes to welfare and educational programs. He would have had a chance given any support from the international funding cartel, but sadly he chose not to agree to further privatization of national resources, so the Haitian peple paid the (relatively) short term price fo seeing all aid evaporate.
Funny how the brutal crimes of all of the American-backed dictators in Haiti this century are extremely well documented, but the alleged shortcomings of Aristide are loosely based on American media and obfuscated by the non-examination of the financial burden imposed on Haiti by the IMF and the World Bank…
The propaganda cup runneth over. Haiti just got raped, again, and will continue to do so until it finds itself under leadership willing to submit to offshore financial interest.
Ever since Haiti became the first nation in the world founded by post-revolt slaves, the U.S. press has had a field day with distortion. Refer to any American
news shortly after the slave revolt there, and you may find interesting reflections on the behaviour of the American press regarding Haiti . Nothing has changed in that regard IMHO.
I’m not at all sure such a deal was implied. As I said, the deal implied was, “focus on neoliberal economic policies, and we’ll give you money.” Human rights weren’t mentioned. In other words, I DO think he was denied aid because he valued education and health care: he spent lots of government resources on these programs, which isn’t a policy supported by bodies like the IMF. I’ll try to dig up some cites on this tomorrow.
If the US DID suggest to him that protection against the evil folks who might try to overthrow him was contingent on his making strong improvements in Haiti’s human rights record, that’s absolutely news to me. But if so, and if Bush kept to that offer, I’ll retract the nasty things I’ve said about him here.
If anyone is interested, here is an interview with Aristide on CNN…he sounds like a total flake to me.
What I want to know is, how wide spread was the disaffection with Aristide? I’m reading a CNN report and it seems pretty wide spread to me. If Aristide was such a shinning knight as the OP continues to make him out, why were so many people willing to rise up against him? I found this interesting also in the CNN report:
I’m still trying to figure out here who all (besides the OP) is saying this was definitely a US coup against Aristide…and what exactly the US’s role was supposed to be. Frankly I’ve not been able to find anything that doesn’t fall into the tin foil hat variety expressed several times by the OP that the US DID in fact actively participate in the coup, except Aristides statement…and again he sounds like a nutball to me in the CNN interview. Read it and look at the reporters questions…you can practically see the CNN reporter rolling his eyes at certain places where Aristide just kind of wanders off on his rant.
I’m also confused about what seems to be a pretty hefty popular uprising (this from multiple sources). Was the US supposed to have stirred up the rebels and the population against Aristide? Were there rebels at all or were they all supposed to be US stooges? Or is it French stooges? Is the extent of the uprising being misreported by most of the press? Are all the press except the Guardian and a few fringe papers in on some kind of reporting conspiricy?
I’m doing some research right now (its late atm so it will be tomorrow at least) about exactly why the Clinton administration decided to go with the OAS report on election fraud to cut off $500m in international aid, but so far it seems much more complicated than the OPs “We just want them to be our slaves again to grow us cheap fruit” arguement. In fact, the more I dig in, the more complex this whole friggin mess becomes leading me further to believe that my initial take that this thing was above the Kennedy assassination on the conspiricy scale may have been wildly optimistic.
One last question: Where is the UN in all this btw? Why WEREN’T the UN peacekeepers sent in months ago? I’m reading the BBC atm in a section where people write in about Haiti and one of the reoccuring themes is “Where is the UN?”.
If anyone is interested in some diverse (to say the least…lol) thoughts on Haiti on the BBC, here is the link.
This isn’t a question of who is pure, it’s a question of a coup d’etat. Whether you like Aristede or not, he was democratically elected. All of the other rhetoric is a red herring. Do you have a cite for “so many people willing to rise up against him” ?
I didn’t say it was a U.S. coup, I said it was backed by the U.S… It’s obvious to many people that it’s a coup, all you have to do is look at the players i.e. the resistance leaders. The resistance is nothing more than the same thugs that ousted him during the last coup. Where have you been?
It’s very easy for most of the press to get the story wrong, they tend to get their information from the same place. It’s not surprise that a large number of them would say the same thing. The fact that a large number of them report something doesn’t mean that the something is true nor does it lend additional credibility. You seem to think otherwise perhaps because you don’t know how it all works.
Weapons of mass destruction, most of the press bought into that. Need I say more?
I’m glad you’ve decided to do some research. Allow me to point you in the direction of some places that may help you.
This isn’t a question of who is pure, it’s a question of a coup d’etat. Whether you like Aristede or not, he was democratically elected. All of the other rhetoric is a red herring. Do you have a cite for “so many people willing to rise up against him” ?
I didn’t say it was a U.S. coup, I said it was backed by the U.S… It’s obvious to many people that it’s a coup, all you have to do is look at the players i.e. the resistance leaders. The resistance is nothing more than the same thugs that ousted him during the last coup. Where have you been?
It’s very easy for most of the press to get the story wrong, they tend to get their information from the same place. It’s not surprise that a large number of them would say the same thing. The fact that a large number of them report something doesn’t mean that the something is true nor does it lend additional credibility. You seem to think otherwise perhaps because you don’t know how it all works.
Weapons of mass destruction, most of the press bought into that. Need I say more?
I’m glad you’ve decided to do some research. Allow me to point you in the direction of some places that may help you.
An especially revealing quote from an ex- military U.S. figure sorta sums it up, but the whole page is worth a read actually, for those who feel that the U.S. is just getting involved now…
