How to square this with the position that it was wrong to be unilateral in Iraq?
[ul]
[li]Location. Haiti’s in our backyard and that makes things different.[/li][li]Haiti’s a poor, strategically unimportant country and that makes things different.[/li][li]The Haitian situation is urgent.[/li][li]Expediency. Haiti can be held with a few thousand US troops and we ordinarily wouldn’t need help. Iraq is/was bigger.[/li][/ul]
My own take is that any US administration – for that matter, pretty much any administration, period – is going to be unilateral when it feels it needs to, and this just reveals it.
Monroe doctrine. I like it.
There are two at least quasilegitimate bitches about how this was handled:
•Why the heck did we ever let things slide this far before taking action?
•Once we did take action, why’d we do it in such a way as to leave ourselves open to charges of playing fast and loose with a democratically elected regime?
I was pretty appalled at Bush’s reaction: holding off on sending troops until Aristide was gone was damn cold.
Differences? Well, when a democratically elected leader is in the midst of being ousted by drug lords and ex-military leaders and asks for aid from outside countries, it’s entirely different from when you invade a sovereign nation based on false evidence of that nation’s threat to your own safety. Bush wouldn’t have needed international support to bring troops to Haiti; he just would’ve needed Haiti’s support, as expressed through Haiti’s government.
Granted, Aristide was corrupt, and AFAIK he was no great friend of the US or of democracy. Still, Bush’s cavalier disregard to a coup in our own backyard may well result in the resumption of military dictatorships in the Western Hemisphere, something that (IIRC) we finally got rid of under Clinton. (Note that “we” refers to the world community; of course Clinton wasn’t solely or even mainly responsible for this trend).
I think President anybody-else could have built much more support for the war in Iraq than Bush did. But I don’t think that unilateralism is wrong in the end, if something is important or urgent enough. Certainly there’s a big difference between trying to support an existing democracy and trying to take over and rebuild a dictatorship.
This is clearly humanitarian, providing a safe presence so that any fighting will not tear unfettered through civilian population centres and instilling some semblance of stability.
I believe operations like this should be automatically authorised by the UN; ie. if a state can show that certain conditions are met and promise that the mission’s mandate is limited in scope in certain ways, then that state can inform the UN so that the intervention can be declared legal; (it would then be for other states to have that declaration overturned if it is somehow not so, such as an invasion or landgrab.)
Providing stability in domestic chaos is one thing; active regime-change is quite another, to say nothing of the fact that no such justification was even made in the case of Iraq.
France, Canada, and Haiti’s Caribbean neighbors (except Cuba I presume) are also backing intervention. Canadian troops actually went in before the US. Marines! This is not that unilateral. Of course Bush’s delayed involvement is another issue.
Make sure no one flees the island and lands in Miami. Hang around long enough that a semblance of government is in place.
The Canadian one is to look like we’re doing something, keep the Haitian community in Montreal quiet and bail after sending the RCMP in to train the new police/thugs.
What hypocrisy? Aristide, for all his faults, was elected reasonably democratically and still had some serious level of popular support. If supporting democracy were really a goal, it would make sense to help suppress a revolt against it. Further, the lack of economic value of the place makes it easier, not harder, to avoid peacekeeping being seen as imperialism, which to me is one of the major problems with unilateralism.
This is hardly the only time the US has sent troops there over the last century or more, and it probably won’t be the last either. The problem may not be fixable, just containable.
No, Aristide had become an obstacle to any resolution. It may have been cold, but it was neccessary to any political settlement not involving machine guns. There may yet be machine guns involved, but we’ll see.
It’s to Aristide’s credit that he agreed to step down voluntarily.
“Voluntarily” is a weird word to use here. At what point would you have desribed it as involuntary, considering that he resigned only when it became clear that his life was in imminent danger?
And if Aristotle is an obstacle to a resolution, I’d hate to know what you consider the drug lords who are taking over the country to be.
He wasn’t great, but we’re not working with a country with a sterling history of democracy and human rights, here. You don’t shoot the dog that keeps the wolves at bay.
A lot of people wouldn’t have the guts to do even that. They’d cling to the fragments of power until they lost all their fingers to cling with.
But the plain fact of the matter, that I think Bush knows, is that Aristide isn’t capable of helping any more. His opponents will have to be beaten down, but this way clears a path for new face to lead. It’s as much PR as it is practical. But Aristide was not exactly a master of politics or warcraft, so his removal isn’t going to hurt things.
I expect Bush has probably already found a promising new politician - someone associated with, but not close, to Aristide, who has a firmer grasp on the situation than the dear departed leader.
That politico will be quietly supported by US diplomacy to individual important ploticians, in Aristide’s camp. Incidentally, there will be a few forceful demonstrations of US power, like moving a marine group into the embassy. That will make the opposition blanch. Moreover, it will reinforce the spines of the new old government.
Politics is a dirty game, but someone has to play it.
It is a dirty game, but you don’t always have to play dirty.
For example, I’ll provisionally agree with your predictions: it is indeed likely that the US will follow patterns set in other western hemisphere countries and choose its own leader to groom, someone favorable to US interests. By the last phrase, however, I’m not referring to democracy or human rights, but rather to military and financial interests. My fear, based on US history in the region (combined, Shodan, with the history and philosophy of the current administration), is that they’ll throw their weight behind a right bastard of a politician, someone who’ll provide financial and military stability at the cost of human rights and democratic process.
If I’m wrong – if Bush provides substantial support to someone who actively promotes human rights and democratic process – then I’ll eat my words. But so far he’s not done so, but has only interfered in events to facilitate the victory of drug lords and vicious criminals over the less-offensive Aristide (no angel himself, I repeat).
Heh. I take it you’ve never got down and tried to play, then?
The popint of taking Aristide out was not merely a matter of Aristide. It was also a matter of timing. If we allowed him to remain he would have bumbled his way into a loss sooner or later, and taken down a lot of people with him. Better to act now before the rebels consolidate their control.
