19744: radtimes: Haiti: A Case History (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: radtimes <resist@best.com>

Haiti: A Case History

http://antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=2082

The failure of the interventionist project

March 3, 2004
by Justin Raimondo

How many times has the U.S. "restored order" in the "republic" of Haiti? I
would say none, since there never was any order to restore: only brief
pauses punctuating the normal flow of chaos. The country has always been
ungovernable, and will continue to be in the foreseeable future. So what,
pray tell, is the point of sending in the Marines yet again?

The great problem with interventionism abroad is the same one faced by
central planners on the home front: the resulting disaster always requires
more intervention to "fix" the problem caused by meddling in the first
place. A good example, and one that I hope will sufficiently challenge if
not enrage my left-wing readers, is rent control: housing is scarce, and
costly, because demand is high. The rent controllers intervene, fix prices
at a certain level, further limiting the supply of available housing – and
causing acute shortages. The same principle of "blowback" operates in the
foreign policy realm: we intervene in the name of pursuing "American
interests," establishing "democracy," fighting terrorism, or whatever, and
the result is the exact opposite of the intended result. During the cold
war era we intervened in Afghanistan, armed the Islamist Mujahideen, and
essentially created a monster that would come back to bite us some 20 years
later.

That the same pattern has recurred in Haiti several times over the course
of the 20th century is perhaps due to its geographical proximity to the
continental United States. Enveloped since its inception in a penumbra of
political and financial exploitation disguised as moral and economic
uplift, the nascent Haitian nation was smothered in its crib.

When President Clinton ordered 20,000 troops into Haiti to "uphold
democracy" and install Jean-Bertrand Aristide in the Presidential Palace,
he was trying to undo the results of decades of U.S. intervention on behalf
of "Papa Doc" Duvalier, a dictator propped up by U.S. subsidies, whose
style of rule was summed up by his remark that "I know the Haitian people
because I am the Haitian people." But U.S. meddling predated the Papa
Doc/cold war era, with the roots of the present crisis stemming from the
early part of the last century.

Haiti has, much to its misfortune, been considered our front yard since at
least 1910, when the National Bank of Haiti, capitalized by the French,
went broke, and the National City Bank of New York moved into the vacuum,
taking over de facto administration of the Haitian treasury. U.S. railroad
interests soon followed, and it wasn't too long before a host of American
business interests, including W. R. Grace Corp., lobbied President Woodrow
Wilson to demand the revenue coming in from Haitian customs as repayment
for the government's debt: in effect, turning over the administration of
Haiti's independent government to the U.S.

A key mover and shaker behind this interaction of private capital and
public policy was Roger L. Farnham, vice president of the National City
Bank of New York, as well as Haiti's National Bank and National Railway.
Farnham held the threat of U.S. military intervention over the emerging
Haitian democracy like a veritable Sword of Damocles, demanding that the
custom house revenues be turned over to National City Bank, without much
success – until the outbreak of World War I.

Farnham raised the specter of German influence in Haiti – a small group of
German businessmen had established a tiny enclave – and this was the
pretext, in 1914, for a detachment of U.S. Marines to come ashore and
relieve Haiti's National Bank of two strongboxes containing half a million
dollars in Haitian currency – which was promptly transported to a New York
City safe deposit box. The Haitian government was now literally the captive
of the New York banks: it was a policy of annexation by financial abduction.

In 1915, Haiti went through one of its periodic eruptions of volcanic
violence, when the tyrant Vilbrun Guillaume Sam was overthrown in a
revolution, and Wilson intervened to make Haiti safe for democracy – and
the New York banks. A 19-year occupation ensued, which even Farnham
realized was a brutal and counterproductive injustice. To get some
historical perspective, check out this fascinating piece from the November
9. 1924 issue of The Nation:

"How Haiti was reduced to the state of a conquered province; how the
process was prepared in Washington long before intervention began; how
little excuse there was for American intervention, and how little America
has accomplished there apart from killing Haitians – these things have
become a matter of public record, as told by the men responsible for the
intervention and as revealed in the United States Navy's secret
dispatch-book, in the hearings before the Senate Commission on Haiti and
Santo Domingo, Medill McCormick, chairman, these past weeks. The newspapers
for some reason have been silent, but here are the facts as they have
become part of the record."

The brutality of the occupation gave rise to the Haiti-Santo Domingo
Independence Society, as a direct outgrowth the Anti-Imperialist League's
opposition to the conquest of the Philippines. The early leaders of the
NAACP, as well as The Nation under Oswald Garrison Villard's tutelage, were
the leaders of this movement, which included a significant libertarian
element. What is interesting is that they took the exact opposite position
of today's liberals and African-American leaders by staunchly opposing U.S.
intervention root and branch.

Reverend Jesse Jackson berates the Bush administration for not intervening
early enough to save Aristide's "democratic" thug-ocracy: the U.S., he
says, "has a history of intervening on the wrong side." He wants us to
intervene on the "right side."

Jackson, the Congressional Black Caucus, and their fellow liberal Democrats
dutifully echo the Wilsonian arrogance of Franklin Delano Roosevelt who
once remarked:

"You know I had something to do with running a couple of little republics.
The facts are that I wrote Haiti's constitution myself and if I do say it,
I think it is a pretty good constitution."

The occasion, as Jim Zwick points out in a lucid essay on Haiti and the
anti-imperialist tradition, was the election of 1920, when Roosevelt was
running for vice president. It was, remarks Zwick, "one of the more notable
gaffes of the campaign."

Also a revealing one. The mentality of liberal interventionism is not,
either in principle or effect, all that different from its neoconservative
first cousin. It is merely a question of style, and scope. The various
"humanitarian" interventions undertaken by the Clinton administration –
Bosnia, Kosovo, Somalia, Haiti, et al – were small incursions undertaken
with no guiding strategic orientation other than opportunity and caprice.

The neocons, on the other hand, operate on a much grander scale, and their
ideology determines a relatively narrow strategic focus on the Middle East.
It is the difference between "soft" and "hard" Wilsonianism, with the
former cultivating an image of genteel multilateralism and the latter
leaning toward an imperious unilateralism. Whatever their other
differences, however, both the Bush administration and Jesse Jackson agree
that Haiti is, somehow, our responsibility.

This is true only in the sense that we are responsible for drawing the
right lessons from nearly a century of failed interventionism in Haiti. How
many times must we rescue that nation from incipient chaos before we
realize that not even Sisyphus, who displeased the gods, was deserving of
such a fate? And what sin, pray tell, have we committed?

Hubris, a sacrilegious arrogance, was considered a grave sin by the ancient
Greeks, and it was often punished directly by the gods, as in the case of
Sisyphus, and others. Returned to Olympus, in this, the age of pagan
decadence, it could be that, with Haiti, the gods are punishing the Bush
administration for its "unipolar" conceit.

I will not go into the various permutations of the current crisis, which
are already breaking out and promising a long and possibly quite bloody
stand-off between rival gangs loosely disguised as political factions. I
will only note the call-up of fresh National Guard units to Iraq, and the
prospect of another interminable and ultimately futile occupation. As a
case history of the interventionist project, the story of the American
attempt to implant "democracy" in Haitian soil is one of massive crop failure.

The ideologues who agitated for what they call the "liberation" of Iraq
predicted "falling dominoes" throughout the Middle East as a result. It
serves them right that the first domino to fall is not Syria, or Iran, but
… Haiti. After the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. is the
rescuer of last resort when it comes to "failed states." Although I'm
waiting for some leftist type to come up with the requisite "it's all about
oil" mantra, I'm not aware of any oil reserves to speak of in Haiti. Here
is a U.S. intervention born of pure conceit.

As for the claims by Aristide and Rev. Jackson that what happened in Haiti
amounted to a U.S. "coup," I have my doubts. At any rate, the idea that
Aristide was "abducted" by the U.S. military instead of being driven out by
his own thuggish ex-supporters seems dubious, at best: according to Rep.
Charles Rangel – hardly a Bush shill – this impression on Aristide's part
is somewhat "subjective." To say the very least.

Not that the U.S. is above that sort of thing, God knows, but due to the
somewhat stretched-to-the-limit condition of U.S. forces overseas, and
Bush's opposition to Haitian nation-building in the 2000 election, the idea
of a U.S.-engineered coup seems counterintuitive. Why bother with Haiti,
when this administration has so much else on its plate? No new war in '04 –
that's what Karl Rove would like, at any rate.

But that's just the problem with running a global empire: we don't control
events. They control us.

.