19826: Durban: Wash Post Shacochis Op-Ed (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Lance Durban - MANUTECH <lpdurban@yahoo.com>
Our Military, Haiti's Hope

By Bob Shacochis
Thursday, March 4, 2004; Page A23


Once again Haiti has become an object lesson on how to make a
very bad omelet in the kitchen of democracy.



No matter how you dress it up in the finery of popular will,
Jean-Bertrand Aristide's resignation has the unpleasant
distinction of being Haitian Coup d'Etat No. 33, albeit a coup
artfully finessed by the home team -- Condoleezza Rice, Colin
Powell, Roger Noriega et al. An elected head of state whom three
American administrations could not abide has been removed.
Perhaps the only mystery here is why it took so long.

Almost 10 years ago, during the first days of the military
intervention, a piece of graffiti appeared on a ministry
building in downtown Port-au-Prince that caught my eye with its
ambiguity: "USA FOR 50 YEARS." Was this slogan, resonating with
imperial portent, anti-American, I asked Haitian friends. On the
contrary, they said: It was instead a plea that the Americans
stick around long enough -- two generations -- to ensure that
the seeds of democracy had a realistic opportunity to take root
and bloom and thrive.

For several weeks now, in the best tradition of Maoist
self-criticism, former Clinton administration officials have
stepped forward to offer a belated but honest explanation for
the current crisis: We didn't stay long enough. Yet one gets the
sense, listening to the current administration, that our
forthcoming commitment to digging the Haitians out of their
deep, deep hole will have a very short shelf life.

Democracy doesn't need songbirds; it needs bricklayers.
Tragically, the flaw that Aristide seemed to share most with
Presidents Clinton and Bush was a disregard for nation building,
a bipartisan reluctance to admit that the mechanisms of nation
building and the mechanisms of democracy are one and the same.
Free and fair elections, in the absence of any viable
infrastructure that institutionalizes the virtues of democracy,
will eventually prove meaningless. This equation is not beyond
the intellectual capacities of these three chiefs of state;
each, for his own reasons, shrugged it aside in Haiti, with
inevitable results. Presidents -- and candidates -- who declare
they have no intention of nation building aren't liars; they are
fools.

In the spring of 1995, in the middle of the American occupation,
Haitians were, in their own words, "suffering with hope,"
directed toward the only two entities that seemed worthy of it
at the time -- the American military and, of course, Aristide.
Aristide's great achievement was to convince the world that the
Haitian masses -- the peasants and slum dwellers -- were a
political force that could alter the cruel landscape of power on
the island. But what Aristide provided Haitians as an
inspiration, he took away from them as an autocratic and
increasingly corrupt leader: hope.

Similarly, the American military in Haiti, particularly the
Special Forces, were in a sense defeated by hope -- their own
desire to be part of an event that made the world a better
place. They left after 18 months with a keen awareness and
frustration that they were not allowed to do their job.
Originally deployed with a list of bad guys to neutralize,
capture or kill, the U.S. forces were soon given other guidance:
They were told, through the National Security Council and the
U.S. Embassy, that the terrorists they were rounding up were
actually the "loyal opposition," a legitimate political
counterweight to Aristide's Lavalas party.

Throughout the country, the Special Forces arrested an abundance
of thugs (well-known murderers, torturers, death squad gunmen
and narcotraffickers), shipped them to Port-au-Prince and then
watched in dismay as the detainees were, inexplicably, released,
to make their return 10 years later as armed insurgents taking
over the nation and boasting that they were the new Haitian
army. Aristide was right to call them terrorists.

American soldiers invested sweat and blood in the most basic
groundwork for democracy, organizing grass-roots elections for
town councils and local police forces and coaching rural
communities to be responsible for their own affairs, only to
have their civic accomplishments swept away by politicians in
both governments. Washington wanted to minimize involvement;
Aristide wouldn't tolerate the decentralization of his power.

In all fairness to the enigmatic and self-deluded Aristide, even
if he had been the type of leader his people so desperately
needed, he never had a chance to succeed, given what he was up
against. We Americans ruined Haiti's economy in 1994 and again
in 2000 with ill-conceived sanctions -- another version of
destroying the village to save it. We whitewashed the bad guys
and encouraged the decent men and women in our military to
collaborate with monsters. We walked out on the mission, handing
it off to another underfunded and disorganized U.N. task force.
The $3.2 billion we spent there was the cost of the intervention
and occupation, not the cost of democracy, which is a bit more
pricey. We sent as our emissaries diplomats and bureaucrats who
did not genuinely believe in the fundamental goodness and
potential of Haiti's long-suffering people, including an
ambassador who once told me, "Haitians are maggots."

Ultimately, in the post-Sept. 11 world, it doesn't matter if
most of Haiti's near-fatal wounds are self-inflicted, or if the
American response to Haiti's endless cascade of disasters has
been clumsy and disingenuous. The United States cannot afford to
have a failed state on its doorstep. This time, let the American
military do the job we thought it was meant to do in 1994. In
places without law or order, our servicemen and women provide
not only security and breathing room for political reform --
they are democracy's best craftsmen, and proud of it. This time,
walk away too soon and you can start printing the invitations
for Coup No. 34.

Bob Shacochis is the author of "The Immaculate Invasion," a
chronicle of the 1994-96 military intervention in Haiti.