19869: Durban: Letter with comment from Wash Post (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Lance Durban - MANUTECH <lpdurban@yahoo.com>

Just got following thoughts from a relative who comments on a
letter in today's Washington Post... both his comments and the
letter are pasted on below as I thought the group might
appreciate them...
                            Lance Durban



By all means let's have a thorough inquiry to determine whether
U.S. funding was consciously directed to the anti-democratic
insurgents. Pending the results of such inquiry, we should
neither credit or discredit partisan viewpoints on the subject.
And in the meantime does the U.S. deserve any kudos at all for
the massive, some might say undeserved spending to improve
Haiti?

I enjoyed this letter to the editor of this morning's Washington
Post for three of it's propositions:

1.  That foreign policy is not social work as practiced by
    the Clintonites;

2.  The fundamental necessity of an attitude among the
    (Haitian) populace that leads to the institutionalization
    of the rule of law.  And doesn't the cloak of
    victimihood and tendency to blame America first really
    serve mostly to forestall Haitian responsibility and
    progress?

3.  Change in Haiti will result from "internal dynamics', not
    from without...just as in Taiwan and S. Korea.

Here's the letter as it appears in the Washington Post 3/5/04:


How to Build Democracies
     In his March 2 op-ed piece, "Haiti in America," David
Ignatius contrasted the assimilation of Haitians in Florida into
the American community with the inability of Haitians in Haiti
(and Iraqis and Palestinians) to forge stable, modern,
democratic societies. He noted that America's secret is its
openness to new people and new ideas, and argued that America's
greatest weakness is its difficulty in sharing those gifts with
the rest of the world.

In considering this an American weakness, Mr. Ignatius shares
with both current neoconservatives and former Clintonite
practitioners of foreign-policy-as-social-work the illusion that
America can create stable, modern, democratic societies. U.S.
intervention can bring stability to a country, but  democracies
are created from within, and only when a critical mass is
reached that includes a certain standard of living, a large
enough middle class and Two prime examples of this are South
Korea and Taiwan. Both were highly authoritarian and both have
evolved into stable, relatively democratic societies. They did
so due to internal dynamics, not as a result of the United
States either imposing democracy on them or delivering
chest-thumping lectures about democracy and human rights.

WILLIAM H. BARKELL

Arlington