On Thursday DM had a few words to say about the situation in Bill Clinton's Haiti. After a dissolve from street fighting Haitians...
"Of course that would be Haiti - land of the misspelled grafitti death threat. Hey folks let's cut to the chase. This is a revolution in Haiti, or maybe it's just their yearly Pro-Am machete festival, or maybe they got their voodoo all mixed up, I don't know. All I know is I'm glad I'm not there and it's very hard to tell the bad guys from the bad guys in the rarified heights of Haitian politics."
"You know when I first heard last week that France was threatening to send in troops I didn't like it. What happened to all that frog preening about asking the U.N. first? I mean they do this all the time. Every time a bribe-happy French multi-national company gets the slow pay treatment on a cheese and truffles bill someplace in west Africa suddenly the place is crawling with Jean Claude paratroopers two days later. We try to save the world from a madman in Iraq and we're the bad guys! You know what, I've thought about it and I say send the French into Haiti. Send the whole French army. Let the garlic chomping French taxpayer pay the bill to clean up this mess in Haiti. It's their former colony. I wanna see Pepe le Peacenik in Paris try to sort out a dirt poor country where everybody has HIV and a hundred years of furious pent up colonial rage. You're welcome to it. Haiti's an island too, so the French generals will need to come up with, for the first time I might add, a battle plan that doesn't involve retreating. Meanwhile we in America can all sit back at the U.N. and take pot shots at them. All's fair in love and world politics (kiss) mon cheri."
Okay, let's call it "Maxine Waters's" Haiti.
The CBC, and Rep. Waters pressured President Clinton to install Mr. Aristeed.
The Marines have landed. For better or worse, it appears we'll get another chance to intervene
Posted by: jk at March 2, 2004 06:58 AMBill Clinton's Haiti? The first attempts by the US to bring freedom and democracy to Haiti were by Teddy Roosevelt and new hero of the "new Wilsonianism" Woodrow Wilson himself. Didn't much work then, nor did Wilson's similiar forays into Cuba. Interesting that some societies are considered to far gone to join the free democracy. What was that comment by GWB about bringing freedom and democracy to everyone?
Posted by: Silence Dogood at March 2, 2004 10:22 AMI'm not a Haiti history scholar. My knowledge is limited to, "it used to be a French colony and President Clinton poured billions of our tax dollars into it for "stabilization." At the time I wondered just how long anyone expected this "stabilization" to last if industry and commerce did not follow close behind. Now we know the answer: about this long.
You referred to some societies being "considered" too far gone to have a free democracy, and to "bringing" freedom and democracy to everyone. But freedom to humans is kind of like water to horses. You can lead them to it but you can't MAKE them drink. (For freedom, that's an oxymoron.) My biggest criticism of Clinton was his thinking that THIS time it might work. Who is he, Charlie Brown?
Posted by: johngalt at March 4, 2004 04:41 PMStable and Haiti tend to be two words you don't see very often together. I agree totally with you on not being able to give people freedom or make them free. You can't even expect people to be grateful for long, they tend to soon hate outsiders no matter what great things they do. We built roads and schools in Cuba and controlled mosquitos and eradicated malaria between about 1900 and 1934 and look what it got us.
Posted by: Silence Dogood at March 5, 2004 05:09 PM