[News] The U.S. Needs to Get the Hell Out of Haiti

[Anti-Imperialist News]

https://www.discourseblog.com/p/the-us-needs-to-get-the-hell-out?r=5xzkz&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email
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*The U.S. Needs to Get the Hell Out of Haiti.
**The White House is spearheading a military intervention in Haiti. This 
is a horrible idea.*

by Jack Mirkinson, Discourse Blog, Oct 27



Haiti is in crisis. Fuel prices are out of control, ruthless gangs have 
taken much of society hostage, and the ruling administration is a 
corrupt, illegitimate farce. Cholera is spreading throughout the country.

Haitians have taken to the streets in their thousands to protest this 
horrifying state of affairs. But the international response is one you 
might be familiar with: bring in the troops.

The U.S., Canada, and Mexico are leading a push at the United Nations to 
send a multinational military force to Haiti; on Wednesday, the Miami 
Herald reported that the White House expects “the dimensions of a force 
to be settled by early November.” It’s unclear whether U.S. troops will 
be involved directly in this effort, but Biden’s fingerprints will be 
all over whatever army descends on Haiti.

Some are welcoming the prospect. The Washington Post editorial board, 
which has been clamoring to put troops on the ground, cheered last week, 
“At last, the U.S. edges toward intervening in Haiti.”

There are two things wrong with this sentiment. First, the idea that the 
U.S. has not been intervening already in Haiti is ridiculous. Secondly, 
it is precisely because of that intervention that Haiti finds itself in 
such turmoil and misery right now. Haitians desperately need less 
outside involvement in their lives, not more.

The history of American-backed catastrophe in Haiti stretches back 
centuries. Over the last 220 years, the U.S.: refused to recognize 
Haiti’s independence from France in 1804 (slaves overthrowing their 
oppressors was not really something Thomas Jefferson wanted to endorse); 
looked the other way as France imposed crippling debts on its former 
colony that Haiti has never recovered from; stole resource-rich lands 
directly from Haiti; invaded and brutally occupied Haiti for nearly 20 
years; supported a string of tyrannical rulers; created a CIA-backed 
“intelligence unit” that served as a drug trafficking terror squad; 
supported a coup that overthrew Haiti’s first democratically-elected 
president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide; fomented a second coup against 
Aristide after he won another democratic election; spearheaded a United 
Nations “peacekeeping” force whose troops were responsible for mass 
sexual abuse and a cholera epidemic; and meddled in every single Haitian 
election of the past dozen years, inevitably to prop up discredited 
crooks with no legitimate claim to run the country.

That brings us roughly to now. In recent weeks, acting Prime Minister 
Ariel Henry—who was blatantly installed by the U.S. and its allies 
without any democratic backing after the assassination of the late 
U.S.-backed President Jovenel Moïse in 2021, and who is now ruling 
indefinitely by decree—has issued a public call for outside assistance 
as Haiti melts down. You might think that Henry’s clear defiance of the 
will of the people, or his calamitous decision to raise the price of 
fuel, or the credible reports that tie him to his predecessor’s killing, 
would render his request for U.S.-led intervention, at the very least, 
suspect. But it’s a good enough excuse for the corporate media and the 
so-called “international community” to be able to act like a legitimate 
Haitian government is sending a distress signal. Massive protests in 
opposition to Henry’s call have erupted, but what everyday Haitians 
think is clearly not important enough for the U.S. to care about. And so 
the boots are set, once again, to touch down on Haitian soil.

The preceding paragraphs hopefully made it clear why this is such a bad 
idea. The U.S. has been intervening in Haiti since time immemorial, and 
the results have been unceasingly horrendous. Haitians have paid a huge 
price for the constant American desire to control their country, and 
there is nothing about this latest push that suggests that further 
interference by the U.S. and its allies will suddenly become a good 
thing for Haiti.

Even the people backing a military intervention barely seem to believe 
it will do any good. Here’s what the Post editorial board had to say in 
a recent editorial:

"Largely owing to Washington’s puppeteering, Haitian Prime Minister 
Ariel Henry was sworn in in July 2021 after the assassination of 
President Jovenel Moïse. His unelected, illegitimate government has been 
a predictable disaster. It has either enabled or promoted the country’s 
dissolution into criminal gang fiefdoms allied with the country’s elite. 
It has made no serious attempt to prepare the country for elections, nor 
undertaken good-faith negotiations with Haitian political parties and 
civil society. It has demonstrated its impotence by ceding control of 
the capital, Port-au-Prince, to mounting violence.

[…] No one should take lightly the prospect of an international 
intervention in Haiti. Such efforts in recent decades, by the Clinton 
administration and the United Nations, have provided few long-term 
improvements. A U.N. peacekeeping force that was deployed for 13 years, 
until 2017, provided a modicum of stability but was responsible for 
introducing what became one of the world’s worst recent outbreaks of 
cholera. Some of its troops sexually abused Haitian girls and women.

That’s a cautionary tale. Yet weighed against the cratering prospects of 
a failed state whose main export is asylum seekers, many Haitians would 
support — if with misgivings — the chance at restoring some semblance of 
normal life. For an intervention to succeed, however, it’s not enough to 
suppress the chaos. New hope for Haiti must involve a path toward 
democracy — and a transition toward a legitimate government with popular 
support."

So, to review: the person who was installed by the U.S. is awful, 
previous interventions haven’t worked, even the people who might want an 
intervention would only do so with “misgivings,” and thus the obvious 
solution is…intervene again. Sure, makes sense. (You’ve also got to love 
the blatantly racist line “a failed state whose main export is asylum 
seekers”—nicely done, folks.)
Beyond the Post’s inability to even buy its own nonsense, its editorial 
also rests on a typical fallacy: that the U.S. is concerned about the 
welfare of the Haitian people. The U.S. has never been concerned about 
the welfare of the Haitian people. It is concerned about Haiti’s impact 
on the American global project. The chief goal of American foreign 
policy is to ensure that every inch of the territory it feels divinely 
entitled to dominate stays within its orbit, no matter the cost to the 
people who get in the way of that mission.

The problem the U.S. confronts in Haiti is not that the government is 
helping impoverish its people, or that the leaders the U.S. has imposed 
on the country are little more than Mafia-controlled puppets, or that 
Haitians are suffering the consequences of the sordid history I covered 
a little while ago. It’s that things have gotten too out of control. The 
violence is spiraling. Henry is no longer able to maintain even the 
pretense of stability. Ordinary Haitians are rising up too much. It’s 
the kind of situation that could lead to something resembling a 
democratic revolution—and that is not a risk the U.S. is willing to 
take. Instead, it wants to keep putting its thumb on the scale—and if it 
has to use force to do that, then that’s what will happen.

Here’s a simple suggestion: rather than adding another fiasco to the 
pile, maybe the United States and all the other countries supporting it 
should get the hell out of Haiti, give back all the money they stole 
from Haiti over the centuries, and finally, truly let the Haitian people 
decide their future for themselves.
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