Ten Years After (New Yorker Piece on Haiti)

[mobuto]

In 1994, President Clinton sent twenty thousand American troops to Haiti for a novel purpose in the history of American military interventions: to restore an elected government to power. Promoting democracy has become one of the Bush Administration’s main justifications for the war in Iraq, but ten years ago invading Haiti on behalf of democracy was a deeply unpopular decision.

At first, the unusual display of political courage was rewarded with success: President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who had been elected by a wide margin in 1990 but was overthrown by a military junta several months later, was reinstated with almost no American casualties. The Haitian military, which had plagued the country with coups and violent misrule almost continuously since Haiti gained independence from France, in 1804, was disbanded.

So were the paramilitary death squads, known as the Front for the Advancement and Progress of Haiti, whose acronym sounds like “hit” in French. American and international forces began to retrain Haiti’s notoriously corrupt police. Within two years, almost all the American troops were gone. In this country, people’s attention had already moved on.

{snip}

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/?040301ta_talk_packer

[zbdent]

1. Yes, and one soldier killed in a drive-by shooting at a toll booth

(months after the bloodless return of the rightly elected President) was heralded as the end of the world, as a bright and shining beacon of the failure of Clinton's abilities.