Fw: [A-List] New Boss, Worse than the Old Boss

["Christopher Black" <bar@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

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From: "Bill Totten" <shimogamo@attglobal.net>
To: "Totten Bill Notes" <BillTottenNotes@yahoogroups.com>; "Ugly New World"
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Sent: Monday, March 08, 2004 5:49 PM
Subject: [A-List] New Boss, Worse than the Old Boss



Bush Colonizes Haiti

by Ted Rall

Rall.com (March 02 2004)

The Bush White House is once again up to its hips in regime change, this
time as the architect of the 33rd coup d'etat in Haiti's tortured history.
Backgrounds of the perpetrators and their relationship with the United
States and the regime of ousted dictator Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier
have been hard to come by in the increasingly incurious US media, yet
historical parallels abound when comparing tactics used against Haiti and
those applied to Afghanistan, Venezuela, even Florida. The Bushies' top
dogs, after all, got their start serving Presidents Ford and Nixon.
Successful pit bulls like Rumsfeld and Cheney have little reason to update
their repertoire of dirty tricks.

Jean-Bertrand Aristide fled to exile in the Central African Republic on
February 29 as an alliance of fired right-wing army officers and shadowy
former officials of the Duvalier dictatorship led their guerilla militias
into the capital of Port-au-Prince. It was the second time that the
democratically elected president, who promised to enforce civilian rule over
the military, end corruption, and reduce the nation's vast disparity of
wealth, had been deposed under a President Bush. Aristide, a former priest
whose support among the vast slums had led him to a landslide win at the
polls, was forced out by a similar bunch of army officers back in 1991.
After US troops restored him to power in 1994, President Clinton called his
return "a victory for freedom around the world".

Indeed, Aristide rewarded our faith in him by voluntarily stepping aside
when he lost the 1996 election. The charismatic ex-priest won his second
election in November 2000. Democracy finally seemed to be taking root.

But when the official count showed him winning 92 percent of the vote,
events began to eerily echo the 2000 election crisis here in the United
States. A new rightist opposition alliance, the Democratic Convergence,
claimed that the Haitian Senate elections had been rigged with a view
towards creating a one-party state. (International observers called the
elections fair.) The DC and former army officers refused to recognize the
Aristide government.

After assuming power in February 2001, Aristide found that his posse of
political goons, les chimeres, were powerless against his most formidable
political foe: the Bush Administration. "Many administration officials",
reports the New York Times, "saw him as little more than a leftist leader of
a country whose principal exports were refugees in rickety boats and
transshipments of Colombian cocaine". At the same time, the International
Monetary Fund was trying to subject Haiti to a "structural adjustment" plan
that would have radically curtailed social services in order to redirect
government revenues towards paying off its foreign debts and increased the
viability of its existing free trade zones for American transnational
corporations hoping to use the nation as a tax shelter. The US and IMF asked
international aid agencies to impose a virtual economic embargo upon Haiti,
crippling the economy and leading to the crisis that sparked the coup. It
was time to take out the leftist ally of the last Democratic president.

Tearing a page from the playbook of the US Supreme Court - Republican
justices ran out the clock in Bush v. Gore, deliberating four days so that
there wouldn't be sufficient time to complete the Florida ballot recount -
the Bush Administration refused Aristide's frantic requests to send US
troops to restore order to Haiti. "There is, frankly, no enthusiasm right
now for sending in military or police forces to put down the violence that
we are seeing", said Colin Powell. But hours after Aristide left for
Africa - "kidnapped", according to Congresswoman Maxine Waters, by American
commandos - the marines were on their way.

Bush, editorialized the Times, "withheld the Marines until Mr Aristide
yielded power, leaving Haitians at the mercy of some of the country's most
vicious criminal gangs".

The Bushies have learned from their failed attempt to overthrow President
Hugo Chavez. Rather than rely on a pathetic grab bag of businessmen and
fringe political hacks to pull off a civilian putsch as they did in
Venezuela, the CIA directly funded and armed Duvalier-affiliated thugs to
seize control militarily. US Special Forces-trained ex-coup leader Guy
Philippe and leaders of the CIA-backed paramilitary FRAPH death squad,
supplied with thousands of US-made M-16 and M-60 rifles as well as
rocket-propelled grenades and tank-busting artillery shells (most likely at
US taxpayer expense), invaded Haiti from bases in the Dominican Republic.
"Congress needs to seriously look at what the involvement of the Defense
Intelligence Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency has been in this
operation", says Ira Kurzban, a Miami lawyer representing the Aristide
government. "Because it is a military operation. It's not a rag-tag group of
liberators, as has often been put in the press in the last week or two."

Amazingly, Bush's spokesman argues that there's nothing undemocratic about
deposing a popularly elected president. "There are times when people lose
faith ... in the ability of their leaders to govern effectively, and this is
what happened", says Scott McClellan. He called the coup "a democratic and
constitutional solution that we achieved working with our international
partners".

Bold words from a guy whose boss, an illegitimate coup leader, has himself
lost the faith of the American people.

Few deny that Aristide fell short of his self-styled image as the patron
saint of Caribbean democracy. He relied on cocaine trafficking to prop up
the economy and violence to silence political opponents. But there are
historical parallels here that give pause. In Afghanistan, Bush traded in
the world's worst government, the Taliban, for something still worse -
anarchy and civil war. Chaos and rape gangs replaced Saddam Hussein's Iraq.
Haitians, it seems, may be in for a similarly bad bargain.

(Ted Rall is the editor of the new anthology of alternative cartoons
"Attitude 2: The New Subversive Social Commentary Cartoonists", containing
interviews with and cartoons by 21 of America's best cartoonists. Ordering
information is available at amazon.com.)

Copyright 2004 Ted Rall

http://www.uexpress.com/tedrall/

-----

The Ouster of Democracy

In Haiti, Washington confirmed a foreign policy that is driven by
self-interest and delivered through force

by Gary Younge

The Guardian (March 08 2004)

"All books about all revolutions begin with a chapter that describes the
decay of tottering authority or the misery and sufferings of people", wrote
Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski in his book, Shah of Shahs, about the
Iranian revolution. "They should begin with a psychological chapter, one
that shows how a harassed man breaks his terror and stops being afraid. This
unusual process demands illuminating."

The tottering, and now toppled authority of the former Haitian president,
Jean-Bertrand Aristide, has been well chronicled over the past month. The
story of the psychological effect his departure had on the Haitian people
has been less comprehensively observed. There is good reason for this.
Despite the overthrow of the president and the outpouring of rebel
supporters in the streets, the Haitian people are pretty much where they
have been for the past 200 years - in a desperately impoverished country
where political violence is sustained, if not encouraged, by foreign
intervention and crushes any hope of reconciliation, democracy and economic
prosperity.

In revolutions the people take centre stage and the leaders follow - the
popular will outpaces and overpowers the established institutions and moulds
something essentially new from the old. But over the past week the Haitian
people have been not actors but spectators in their own destiny, watching
one band of armed thugs, who supported a leader with diminishing democratic
legitimacy, replaced by another band of armed thugs, who support a movement
with none at all, with the help of foreign governments. The death squad
leaders, army officials and US marines are back. There are no longer any
democratic violations to criticise because there is no longer any democracy.
What happened was not a revolution but a coup. And no simple domestic
overthrow either. This was the kind of regime change that the French and the
US could sign up to.

The circumstances of Aristide's departure remain under dispute. Aristide
says a huge number of US and Haitian "agents" came to his house and forced
him on to a plane that eventually landed in the Central African Republic.
The US says Aristide was resigned to exile once it was understood that he
could no longer hold on to power, his life was in danger and bloodshed was
inevitable. What cannot be seriously contested is that Aristide did not go
voluntarily in any meaningful sense, and that the Bush administration was
the primary instrument in his removal. It is debatable, yet doubtful,
whether the Haitian rebels could have achieved his removal on their own.
Whoever the US came into protect, it was not the Haitian people. Even as
they were advising people to stay out of the country because it was not safe
they were sending Haitian boat people, fleeing the crisis, back home.

You do not have to be an apologist for Aristide or an anti-American
conspiracy theorist to grasp this. Just follow the quotes from the US
secretary of state, Colin Powell, over the past month and the policy shifts
are clear. On February 12, Powell told the Senate foreign relations
committee: "The policy of the administration is not regime change [this will
come as news to the Iraqis], President Aristide is the elected president of
Haiti".

On February 17, he said. "We cannot buy into a proposition that says the
elected president must be forced out of office by thugs and those who do not
respect law and are bringing terrible violence to the Haitian people". By
February 26, after a week of shopping around, he decided to buy into it
after all. "[Aristide] is the democratically elected president, but he has
had difficulties in his presidency, and I think ... whether or not he is
able to effectively continue as president is something that he will have to
examine". A day later he was selling it, arguing that Aristide, having "the
interests of the Haitian people at heart", should "examine the situation he
is in and make a careful examination of how best to serve the Haitian people
at this time".

Just 48 hours later, after the coup, he was asking the rest of the world to
wear it. He explained why the US had not been prepared to go into Haiti and
support "an individual who may have been elected democratically but was not
governing effectively or democratically". Were it not for the fact that
Aristide has at least won a couple of elections, Powell could have been
talking about President Bush.

Powell argued that Aristide, who had presented his resignation letter not to
his constitutional successor but to the US government, had done the
appropriate, wise and patriotic thing by resigning. The crucial factor that
turned the rebels from "thugs" to a government in waiting in Powell's
rhetoric was that they took over the second city, Cap Haitien. Once the US
sensed that the side they wanted to win could win, they simply switched
sides.

The principal message to the Haitian people from Aristide's ouster is that
force works. If you do not like the elected leader of the country, start a
rebellion and refuse to negotiate. If it is strong enough, and its politics
amenable enough, the Americans will come and finish the job for you. With 33
coups in 200 years, this was a message the Haitian people did not need.

Two key lessons emerge from this, which go beyond Haiti. The first is that
military force is not just the most important element in US foreign policy,
it is the beginning and the end of that policy. For the past 10 years, since
the US restored Aristide to power, it could have trained the Haitian police
and judiciary, invested in projects that shore up civil society and help
create a democratic culture, increased aid and encouraged fair trade - all
of which would have given Haiti a fighting chance of building a sustainable
democracy. Instead, it imposed conditions by the IMF and the World Bank,
followed it up with an embargo on the poorest country in the western
hemisphere, and when none of that worked, sent in the marines against a
nation with no army.

The second is that the US supports democracy when democracy supports the US.
When it is inconvenient, as in Aristide's case, Washington will turn its
back on it in a heartbeat. Faced with a clear choice of either sending the
marines in to protect an elected president, however flawed, or an armed
insurrection, they chose the insurrection because they didn't like the
president.

"We can't be called upon, expected or required to intervene every time there
is violence against a failed leader", said the State Department
spokesperson, Richard Boucher, last week. "We can't spend our time running
around the world and the hemisphere saving people who botched their chance
at leadership".

However, the US can be called upon not to intervene to promote violence
against elected leaders. This latest intervention did not prevent a
bloodbath - more people were killed on the day Aristide left than on any
other - and crushed what was left of democracy. Instead of breaking the
spiral of violence, it has given it a new lease of life. Given that kind of
legacy, the US should indeed stop "running around the world" to "save
people". The Bush administration is doing a good job of botching leadership
at home. There is no need to export it.

g.younge@guardian.co.uk>g.younge@guardian.co.uk

http://www.guardian.co.uk/guardian/todays_stories/idx/0,14041,-103677,00.html

-----

Will Chavez be Next After Aristide?

by Dr Michael Derham, University of Northumbria

The Guardian (March 08 2004)

Peter Hallward makes excellent points about Haiti ("Why they had to crush
Aristide", March 2), but the close parallel with Venezuela is rarely
mentioned. President Hugo Chavez, who assumed power in 1999, has also
annoyed the US by being very open and honest (and popular). The US has
funded an increasingly dangerous opposition movement, again featuring a
minority of failed politicians from previous governments, the "business"
community and corrupt elements who pillaged Venezuela's oil wealth from 1958
to 1998, leaving 80% of the country in poverty.

The US and Britain supported a bloody coup in 2002 in which Chavez was
kidnapped, after refusing to resign. In this case, however, he returned
after popular protests overthrew the illegitimate puppet government.

The minority opposition in Venezuela, just like in Haiti, is falsely
claiming recent electoral irregularities. It is now calling for the US to
send in troops. It has already organised a four-month "bosses' strike" to
try to cause economic collapse.

As in Haiti, the opposition is totally lacking in legitimacy and cohesion
and has no programme, besides a desire to remove Chavez. The undermining of
his presidency began before he even took up office. He is the single most
popular figure in Venezuelan politics; and his human rights record is
exemplary by comparison with the 2002 coup government and the 1958-98
regime.

The US is once again involved in the promotion of subversion and terrorism
in Latin America. It seems it is again trying to install thugs and murderers
as its puppets in government. History is repeating itself.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/letters/story/0,3604,1164295,00.html