Home sick today and reading the news. Just wanted to spin out some of my thoughts regarding Haiti.
As unpopular as this opinion might be, I am fully accepting that some foreign policy maneuvers of any American administration are going to have to be covert and anti-Democratic.
Having lived abroad for some time in an emerging democracy, I understand that the way that power is negotiated, obtained and wielded out there in the world often does not happen in a way that would fit within the structures of the American system of values and ethics. Sometimes, for the sake of pure efficacy, we have to operate abroad by rules that we would not use at home.
So, I'm content, every now and then, to avert my gaze from things like American-sponsored coups, elections tampering, covert wars and other foreign policy actions that, frankly, are unsavory in the context of our traditions of openness and democratic participation.
Because of this, the allegations that Jean-Bertrand Aristide of Haiti may have been abducted by U.S. troops do not raise my ire in itself. What does worry me is the Bush Administration's record of screwing up scenarios exactly like this one, in Iraq, in Venezuela and just about everywhere we have tried to meddle in during the last three years.
How are we going to screw up this one?
Whether or not it ever comes to light that the U.S. was involved in the Aristide matter in Haiti, our reputation in this hemisphere is going to take another knock. Every point at which our international stature is decreased through Bush's foreign policy incompetence, we lose more of our domestic security.