It certainly should come as no surprise that this administration has contributed to yet another loss of hope for Democracy, only this time it involves one of our neighbor islands.
The Article can be found at the New York Times
Mixed U.S. Signals Helped Tilt Haiti Toward Chaos
More below:
According to
Brian Dean Curran
Mr. Curran accused the democracy-building group, the International Republican Institute, of trying to undermine the reconciliation process after disputed 2000 Senate elections threw Haiti into a violent political crisis.
Also we have from the
Global Policy Forum there is an article by Max Blumenthal which is quite interesting. Here is a small part from that article.
On Feb. 8, 2001, the federally funded International Republican Institute's (IRI) senior program officer for Haiti, Stanley Lucas, appeared on the Haitian station Radio Tropicale to suggest three strategies for vanquishing Haiti's president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
Lucas and IRI, a nonprofit political group backed by powerful Republicans close to the Bush administration, did more than talk. Throughout the last six years, IRI, whose stated mission is to "promote the practice of democracy" abroad, conducted a $3 million party-building program in Haiti, training Aristide's political opponents, uniting them into a single bloc and, according to a former U.S. ambassador there, encouraging them to reject internationally sanctioned power-sharing agreements in order to heighten Haiti's political crisis.
The recent political turmoil in Haiti and in Venezuela (where the Bush White House tacitly supported a coup against President Hugo Chavez in 2002, and where IRI also has a murky history of involvement) reflect a troubling pattern in the Bush administration's prevailing approach to the export of "democracy."
Meanwhile, the well-connected, smooth-talking Lucas acted as the Haitian version of Ahmed Chalabi, the Iraqi exile who helped neoconservatives in Washington promote the war against Saddam Hussein. Like Chalabi, Lucas ingratiated himself with powerful Republicans sympathetic to the concept of regime change in his native country and lobbied for increased funding to the opposition groups he advised and helped train.
According to Bob Maguire, a leading Haiti expert at Trinity College and former State Department official, Lucas' personal history raises serious questions about IRI's integrity. My comment: Remember this is the man (Lucas) our State Department was using in Haiti.
The role of figures like Lucas in the coup suggests a complex web of Republican connections to Aristide's ouster that may never be known.
With the insurgency sweeping toward the capital on Feb. 28, top Bush officials convened, but rather than send in troops to protect Aristide's government, they reversed their official position of support, asking Aristide to leave the country immediately under U.S. stewardship.
To be sure, Aristide was a corrupt, problematic leader -- but since his ouster, the situation in Haiti appears to have deteriorated to a point lower than at any moment during his tenure.
For the majority of Haitians who live on one meal and less than a dollar a day, regime change has only brought more violence, chaos and starvation.
The right-wing campaign to oust Aristide has its roots in the GOP's longstanding support for pro-U.S. dictators in Haiti. In 1971, President Nixon restored U.S. military aid to the brutal regime of dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier, whom he considered an anticommunist counterweight to Cuba.
From the beginning of its Haiti program, in direct contradiction of many of its own guidelines, IRI embraced reactionary political elements far more antidemocratic than Aristide.
IRI's Lucas began to sabotage the U.S. ambassador, Brian Dean Curran, a career diplomat and Clinton appointee who had evidence that Lucas was undermining diplomatic efforts to resolve Haiti's political crisis. Seeking to weaken Curran politically, Lucas spread destructive rumors about his personal life, according to a close associate of Curran's who asked to remain anonymous. A journalist with access to U.S. diplomats in Haiti offered a similar account.
While Aristide's time in office was riddled with corruption, the man was elected in an open Democratic election. The chances were very good that if the US had not boosted and supported the brutal opposition group through the use of the IRI group, that Haiti would have wound up with a much less corrupt government through the Election that was coming up but has now been post phoned several times since the ouster of Aristide.
So now we have seen the failure of this Administration to export Democracy to Iraq, plus
even though our Administration was actively supporting the Pro US Corporation party of
Bolivia we have seen the party of the poor win the recent election there. Guess the poor got tired of being ripped off year after year for the benefit of the Elite and the US Corporations.
Then we should not forget that this Administration also was very involved in pushing a failed attempt to over throw CHAVEZ in Venezuela which succeeded in pushing that country
away from us.
Now as a result of our country's policy in the Mid East we have just seen the Hamas win control of the Palestine Government.
Friends of mine in South Florida say that some of the Cubans are doing a lot of talking along the lines of renewed hope that the Bush Administration will step up the efforts to over throw Castro. According to my friends something has got them stirred up. Could it be that we are now going to become more involved in a forceful ousting of Castro?
I don't know about others, but I for one think that the US would be so much better off if
our wrong way President would stop trying to build nations of Democracy.