Press Action ::: Antiwar.com Gives Bush Benefit of the Doubt on Haiti

Wednesday, March 03, 2004

Antiwar.com Gives Bush Benefit of the Doubt on Haiti

By Mark Hand

If it cannot be plausibly argued that neoconservative interests are at the heart of a U.S. military action, then Antiwar.com is likely to tread more lightly in its criticism of a Bush administration foreign policy initiative. Following the 9/11 attacks, Antiwar.com turned up the pressure on neoconservatives in Washington for implementing policies that the website’s editors believe cater to the interests of the government of Israel, not the American people.

When all signs this week pointed to U.S. government involvement in a coup in a poor, black nation in the Western Hemisphere with no discernable ties to Israel, Antiwar.com cast suspicion on such claims because they didn’t fit its stereotype of the neoconservative policy mindset.

“As for the claims by Aristide and Rev. Jackson that what happened in Haiti amounted to a U.S. ‘coup,’ I have my doubts,” Antiwar.com Editorial Director Justin Raimondo wrote in a March 3, 2004 column. “At any rate, the idea that Aristide was ‘abducted’ by the U.S. military instead of being driven out by his own thuggish ex-supporters seems dubious, at best …”

In his book, The Terror Enigma: 9/11 and the Israeli Connection, Raimondo argues that Israeli spies in the United States had been watching the people suspected in the 9/11 attacks. If Israeli intelligence had foreknowledge of the attacks, why didn’t they let the U.S. government know? he asks.

Raimondo obviously works hard to dig behind the headlines. But in the case of Haiti, he neglected to conduct a similarly robust analysis of U.S. involvement in Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s latest removal from the presidency.

He criticizes President Bush for sending the U.S. military into Haiti because it perpetuates an ineffective 100-plus year tradition of U.S. interference in the country. But he also dismisses claims that the Bush administration played a pivotal role leading up to Aristide’s ouster. His skepticism of these claims is similar to the manner that most establishment policymakers in Washington dismiss arguments that the U.S. war against Iraq has something to do with the interests of Israel. For Raimondo, the current situation in Haiti is simply “a long and possibly quite bloody stand-off between rival gangs loosely disguised as political factions.”

Stan Goff, like many other Haiti experts, believes there’s a racist implication to the U.S. government’s policy toward the Caribbean nation. Other critics of U.S. policy toward Haiti agree that the situation there cannot simply be stripped down to rival gangs battling for power. In a March 3, 2004 interview with Democracy Now!, Goff said the Bush administration’s policy on Haiti has racial implications that represent a continuation of Richard Nixon’s strategy of appealing to certain white voters in the U.S. South by appealing to their racist inclinations.

Goff, a former member of the U.S. Army who participated in the 1994 U.S. invasion of Haiti as a Special Forces master sergeant, writes in his book, Hideous Dream: A Soldier’s Memoir of the U.S. Invasion of Haiti, that the “mission was never to restore popular power. It was to put Aristide’s face on a neoliberal fraud. ... Our mission in Haiti was to stop a revolution, not a coup d’état.”

Raimondo and other right-wing libertarian writers conveniently ignore the ramifications of the U.S. government’s involvement in the latest downfall of Haiti’s fragile democracy and instead narrowly focus on the error of sending Marines into Haiti again. “If it’s this easy to destabilize Haiti, Cuba will unquestionably appear a more viable target for direct intervention in the not-so-distant future,” Heather Williams, assistant professor of politics at Pomona College, wrote in the March 1, 2004 issue of CounterPunch.

Many analysts also view U.S. involvement in the coup in Haiti as a dry run for a potential second attempt by the Bush administration to remove the democratically elected Hugo Chavez from his position as president of Venezuela.

While Raimondo tries hard to ignore U.S. involvement in Aristide’s ouster — perhaps because he dislikes the Haitian leader’s socialistic leanings — he lauds Chavez for standing up to the bullying of the United States, even as the mainstream press paints the Venezuelan leader as a leftist firebrand.

Chavez “is no Commie: that is a patriot talking,” Raimondo wrote on Antiwar.com in January 2001. “Not only a patriot, but a military man who bitterly resented the prospective decline of his nation’s army into a narcotics squad for their imperial overlords in Washington. When he assumed power, Chavez defied the U.S. and refused to allow the U.S. government to conduct their phony ‘war on drugs’ on Venezuelan territory, and more: Chavez has militarized the border with Colombia precisely because of his neighbor’s inability to control drug trafficking and guerrilla incursions into Venezuela.”

Despite his reputation as a libertarian, Raimondo probably fits more comfortably into Pat Buchanan’s nationalist corner or among paleoconservatives. His enthusiasm for “patriots” has nothing in common with the libertarian principle against devotion to such inherently coercive entities as nation-states.

Given his support for the nationalist policies of coup-plotter-turned-president Chavez, Raimondo probably interprets former radical Catholic priest Aristide’s decision to eliminate Haiti’s national army after his return to power in 1994 as a silly and unpardonable mistake.

Mark Hand is editor of Press Action.

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