US v. Haiti

It becomes more obvious with each day that while it's unlikely that the US directly prompted the coup in Haiti, it certainly wasn't an unwelcome turn of events.

- First there was State Department flak Richard Boucher doing his best Bill O'Reilly imitation, saying of Aristide on March 9, "If Mr. Aristide really wants to serve his country, he really has to, we think, let his nation get on with the future and not try to stir up the past again."

Translation: "Shut up! Just shut up!"

- Then in the wake of the wake of former Supreme Court chief justice Boniface Alexandre being sworn in as interim president in an extra-legal procedure (such a move is supposed to be approved by the national assembly),

US Secretary of State Colin Powell said the US was working to find a prime minister replacement,

BBC News for March 9 tell us.

And just why in hell were we looking for a replacement prime minister? And why should there have been one anyway? I thought Aristide himself was the issue. Oh, right, I forgot, now his whole administration should be put on trial.

The new prime minister is Aristide critic and former Foreign Minister Gerald Latortue. He's been living in the US for the last 16 years, most recently in Boca Raton, FL, working as a business consultant. He fled Haiti after a military coup in 1988. So naturally, one of the first things he says, reports the March 10 Toronto Globe & Mail, is that he might bring back Haiti's army, which Aristide dissolved in 1995. The restoration of the army is a prime demand of rebel leader and multiple coup-plotter Guy Philippe.

- And of course there was the announcement yesterday that the role of US Marines in Haiti is being expanded to include intervening in violence, confiscating weapons from any Haitians found with them in the capital, and,

"as we develop intelligence and can find weapons caches, we are going to go after those," [Army Gen. James] Hill said.

That is, pretty much everything that there was "no interest in doing," was just impossible even to contemplate, would stretch our forces too thin, when Aristide was still there.

I don't know the official name for the deployment in Haiti, but I'm sure it's something like Operation Securing Democracy or some such bull. It's really quite depressing and our involvement in generating the chaos through our unremitting efforts to undermine economic change in Haiti are a disgrace. What's really depressing is that it looks like we're going to get away with it again.