Justin Raimondo included the following quote in his article Haiti: A Case History
The failure of the interventionist project.
Jackson’s quote in its entirety: “Haiti has a democratically elected government and we must stand with it,” Jackson emphasized. “The U.S. has a history of intervening on the wrong side as they did in Grenada and Panama. It’s time to do the right thing.”
I commend Raimondo for dispatching and expertly denouncing the hypocritical sanctioning of imperialism disguised as humanitarian intervention on the part of some Democrats. Yet why dismiss entirely the intended meaning behind Jackson’s references to Grenada and Panama when we don’t know with any certainty the origin and extent of U.S. interventions that preceded this coup? Doesn’t that history and the timing of formal U.S. diplomatic and military intervention favouring the opposition strongly suggest there’s more to this story? And why before it has yet to be firmly established that Aristide is a free man?
Were the M-16’s used by the rebels obtained via military resources the United States supplied to the Dominican Republic? Arms the ‘ragtag outfit’ have yet to relinquish as promised? Signs of a coup d’etat in the making had been reported long before the coup was implemented. If the Bush administration facilitated it shouldn’t this be clarified, at the very least, to be historically accurate?
No, Haiti is not an integral part of the empire of bases that Chalmers Johnson so formidably described during his Book TV appearance this past weekend [3/6/2004-3/8/2004], but that’s not reason enough to give crediblilty to Bush’s chatter he opposed Haitian nation-building during the 2000 election campaign, not coming from an administration that prioritises retaliation against perceived enemies above the greater good of the nation and possibly self-preservation. Is it such a stretch to consider this mission was formulated in the spirit of unfinished business, yet another notch on the belt to crow about over Texas barbeque?