Dr. Bass,
I should send you a bill for a bottle of Maalox that I had to
purchase after stumbling across your article "Humanitarian Impulses"
in the NY Times Magazine section this morning as I wended my way
toward the crossword puzzle--the saving grace of this atrocious
neoconservative/neoliberal periodical. It was bad enough that
Condoleezza Rice was droning on in the background on Bob Schieffer's
gabfest without being confronted by your exercise in imperialist propaganda.
In trying to put across the argument that the U.S. should police the
world, you seem completely oblivious to counter-arguments. Even a
skilled propagandist like Christopher Hitchens would acknowledge the
opposing viewpoint. For example, you quote Madeleine
Albright--infamous for her observation that the end of "liberating"
Iraq might justify the means of killing 1/2 million of its children:
"many of the world's necessary interventions in the decade before the
invasion [of Iraq] in places like Haiti and the Balkans would
seem impossible in today's climate."
Excuse me, professor, I know that you are a disadvantage teaching at
a place like Princeton, which like Columbia, Yale and Harvard are
branch offices of the U.S. State Department, but it is particularly
obscene for Albright to talk about humanitarian intervention in Haiti
given the fact that the U.S. Marines occupied this sad country for 19
years and then backed its murderous dictator as a bulwark against
Communism in the 1960s. With this on its record, the U.S. had no
business ever sending troops to Haiti again.
You do admit of course that the U.S. "was rarely moved by
humanitarianism alone". That's quite an admission from an imperialist
mouthpiece like you, but it would be more accurate to state exactly
why the U.S. sends troops abroad. It is to defend the profits and
future profit possibilities of the capitalist class. You have the
brass to begin your article crowing about the capture of Radovan
Karadzic when just moments earlier, I read this item titled "License
to Steal" from the Al Ahram Weekly Online August 7-13 issue, which began:
>>"Our country has been undergoing the longest, slowest economic
transition in Eastern Europe," remarked Djordje Petkovic, a Serbian
rubber factory worker whose company, Rekord, recently shut down,
leaving him jobless for the past 10 months. Frustrated with his
country's current economic state, he continued: "We have seen nothing
of the grants and loans the West has given us. The new transition
laws have brought popular misery and raised the cost of living for
many. My company, which has existed for 100 years, has now
ceased to exist, but nobody cares."<<
That's what these "humanitarian interventions" bring: popular misery.
Haiti is worse off than ever as the U.S. conspired to topple its
popular president who was too far to the left. Some day the lying
propagandists who have made a career at prestigious Ivy League
colleges will have to be accountable to a world that is sick of U.S.
bullying and corporate plunder. The sooner the better.
Louis Proyect
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