On Sun, Jan 17, 2010 at 10:50 AM, Michael Smith <[email protected]> wrote: > > Apologists for Bill Clinton and for liberal interventionism > generally are fond of citing the 1994 restoration of Aristide, > at the point of US guns, as a shining example. <snip0> > Does anybody on this list have his or her own theory? Has anybody > written anything illuminating on the subject?
We seem to have some People who really know the subject on list, so I'll leave detailed reply to them. But the short version was Florida was getting an influx of live and dead Haitians, and the military had gone far beyond restoring neoliberalism to directly murdering children and random acts of cruelty that were not needed by neoliberalism. So Clinton extracted concession from Aristide that he would carry out the neoliberal agenda rather than the platform he had been elected on. (One can criticize Aristide for this, but "support long term destruction of your people or watch them being tormented now" is a hell of dilemma to put a leader in who sincerely cares about his people.) So Clinton gave the military orders to let Ariside back, and they refused. At that point it was the Haitian military rather than Ariside defying use orders. So the U.S. does what they always do when an imperial servant turns against U.S. masters. It sent in the military. I will add that there was also a strategic difference between Clinton and Bush I. Bush would I think have never seen giving on the economics as sufficient. I think the Haitian military as good and faithful servants would have been rewarded by being allowed to stay in power and would never have been asked to back down. Arisides record of defiance would have prevented his being allowed to return even as a fig leaf. That is one reason the military was defiant. Their interactions with the Bush I administration had led them to believe they were in for good, or at least the long term, that the U.S. would not remove them even partially from power in the short run. Also, according to Brad De Long, even within the Clinton administration there was ideological fight. Not everyone within Clinton supported restoring Aristide, and it took time for those who did to win the policy fight. Not very detailed but a quick answer, unfortunately very divorced from the long term history that shaped U .S. Haitian relations. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
