Another typical gag-enducing editorial from the Newspaper of Record, this time urging the Bush regime to "take constructive action" and "not just drop hints that Mr. Aristide should resign." It's hard to single out just one snakelike sequence of sentences in this loathsome swamp, but probably the most poisonous -- and the most characteristic of the Times' style -- is the double-attack on Aristide disguised as an effort at "even-handedness." Here it is:
"Jean-Bertrand Aristide helped bring this crisis on himself, with his encouragement of mob violence, politicization of the national police and failure to ensure fair legislative elections. Yet many of the insurrectionists are former Aristide allies with even weaker democratic credentials."
So in other words, the only bad thing about the counterrevolutionaries is that some of them are former supporters of Aristide. A more realistic assessment of the nature of the "opposition" is not in evidence here: for example, that they are really just a bunch of bloody-minded macoutes who deserve to have their heads chopped off with machetes, a fate they have avoided only because of the remarkable restraint thus far shown by the popular masses who overwhelmingly support Aristide.
And how about this paragraph?
"Nearly a decade ago, the Clinton administration's dispatch of American troops helped persuade a murderous Haitian military junta to step down, paving the way for Mr. Aristide to complete his first presidential term, which had been interrupted by a coup. Unfortunately, Washington's involvement wound down before the kinds of steps that would have deepened the roots of Haitian democracy -- like creating a professional police force and independent electoral institutions -- were completed. That kind of unglamorous institution-building would most likely have prevented the current insurrection and much of the political crisis that preceded it."
It's a failure, then, of the US in not pursuing "unglamorous institution-building," something for which the Haitians are just not ready on their own apparently. Not a mention of the (glamorous?) institution-building that the US has done plenty of in Haiti -- namely, the cultivation of the Duvaliers and the macoutes over several decades, the setting-up and financing of FRAPH by the CIA, and currently the International Republican Institute's financing of the so-called "Democratic Convergence" with money supplied by the National Endowment for Democracy.
In the real world, Haitians' determination that they are quite capable of building their own institutions -- though glamor, like most things in Haiti, is in short supply -- is tempered by their understanding that they first have to be rid of the more glamorous institutions long imposed from Washington with the enthusiastic connivance of the pampered brats who now fancy themselves the "opposition." We can trust that what the vast majority of Haitians can see for themselves will be missed by the New York Times, a paper that caught plenty of hell over Jayson Blair's imaginative scribblings even as it gleefully reported the far more pernicious fairy tale that Hugo Chavez had resigned as president of Venezuela. Their line throughout will be that the US should "mediate" between the popularly-elected government it has been trying to oust on the one hand and the thuggish "opposition" it created and cultivated in the first place.
- - - - - John Lacny
People of the US, unite and defeat the Bush regime and all its running dogs!