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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (125434)	3/1/2004 6:52:23 PM
From: Jacob Snyder	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

If we could "fix" Haiti with our soldiers, I could probably be persuaded to support a Humanitarian intervention. I'd add a few caveats, like it'd have to be a multinational force, with a clear exit strategy, and it can't cost too many U.S. lives (because it just isn't worth that much to us; there is no compelling national interest). But, if we could have "fixed" Haiti by sending in troops, it would already have happened, in the 20-year occupation between the World Wars, or the 5-year intervention of the 1990s. My point is, we've already tried what we are again embarking on, and it didn't work, last time. Or the time before. Or the time before that. Haiti is not an acute crisis. It is a chronic problem. It's broken, it's been broken for 200 straight years, and the proper tool to fix it, is not the U.S. Marines. If we truly wanted to fix Haiti, the only realistic way for America to do that, is make them the 52d State (Israel, of course, is ahead in line). Take over, kill anyone who disputes our power, invest a vast amount of money over several generations, rebuild every institution there (from the ground up). Build InterState highways, make everyone go to school (after we build the schools and train the teachers), solve the AIDS epidemic by enforcing sex only within marriage, etc., etc. We haven't done too bad a job in Puerto Rico, maybe we could raise Haiti up to Puerto Rican standards, by about 2050, if we annex them now. You up for that? Me neither.