USA consollidates hold on Haiti with 12,000 troop invasion

[Magda Hassan]

Why Did We Focus on Securing Haiti Rather Than Helping Haitians?
Here are two possibilities, neither of them flattering.
By Ben Ehrenreich
Posted Thursday, Jan. 21, 2010, at 1:39 PM ET

By the weekend, it was clear that something perverse was going on in Haiti,
something savage and bestial in its lack of concern for human life. I'm not
talking about the earthquake, and certainly not about the so-called
"looting," which I prefer to think of as the autonomously organized
distribution of unjustly hoarded goods. I'm talking about the U.S. relief
effort.

For two days after the quake, despite almost unimaginable destruction, there
were reasons to be optimistic. With a few notable exceptions-Pat Robertson
and David Brooks among them-Americans reacted with extraordinary and
unhesitating generosity of spirit and of purse. Port-au-Prince is not much
farther from Washington, D.C., than, say, New Orleans, and the current
president of the United States, unlike his predecessor, was quick to react
to catastrophe. Taking advantage of "our unique capacity to project power
around the world," President Barack Obama pledged abundant aid and 10,000
troops.

Troops? Port-au-Prince had been leveled by an earthquake, not a barbarian
invasion, but, OK, troops. Maybe they could put down their rifles and, you
know, carry stuff, make themselves useful. At least they could get there
soon: The naval base at Guantanamo was barely 200 miles away.

The Cubans, at least, would show up quickly. It wasn't until Friday, three
days after the quake, that the "supercarrier" USS Carl Vinson, arrived-and
promptly ran out of supplies. "We have communications, we have some command
and control, but we don't have much relief supplies to offer," admitted Rear
Adm. Ted Branch. So what were they doing there?

"Command and control" turned out to be the key words. The U.S. military did
what the U.S. military does. Like a slow-witted, fearful giant, it built a
wall around itself, commandeering the Port-au-Prince airport and
constructing a mini-Green Zone. As thousands of tons of desperately needed
food, water, and medical supplies piled up behind the airport fences-and
thousands of corpses piled up outside them-Defense Secretary Robert Gates
ruled out the possibility of using American aircraft to airdrop supplies:
"An airdrop is simply going to lead to riots," he said. The military's first
priority was to build a "structure for distribution" and "to provide
security." (Four days and many deaths later, the United States began
airdropping aid.)

The TV networks and major papers gamely played along. Forget hunger,
dehydration, gangrene, septicemia-the real concern was "the security
situation," the possibility of chaos, violence, looting. Never mind that the
overwhelming majority of on-the-ground accounts from people who did not have
to answer to editors described Haitians taking care of one another, digging
through rubble with their bare hands, caring for injured loved ones-and
strangers-in the absence of outside help. Even the evidence of "looting"
documented something that looked more like mutual aid: The photograph that
accompanied a Sunday New York Times article reporting "pockets of violence
and anarchy" showed men standing atop the ruins of a store, tossing supplies
to the gathered crowd.

The guiding assumption, though, was that Haitian society was on the very
edge of dissolving into savagery. Suffering from "progress-resistant
cultural influences" (that's David Brooks finding a polite way to call black
people primitive), Haitians were expected to devour one another and, like
wounded dogs, to snap at the hands that fed them. As much as any logistical
bottleneck, the mania for security slowed the distribution of aid.

Air-traffic control in the Haitian capital was outsourced to an Air Force
base in Florida, which, not surprisingly, gave priority to its own pilots.
While the military flew in troops and equipment, planes bearing supplies for
the Red Cross, the World Food Program, and Doctors Without Borders were
rerouted to Santo Domingo in neighboring Dominican Republic. Aid flights
from Mexico, Russia, and France were refused permission to land. On Monday,
the British Daily Telegraph reported, the French minister in charge of
humanitarian aid admitted he had been involved in a "scuffle" with a U.S.
commander in the airport's control tower. According to the Telegraph, it
took the intervention of the United Nations for the United States to agree
to prioritize humanitarian flights over military deliveries.

Meanwhile, much of the aid that was arriving remained at the airport.
Haitians watched American helicopters fly over the capital, commanding and
controlling, but no aid at all was being distributed in most of the city. On
Tuesday, a doctor at a field hospital within site of the runways complained
that five to 10 patients were dying each day for lack of the most basic
medical necessities. "We can look at the supplies sitting there," Alphonse
Edward told Britain's Channel 4 News.

The much-feared descent into anarchy stubbornly refused to materialize. "It
is calm at this time," Lt. Gen. Ken Keen, deputy commander of the U.S.
Southern Command, admitted to the AP on Monday. "Those who live and work
here . tell me that the level of violence that we see right now is below
pre-earthquake levels." He announced that four-four, in a city of more than
2 million-aid-distribution points had been set up on the sixth day of the
crisis.

So what happened? Why the mad rush to command and control, with all its
ultimately murderous consequences? Why the paranoid focus on security above
saving lives? Clearly, President Obama failed to learn one of the basic
lessons taught by Hurricane Katrina: You can't solve a humanitarian problem
by throwing guns at it. Before the president had finished insisting that "my
national security team understands that I will not put up with any excuses,"
Haiti's fate was sealed. National security teams prioritize national
security, an amorphous and expensive notion that has little to do with
keeping Haitian citizens alive.

This leaves the more disturbing question of why the Obama administration
chose to respond as if they were there to confront an insurgency, rather
than to clear rubble and distribute antibiotics and MREs. The beginning of
an answer can be found in what Rebecca Solnit, author of A Paradise Built in
Hell, calls "elite panic"-the conviction of the powerful that their own
Hobbesian corporate ethic is innate in all of us, that in the absence of
centralized authority, only cannibalism can reign.

But the danger of hunger-crazed mobs never came up after the 2004 Pacific
tsunami, and no one mentions security when tornados and floods wipe out
swaths of the American Midwest. This suggests two possibilities, neither of
them flattering. The first is that the administration had strategic reasons
for sending 10,000 troops that had little to do with disaster relief. This
is the explanation favored by the Latin American left and, given the United
States' history of invasion and occupation in Haiti (and in the Dominican
Republic and Cuba and Nicaragua and Grenada and Panama), it is difficult to
dismiss. Only time will tell what "reconstruction" means.

Another answer lies closer to home. New Orleans and Port-au-Prince have one
obvious thing in common: The majority of both cities' residents are black
and poor. White people who are not poor have been known, when confronted
with black people who are, to start locking their car doors and muttering
about their security. It doesn't matter what color our president is. Even
when it is ostensibly doing good, the U.S. government can be racist, and, in
an entirely civil and bureaucratic fashion, savagely cruel.
Ben Ehrenreich, a journalist and novelist based in Los Angeles, is the
author of The Suitors. He reported from Haiti in 2006 for L.A. Weekly.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2242078/