Haiti

It must be a tremendous insult to the Haitian people that president Obama appointed George W. Bush along with Bill Clinton to head up relief efforts for Haiti. Although Clinton has a dubious history with Haiti too, Bush is seen as the enemy of Haiti by a great number of people in that country. It was under the Bush administration that the US military was sent to Haiti in the middle of the night to kidnap their elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 2004. Aristide was put on a US military plane and dropped in the Central African Republic and left there. Aristide had been a very popular president but one the US government didn’t like because of his anti-globalization stand and his insistence that Haiti’s resources and production to be used to better the Haitian people not the multi-national corporations.

Bush also had less than a good record for his administrations response in New Orleans after hurricane Katrina. There, mercenaries from the Blackwater corporation along with National Guard were sent in to keep order as a priority over meeting the needs of the people. The same seems to be happening in Haiti today.

As many are calling for the return of Aristide as a way of unifying the country, the US has sent in the military, supposedly in a humanitarian mission. Other countries did not send their militaries; they sent doctors and disaster recovery experts. The first move the US military did was to take over the airport. As stated in an AP article on January 18, 2010, “Some aid groups and foreign officials have blamed the U.S. military for slowing down aid deliveries, saying the American units that took charge of the small Port-au-Prince airport last week gave priority to U.S. military flights.” In a country where possibly 200,000 have died, where the people are in great need of aid the US is emphasizing security. Is the US afraid that the Haitian government has collapsed and the people might rise up and overthrow the US supported government and perhaps bring back Aristide?

Maybe, with his record in Iraq, Afghanistan and New Orleans, Obama sees Bush as just the right man for the job.