Why is our military and the UN calling off the rescue when live bodies are still being plucked from the rubble?

From WSWS:

US Marines in Haiti: Back to colonialism

27 January 2010

The US media’s coverage of the catastrophe in Haiti has increasingly included articles and broadcast reports extolling the supposed humanitarian role of US soldiers and Marines in the Caribbean country. They generally describe how “combat-hardened” veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan are lending a helping hand to the survivors of the earthquake.

Some of this reporting seems aimed at countering growing international criticism of the US militarization of the response to the Haitian disaster, which has given priority to rushing in combat-equipped troops over the provision of medical supplies, food and water desperately needed to save lives.

A spokesman for Doctors Without Borders, for instance, voiced concern over “the extreme confusion of distributing food with a gun.” The organization formally protested the repeated diversion of planes bringing it medical supplies after the US military seized control of the Port-au-Prince airport, saying that many of its patients have died as a result.

With hundreds of thousands dead and hundreds of thousands more injured, there is undoubtedly shock among the troops in Haiti at the scale of the devastation and sympathy for the suffering of the Haitian people.

Those in Washington who sent them there and the senior officers who command them, however, are operating on the basis of very different motives, as one recent press report on their mission makes clear.

USA Today published an article Monday headlined “Marines Studied Their Own History in Haiti,” describing the country as “a major part of Marine Corps lore.”

The Marines, the article states, “governed Haiti from 1915 to 1934 after an invasion force was sent to prevent an anti-American dictator from assuming power. Young, non-commissioned officers governed Haiti with little supervision.”

USA Today goes on to quote Lt. Col. Gary Keim, the commander of a Marine logistics battalion, who said he and other officers had studied the history of the occupation before deploying to Haiti. “We were required to reread it,” he said. “We’ve been here before. We’ve been successful before.”

The Marines, the article continues, “viewed those years as a model for nation building and counterinsurgency strategy.”

That the US Marines sent to Haiti by the Obama administration are consciously modeling their mission on the “success” of the 20-year occupation that ended in 1934 has unmistakable political significance.

When the Marines first invaded Haiti 95 years ago it was also presented as a rescue mission, aimed at protecting American lives and saving Haitians from German domination. Declaring martial law, the invasion force seized control of Haiti’s treasury and customs houses, while armed Marines were sent into the country’s parliament to ensure that it installed Washington’s choice for president.

Over the next two decades, some 3,000 Haitians were killed by the occupiers, while the Marines themselves suffered just 16 fatalities.

The initial years of the occupation saw a campaign to suppress opposition from the so-called cacos, a peasant-based rebel movement led by a former Haitian army officer, Charlemagne Peralte. The movement gained broad support from Haiti’s most oppressed layers, in large measure because of the brutal methods of the American occupiers, who seized peasants off their land and pressed them into chain gang-style labor.

As the USA Today article suggests, the Marines introduced innovative “counterinsurgency” tactics that would be repeated from Vietnam to Afghanistan, including the US military’s first use of aerial bombardments to support ground assaults on the cacos and the peasant population that supported them. As in the current US wars, prisoners were beaten and tortured to extract information and, in many cases, subjected to summary execution.

Peralte himself was captured and murdered by the Marines in 1919. His corpse, nailed crucifix-style to a door, was placed on public display in an attempt to intimidate the population.

Washington pushed through changes in the Haitian constitution giving foreigners the right to own land for the first time since a slave revolt secured the country’s independence from France in 1804.

The US set about building up a Haitian repressive force, commanded by Marine officers, known as the Garde d’Haiti. The creation of this force was part of what the press referred to at the time as the “Haitianization” of US colonial domination of the country.

It was growing popular resistance that forced the US military out of Haiti. The decision to withdraw was hastened by mass unrest sparked by the economic crisis that gripped the country in 1929, with the collapse of coffee prices. A student strike was joined by workers, and peasants staged risings in a number of areas.

In Cayes, in the southwest, thousands of peasants carrying stones, clubs and machetes confronted Marines armed with automatic weapons on December 6, 1929. The Marines opened fire, killing 24 and wounding 51 Haitians. One Marine was reported injured. The unit’s commander was subsequently awarded the Navy Cross for directing the massacre.

In 1931, Smedley Butler, the Marine officer who led the initial intervention and headed the Haitian security forces for two years, provided a candid assessment of his mission: “I was a racketeer for capitalism,” he declared. “I helped make Haiti…a decent place for the National City boys to collect revenue in.” National City, the precursor of Citibank, controlled Haiti’s railroads and largest bank. After the US invasion, it took over the Haitian treasury.

The Marine occupation left behind a powerful US-dominated military which effectively controlled the country’s political life for decades, and in 1957 brought to power the Duvalier dictatorship, which would rule Haiti through savage repression for 30 years.

This deadly legacy played a decisive role in subjecting the Haitian people to poverty and oppression and creating the social and economic conditions that allowed the January 12 earthquake to claim such a staggering toll in human life.

That today’s Marine commanders invoke the occupation of the early 20th Century as a precedent for their current mission constitutes a warning. Behind the humanitarian mask, Washington’s intervention in Haiti is part of an attempt to assert US imperialist interests in the Americas and across the globe by use of military force.

In Haiti, the US military has been deployed to assert Washington’s hegemony over the lands to its south, where American imperialism got its start and where it now faces ever greater challenges from powerful economic rivals in Europe and China.

As in the intervention that ended in 1934, US guns will inevitably be used against the resistance of Haitian workers and oppressed to poverty, starvation wages and extreme social inequality.

I was going to write a pithy commentary on the dumbing down of America and the idiocy of some individual world leaders. However after reading the remarks about why the military is in Haiti, I realized the conspiracy fringe had won again. Not only did the U.S. cause the earthquake with a secret weapon, now we can see that the method to such madness was to take control of one of the poorest countries of the world, with no natural resources left there and no strategic use. That makes perfect sense. Clearly I was mistaken in my first assessment.

It was to destroy the evidence that Obama was actually born in Haiti and therefore not a US citizen and ineligible for the Presidency.

There are dubious claims in Haitian media that the US wants to occupy because of Haiti's apparently vast oil fields.

http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A//www.metropolehaiti.com/metropole/full_une_fr.php%3Fid%3D13439&hl=en&langpair=auto%7Cen&tbb=1&ie=ISO-8859-1

It seems Haiti is very strategically significant for the United States

http://books.zcommunications.org/chomsky/year/year-c08-s02.html

oil and mining in haiti by the worlds elite is robbing the people blind!
http://www.abibitumikasa.com/forums/oppression-afrikans-economically/41112-oil-mining-haiti-worlds-elite-robbing-people-blind.html

20bn barrel oil discovery puts Cuba in the big league
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/oct/18/cuban-oil

Now if one looks at a map and notices that Haiti and Cuba are only about 60 miles apart separated by the Winward Passage, one might then assume that perhaps the two Caribbean nations might be sitting on the same stretch of oil field.

Haiti's elite hold nation's future in their hands
HTTP://WWW.latimes.com/news/nation-and-world/la-fg-haiti-elites21-2010jan21,0,3073469,full.story

I dont know about the oil theory, but this analysis by wsws sounds a little more feesable. I Don't know is true either:

"Criticism mounts over US response to Haiti disaster"

By Jerry White

"A principal concern of the US government has been to prop up the US-installed Préval regime and prevent a repeat of the events in Nicaragua in the 1970s, when official indifference in the aftermath of the earthquake in Managua contributed to the overthrow of the long-standing American-backed Somoza dictatorship. At the same time, the US has sought to block desperate Haitians from crossing over to the US, warning that all refugees would be turned back by the US Coast Guard."

"Over the weekend, the Haitian government, along with the UN, called off efforts to rescue people trapped in the rubble, even though survivors continue to be found. The decision underscores the moves by the US to quickly move to the “reconstruction” stage, which involves longstanding plans to transform the country into a cheap labor platform for international garment manufacturers."

“Reconstructing Haiti” on starvation wages

By Bill Van Auken

Government ministers, international bankers and aid agencies gathered in Montreal Monday to discuss plans for reconstructing earthquake-ravaged Haiti. At the heart of their proposals is the exploitation of Haitian workers at poverty wages.

The conference offered nothing concrete in terms of new assistance, instead scheduling a donors meeting at the United Nations in March. Much of the rhetoric coming out of the gathering seemed to bear little relationship to the situation on the ground in Haiti, where 150,000 people have been confirmed dead, hundreds of thousands more are wounded and over 1.5 million are homeless.

Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive, representing what remains of the Haitian government, together with foreign ministers from Europe and the Americas spoke of respect for Haitian sovereignty, subordination of foreign military forces to humanitarian efforts, and allowing Haitians to determine and lead their own reconstruction efforts.

Some leading officials, including International Monetary Fund Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn, have gone so far as to speak in terms of a “Marshall Plan” for Haiti.

In reality, Haiti is now being run by the US military, which has deployed over 13,000 troops and unilaterally taken control of the country’s airport and port facilities. The Pentagon has dominated the provision of relief, which it has subordinated to the number one priority of deploying combat-equipped US soldiers and Marines, much to the detriment of injured and hungry Haitians waiting for life-saving medical supplies and food.

The US newsweekly Time gave expression to the real situation, referring to the top US military commander in the country, US Lt. Gen. Ken Keen, as “the de facto king of Haiti.” Meanwhile, the Haitian people have not seen or heard anything from Haitian President René Préval.

Behind the talk of Haitians determining their own future and the country’s government leading the way, what is being discussed is a plan worked out in the months before the earthquake that is dictated by the profit interests of US banks and corporations, together with those of Haiti’s wealthy elite.

Speaking to reporters en route from Washington to Montreal, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton referred to this plan, while praising the work of her husband, former President Bill Clinton, in seeking to implement it in his position as United Nations envoy to Haiti.

“He had just had a conference with 500 businesspeople,” she said. “They were signing contracts, they were making investments.”

She continued: “So we have a plan. It was a legitimate plan, it was done in conjunction with other international donors, with the United Nations. And I don’t want to start from scratch, but we have to recognize the changed challenges we are now confronting.”

The plan, worked up at the behest of the UN last year, is aimed at expanding the Haitian economy through the development of free trade zones based on garment sweatshops in which Haitian workers would be paid near-starvation wages.

The initiative was based on a report prepared for the UN last year by Oxford University economics professor Paul Collier. The report perversely cast Haiti’s poverty—the deepest in the Western Hemisphere—as its number one asset in the global capitalist economy.

“Due to its poverty and relatively unregulated labor market, Haiti has labor costs that are fully competitive with China, which is the global benchmark,” Collier wrote.

This “asset” is something that both Washington and Haiti’s parasitical ruling elite have jealously guarded. Former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was overthrown twice—in 1991 and 2004—in bloody coups orchestrated by the CIA in conjunction with Haitian factory owners, in large measure for proposing to raise the country’s minimum wage.

After his election for a second term in 2000, Aristide doubled the minimum wage and banned piece work in the garment factories, provoking fierce opposition from the owners of these enterprises. Andy Apaid, the Haitian-American owner of the largest sweatshops in Haiti and one of the Clintons’ key allies in the new “development” plan, was a key figure in the 2004 coup, which saw Aristide abducted and bundled out of the country by US troops and thousands of Haitians massacred by right-wing death squads.

Last year, following mass demonstrations by students and workers in which several people were killed and wounded, President Préval was forced to accept an increase in the minimum wage that had been passed by the Haitian legislature. However, he enacted a sub-minimum wage for the garment assembly industry of $2.98 a day—approximately one-twentieth of the minimum wage in the US.

While such a system will make super-profits for garment manufacturers and further enrich Haiti’s native oligarchy, it will do nothing to alleviate the country’s grinding poverty and will only deepen its pervasive social inequality, the worst in the hemisphere. Garment assembly involves importing pieces of clothing that are put together in free trade zones and then exported out again, with virtually no impact on the local economy.

While Secretary Clinton indicated that this slave labor blueprint is the one Washington is still working off of in the wake of the January 12 earthquake, she allowed that the catastrophe would require making some modifications.

Clinton praised Bellerive for talking about “decentralizing” the Haitian economy. “As part of our multilateral efforts to assist Haiti, we should look at how we decentralize economic opportunity and work with the Haitian government and people to support resettlement, which they are doing on their own as people leave Port-au-Prince and return to the countryside from which most of them came,” she said.

The Haitian authorities, backed by Washington and the UN, have begun implementing a plan to move hundreds of thousands of predominantly poor people out of Port-au-Prince and into resettlement camps. Ground has been cleared for one of these at Croix-des-Bouquets, eight miles from the capital, which would house 10,000 people. Other sites are being chosen, with the idea that those evacuated from the capital will be permanently housed there.

In a society in which social divisions are so stark, the so-called reconstruction plan for Haiti is inevitably developing along class lines. It may well emerge that the new resettlement camps will serve as captive labor for free trade zones erected in close proximity.

Meanwhile, Port-au-Prince will be reconstructed as a smaller city, geared to the interests of the country’s wealthy. This was hinted at in a statement by the Haiti’s ambassador to Washington, Raymond Joseph. Speaking on a C-SPAN television broadcast about the tragedy that has been inflicted upon the Haitian people, he said, “There is a silver lining. What was not politically possible was done by the earthquake. We will rebuild differently.”

Such social re-engineering in the interests of a native ruling class and foreign capital, and at the expense of the broad masses of Haitian workers and poor, will inevitably provoke social upheavals and resistance. This is why Washington has placed getting “boots on the ground” ahead of saving the lives of the earthquake’s victims.

Bill Van Auken

and I look forward to reading more of your insightful posts in the future. Yes, "control" of Haiti; that's exactly what the US wants!

who want the US to control Haiti, are the Haitians.

Do you follow links in blog posts? 

And prior intervention in Haiti does not offer evidence of a desire to intervene again.  Indeed, given the outcomes of past interventions, the reverse would more likely be the case. 

Nothing you say, Mr. Drezner, will change the minds of those whose thinking is so deeply embedded in the dredges of personal prejudice and inane fantasy. The "don't confuse me with facts, my mind is made up" types are not interested in reality.

"Do you follow links in blog posts?"

I read the links, and the links embedded in the links. They offer no conclusive evidence that Chavez made such a statement. The sourcing is somewhat circular, and no reference to Chavez is to be found in the original ViVe TV story. It's possible that the footage used in the RT piece (which I had seen earlier) of Chavez at the podium could be the speech in which the statement was made, which is why I asked if anyone had a link to that (unedited) footage.

"And prior intervention in Haiti does not offer evidence of a desire to intervene again. Indeed, given the outcomes of past interventions, the reverse would more likely be the case."

I was not suggesting that the U.S. has the desire to intervene again; if this is what you interpreted from my statement, I'm sorry for wording it poorly. I really do not know enough to determine the contours of US interest in Haiti at present. I was simply musing on the sentiment many commenters had expressed about the US and Haiti.

@ FreeTrader

"The only people who want the US to control Haiti, are the Haitians."

Have you asked any Haitians about this? Surely they welcome the aid - and there must exist some subset of the population that wants to be the next Puerto Rico - but US "control" of the country is not a promising prospect for most Haitians, given the historical experience of Haiti-US relations.

@ BibleMike

"Nothing you say, Mr. Drezner, will change the minds of those whose thinking is so deeply embedded in the dredges of personal prejudice and inane fantasy. The "don't confuse me with facts, my mind is made up" types are not interested in reality."

Please allow Mr. Drezner and I to engage in this discussion without resorting to intellectualized schoolyard insults; I appreciate that he took the time to respond to my issues with his post, as I imagine he's quite busy at the start of a new semester. If you care to provide any post-hoc substance to your comment, I'd be glad to respond.

That's the beauty of the plan -- the Americans can generate earthquakes on demand, and only at 10KM. No one would believe they would be that dumb -- to make them all the same. So you wouldn't suspect them.

Experience shows that the American government is terrifically efficient, and experience shows that most people keep secrets. When you look carefully at your experience, you will see that all of the evil, and all of the mildly unfortunate, from global disasters to small splinters on your pinkie, are caused by vast American-managed conspiracies.

Yes, look at how successfully the Bush folks were in keeping their role in 9/11 secret. I bet the Russians have that all explained, as well.

BTW: Is Putin's decree that at least 50% of all media transmissions about the US must be negative still in effect?

I think you might be on to something. My son burps at precisely 10:05 pm about 2% of all the time he burps. I suspect my neighbor has produced some sort of hybrid burp machine and points it at my house, causing my son to burp at exactly 10:05 pm.

What gives? We we're duped. Saddam put the word out that he HAD WMD's. Indeed, not just the CIA, but other nations as well suspected this. Cause for war? you decide. Little know fact, over 500 metric tons of yellowcake was removed from Iraq along with other signals of nuclear false starts (or just fodder). Bio weapons were found, but were previously manufactured, and not enough to "invade".

At the time it made more sense than it does in retrospect. Besides, Iraq had the perfect patsy. Saddam himself - Sky-shooting, stubborn Ba'athist butcher whom repulsed the rest of the world. Who didn't want to see him ousted? So you have a blow-hard dictator and a US president with an itchy trigger finger. Gasoline and a match. I'm not saying it was all right, but if I want to look at unjustified wars, Iraq has plenty of blood on it's own hands as well as the US. Anyway, Iraq DIVIDED America more than brought it together.

To wit:
"That cult would never die until the stars came right again, and the secret priests would take Cthulhu from His tomb to revive His subjects and resume His rule of earth. The time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild, and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and reveling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom."