Bill the Builder, Can We Fix It? Bill the Builder, Maybe Not!
I get very nervous when I hear people talking about then years, it seems to me that five tears might be what is required to help rebuild some basic infrastructure in Haiti. I mean, look, there’s heart rending suffering there and we have an obligation to help and that would include helping them rebuild bridges, ports, streets, railways, etc.
But, when you start talking ten years, it looks to me like people want to restructure the Haitian society. We have no mandate for that and we have no special wisdom on how to do that, I think we should define the mission modestly and do what we can in a practical way and then withdraw. These kind of open ended commitments make me extremely nervous, not just financially, of course, but also from getting involved in something we can never really get out of.
Those are the same kind of heebie jeebies I got reading Bill Clinton’s comments around Haiti almost two weeks ago,
When I work places, everybody knows I don’t tolerate corruption, I’m going to do the best I can to help them,” says Clinton, the former president and special United Nations envoy to Haiti. “But, they want to do this — they want to build a modern society, for the first time…
“Anybody who has worked with Haiti over the last 20, 25 years, will tell you that this is the best situation we’ve ever had,” Clinton said in an interview with FOX News Channel’s Major Garrett. “They are trying to turn a corner here, and together, we may find it even easier to take a path of openness and transparency.”
I mean, don’t get me wrong, I don’t think that Clinton has anything but the best of intentions for Haiti and Haitians and for all of the fist shaking I’ve given Harper over the past two months, I don’t ascribe any ill will to his actions either. In both cases, I think the men in question see an obligation for wealthy nations to assist a fellow nation of a more fragile foundation that has been torn apart by disaster.
That is a positive moral impulse to feel and I don’t want to discourage it, per se. But as Flanagan suggests, we need to be careful both around our intentions and how we go about carrying those intentions out. I’m not inclined to level allegations of colonialism here, as Chris did — though he was dealing with a fundamentally different interlocutor — but it strikes me how subtley pervasive this notion of nation building continues to be. It’s as though taking it out of a “democracy by the barrel of a gun” context all of a sudden mends the stiching of its theoretical and practical holes and makes it a conceptual framework of nobility, benevolence, and veracity.
I’m not at all convinced that it does and I think our fundamental unwillingness to auger with just how little we really understand about the generatin of a successful nation will continue to dog us in the best of our efforts to do right by nations like Haiti.
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January 27, 2010 6 Comments
Engagement: The Breakfast of Champions
To my mind, letting that process play out (ie. allowing the current regime to collapse under the weight of its own internal inconsistencies) while diplomatically gesturing towards the obviousness of the situation is the only sane best of all possible, if not far more challenging than it is often given credit, courses of action.
It remains true that throughout the Middle East there are real instances of attitudes and actions towards human rights that constitute reasonable causes for concern. While we might be in a place where most aren’t interested in making the Middle East over in the West’s image (were such a thing even possible), that doesn’t mean that we also cease to be concerned about the rights afforded women in Saudi Arabia or homosexuals in Dubai or the like. And if those reasonable concerns are to really be addressed and the security risks posed by animosity between the so-called “clash of civilizations” averted, then a real partner is needed in the Middle East.
Perhaps counter-intuitively, it makes sense to me that Iran represents the greatest possibility for that partner. [Read more →]
November 27, 2009 11 Comments
savvy foreign policy thinking
July 17, 2009 2 Comments
