More Meddling in Haiti Is Not the Answer

When this is the fruit of U.S. interference, how would even more interference produce better results?

The Washington Post is back again to call for foreign intervention in Haiti:

Yet weighed against the cratering prospects of a failed state whose main export is asylum seekers, many Haitians would support — if with misgivings — the chance at restoring some semblance of normal life. For an intervention to succeed, however, it’s not enough to suppress the chaos. New hope for Haiti must involve a path toward democracy — and a transition toward a legitimate government with popular support.

The editorial acknowledges that previous outside interventions in Haiti have either failed or made conditions worse, and its authors offer no reason to think that a U.S. or U.N. intervention today would succeed in doing what they say needs to be done. After all, they are not just proposing that the intervention will seek to establish a modicum of stability, but they are also already setting ambitious goals of democracy promotion and state-building that are almost certainly beyond the abilities of outside governments to achieve. Past experience in Haiti and in other countries tells us that this is a fool’s errand, but the compulsion to demand that the U.S. and other governments “do something” is simply too strong for interventionists to resist.

In one breath, the editorial admits that the current prime minister holds power “[l]argely owing to Washington’s puppeteering” and that the government he leads is unelected, illegitimate and a “disaster,” and in the next it urges outside governments to facilitate a transition to a popular, legitimate government. If the U.S. has been instrumental in propping up an unelected and illegitimate government, how likely is it that any Haitian government it supports in the future will be so radically different in character? When this is the fruit of U.S. interference, how would even more interference produce better results?