Haiti: A Foreign Policy Horror Story

As most Americans watch the events of the last couple of weeks unfold in Haiti, they seem terrified and saddened by what's going on - reasonable responses - but completely clueless as to the causes or implications of these events for politics. For those who live under a rock, Haiti has been hit by an epidemic of cholera in the last several weeks. No one is really clear on where said epidemic originated, but the infrastructure on most of the island is still completely in ruins from the earthquake, so an epidemic of a disease heavily reliant on lack of sanitation is not a surprise. Well, somehow, a number of local guerilla groups (that are armed to the teeth despite strict gun control laws) have gotten into their heads that the epidemic was imported by a recently-arrived batch of Nepalese U.N. aid workers, and have taken to the streets of the major cities attacking anything that moves that isn't a fellow Haitian, forcing the UN contingents to bunker up in their compounds where their limited peacekeeper forces are able to fend off the guerillas, and severely impeding their efforts to distribute food and medical aid in fighting the epidemic.

Now its reasonable response from an empathetic human being with a basic understanding of modern biology and medicine to feel frustrated with the ignorance of the guerillas and saddened by the lack of access to help for the 10,000s of people ill with cholera, as well as to realize that the only clear "winner" in this equation is the Cholera. However, past the emotional response, it is important to point out this situation as a fundamental lesson for our foreign policy that politicians in this country have turned a blind eye to since the days of Woodrow Wilson. That lesson is the imminent failure of both nation-building and globalism as proverbial attempts to fit a square peg through a round hole, in this case both types of policy rolled into one.

Haiti has been marked by corruption, political unrest, poverty, destitute and epidemics for decades, but despite all this, at the time of the earthquake the political situation was relatively stable; there were no sub-autonomies in rebellion, no serious contesting claims to the legitimacy of the government in power, no armed guerilla groups rampaging through hard-to-control territories to such an extent that they threatened the integrity of the system - all things that have happened periodically in Haiti's recent history. When the earthquake happened, the Haitian government immediately admitted that it did not have the resources or the infrastructure to facilitate relief and recovery and welcomed the US and the UN with open arms, essentially turning over to them the governance of the country. No war, no occupation, no militant guerillas with any significant opposition claim - it would appear the stage was set for a globalist philanthropy miracle, and I'll never forget all the do-gooders with their rosey glasses talking on television about how this was Haiti's chance to establish efficient social services, quality public education and reliable public institutions. Well, this cholera epidemic and its aftermath are these idiots' reality check, I'm personally a little surpised people didn't start shooting at them a lot sooner.

Why am I so heartless and negative? Because I'm a scientist, not a faithful denier of reality.

For starters, the fact that a measley 7 point earthquake could paralyze the country should have been a huge warning sign that going there with food, medications, and blankets would get you greeted with guns. An earthquake of slightly GREATER magnitude happened in Baja California this Summer, just a few miles south of the US-Mexico border, and most of the two adjacent CA counties - San Diego and Imperial - felt it. 2 people died, there were a few structures compromised that had to be torn down - although no collapses, and a few roads that had to be closed for a few weeks for repair, every one of these things on the Mexican side of the border. People from that region of Mexico couldn't stop talking for weeks about how inept and corrupt their local authorities were in their preparation for and handling of this. In another example, in the Autumn of 2003 San Diego county was ravaged by a storm of uncontrolled wildfires that lasted about 3 days. The death toll was 27 people in a county of 3 million, divided roughly in half between first responder personnel and civillian victims. The aftermath saw multiple independent and legal investigations from all sides of the political spectrum into the blatant incompetence and negligence with which local politicians handled this disaster, culminating in the already unpopular mayor of the City of San Diego resigning a few months later. The people of San Diego County clearly did not think 27 deaths was an acceptable outcome, and fired the government that was not up to par with these expectations. The mayor elected to replace the one that resigned made disaster safety a top priority, and the next firestorm in 2007 claimed only 6 lives - 2 firefighters and 4 severely compromised patients in residential health facilities that did not survive evacuations for medical reasons - and also did only a small fraction of the property damage of that of 2003. Still, people complained, there were lawsuits against developers and the local power utility for exacerbating the danger, and ensuing amendments to fire code regulations, but the government was kept intact. Accountability delivers.

In Haiti, on the other hand, 200,000+ deaths from an earthquake of comparable magnitude to one that killed 2 in Mexico is a matter of fact outcome. If we consider Premise 2, that government operates on compliance, not coercion, it should become evident from this comparison why pumping foreign aid and foreign law enforcement into a country like Haiti is like trying to teach a dog human table manners. For starters, I have a hard time believing that Haiti doesn't have the regulations and infrastructure written into their law codes to prepare for such an event. While I haven't done the research specifically on Haiti, I have seen comparable evidence from the Russian Federation's recent firestorms, as well as the earthquake in Turkey and the floods in Pakistan, and in all 3 places very stringent and precise regulations were in place that should have prevented the mass fallout from the disasters, regulations that make ours here in the US look tame. The problem is, nature doesn't give two shits about regulations; building codes, fire codes, safety and law enforcement codes, and so forth, actually have to be FOLLOWED in order to prevent natural disasters from taking 1000s of lives. In order for law enforcement and various inspectors to ensure these regulations are followed, they have to have significant incentives not to take bribes for ignoring violations, and in order for this to happen the upper levels of government have to enforce anti-corruption laws rather than take a cut of said bribes and ignore their own job responsibilities in turn. Unfortunately for all the places mentioned above, the elected politicians who appoint top executives and allegedly hold them responsible this equation face virtually no accountability pressures due mostly to corrupt and fake elections, and seeing as the people ultimately responsible for making sure the regulations are followed cannot be fired by the populace, the natural disaster wins every single time.

However, compliance has a strong cultural component. It may be far-fetched that the population of Haiti would forcibly throw out their government if they can't do so through fixed elections simply because safety codes are neglected. Even in the US, the incompetence of Bush Jr.'s FEMA in handling Hurricane Katrina didn't bring about any sort of national violent uprising, although it did lead to many demands for changes to regulations and dismissal of bureaucrats, some of which were met. But neglect is a spectrum. The fact that they were neglected to the extent demonstrated by this earthquake, as well as a variety of other historical facts about Haiti, are strong evidence of a culture that is very undemanding in terms of accountability and forcing the government to do its job. This isn't any kind of ethnocentric claim against Haitians, I am merely a proponent of a theory that societies develop and mature culturally over time and become more demanding, and that Haiti is relatively undeveloped in this respect. A mere 200 years ago, for example, the aggregate of the population of the United States thought it perfectly acceptable to own and enslave another human being, or to force him from his home motivated by religious and ethnocentric hysteria as was the case with Native Americans. Contrary to popular modern belief, most of the VICTIMS of these practices thought of the practices as perfectly acceptable, their concern was to reduce the impact on themselves and their families, not to convince the oppressive society that this wasn't OK. When a practice becomes culturally intolerable by an aggregate of the population is usually when such practice is labeled barbaric and at least significantly reduced if not done away with. Places like Haiti and Russia can be said to have roughly attained the developmental stage of the US in the late 19th century - with corruption and pandering to rich and powerful interests by the government not only rampant, but accepted culturally as natural and unavoidable. In places like Turkey and Pakistan the undercurrent of this being unacceptable has gained ground in recent decades and begun to change the course of politics, but in Haiti or Russia said undercurrent is infant at best.

If its not obvious yet why both nation-building and globalism, even in the form of aid to a seemingly devastated and un-resisting country, are doomed to failure and blowback against whoever is giving the aid, let me conclude by breaking it down for you. The guerillas aren't attacking the aid workers because they are there and make an easy target. The aid workers are there because it is a country whose culture allowed it to be devastated by a 7 point earthquake in the 21st century although the scientific knowledge for how to prevent this has been available for decades and likely written into its laws. Such cultures breed guerillas, as well as incivility and superstition in times of disaster; elements that will naturally attack anything attempting to solve the crisis in a civilized manner. If these policies can't win in an attempt to deliver aid and rebuild infrastructure, what chance can they possibly stand in trying to change the social order of a country against heavily organized resistance forces in places like Afganistan, or Viet Nam before it? The failure of the policies also isn't limited to organized hostility. Various forms of foreign aid to struggling economies such as Guatemala, Uganda and Russia have a long documented history of producing no returns and worsening the economic situation at the target location as the culture of corruption at all levels makes the aid a vehicle of empowerment for special interests and inequality.

I'm not making the claim that the poor starving children you see in television ads asking for donations and political support of your government's intervention aren't DESERVING of help and access to resources, but I am proving that said aid does not help those children and in many cases makes their situation worse. Imagine if, in the 1840s, a foreign country with a far more powerful military invaded the United States with the intention of ending slavery, ensuring political and resource-access equality for all races including the freed slaves, and rooting out the practice of displacing Native Americans from their lands. Based on our familiarity with the culture of the US at that time, would this have WORKED? Arguably, even our own Civil War marked the end of slavery but failed colossally to bring equality to the freed slaves, and this is despite the fact that the Union Army occupied some parts of the former Confederacy until as late as 1877, restricting its capacity to govern itself. Racism was deeply ingrained in the culture and despite a military presence, it was heavily institutionalized and enforced through vigilante justice by guerilla groups like the KKK, against whom the standing military proved disastrously incapable due to the cultural hostility of the local population. After 12 years of occupation, the efficiency costs to the Federal government became too excessive and they withdrew despite some of the Southern States not having met the requirements set for this in 1865. Arguably, if the secession and the Civil War could have been avoided, a cultural evolution of belief in racial equality would have brought far more commendable results to the South a couple of decades later, even if this meant a delay to the abolition of slavery.

Similarly, throwing anything from resources to the military to a combination of both into places stricken by corruption and poverty tends to slow down the progress of those places in demanding an end to these practices. What we view as help, they view as hostility and meddling in their affairs which we don't understand; and the resources we deliver are embezzled and distributed disproportionately in a matter-of-fact way because even those on the cheated end view this as normal, but as a result also view US as backing the embezzlers by delivering them. I haven't even touched on the plethora of ulterior motives for governments bringing occupations and aid, such as securing in power a dictatorial government that is conducive to their economic interests, which eventually breeds extremely hostile guerilla opposition such as Che Guevara and Osama Bin Laden, but these too are often a reality of nation-building. However, even the most well-intentioned globalism and nation-building are doomed to failure simply by their nature of miscalculating their targets of operation, and the Haiti situation should be treated as a valuable lesson in why to fire your government from its self-prescribed responsibility of meddling in foreign affairs.