James Traub seemed a little bummed in a Sunday New York Times op-ed ("The End of American Intervention?," 2/18/10), that military cuts and changing priorities will mean fewer humanitarian interventions in America's future.

So we must accept, if uneasily, the future which now seems to lie before us: We will do less good in the world, but also less harm.

A leading advocate of "humanitarian intervention," Traub doesn't waste many words on the "harm" produced the by two decades of them, but he seems pretty sure about the "good." For instance, he writes that the post-Cold War period "raised the question of whether and when we would resort to force," a question he says was answered "when the Clinton administration felt compelled to respond to political chaos in Haiti and mass violence in the Balkans. Force could be used in pursuit of justice."

Traub doesn't mention that Clinton's Haiti intervention promoted anti-democratic forces (Extra! Update, 12/94) and that U.S. interference eventually scuttled that nation's democracy (Extra!, 7-8/06), bringing more chaos and bloodshed. Or that the bombing in the Balkans resulted in even more deadly recriminations against the people the US/NATO forces were allegedly protecting (Extra!, 1/08).

In fact, a close look at Traub's record shows he is generally supportive of U.S. military adventures whether they are dressed up with the "'humanitarian" label or not. From his lofty perches at the New York Times, Foreign Policy and elsewhere, Traub has seldom met an intervention he couldn't embrace. He supported early on an intervention in Darfur  (PBS Frontline interview (11/20/10) and Kyrgyzstan ("Not Too Late to Save Kyrgyzstan,'' Foreign Policy, 6/22/10).

But he was willing to scuttle set aside the "humanitarian" qualification to get at Libya, as he wrote in a Foreign Policy piece last year (3/11/11) headlined "Stepping In: Libya Doesn't Meet Any of the Criteria for a Humanitarian Intervention. We Should Do It Anyway."

The U.S. attack on Iraq in 2003 was launched over supposed weapons of mass destruction, but in a 2005 book review (New York Times, 10/30/05), Traub tried to argue that the Iraq War was started for humanitarian reasons, that "the case for war did not actually depend on the threat of imminent attack--even if the White House said otherwise."

But even the premise of Traub's Times op-ed, that the future will necessarily see fewer U.S. interventions, seems suspect. For instance, he doesn't mention the U.S.'s expanding use of drone missile strikes, or the increasing number of nations in which U.S. special forces are deployed--while it was 60 nations at end of the Bush administration, according to Nick Turse (Tomdispatch, 8/3/11), "By the end of this year, U.S. Special Operations Command spokesman Colonel Tim Nye told me, that number will likely reach 120."

According to Traub, the White House is currently pivoting away from the Middle East to prioritize the Pacific and China. Reflecting on the challenge of China, Traub writes, with no apparent irony:

China is an emerging power, and once having found their footing, emerging powers usually seek to expand at the expense of their neighbors. The world is accustomed to dealing with this kind of problem, which involves persuading the bumptious power that its interests lie in cooperation rather than in confrontation.

But who's going to persuade a bumptious United States to abandon its policies of constant confrontation?

In the new issue of Time (12/12/11), Fareed Zakaria writes in the first sentence of his column:

It is difficult to find a country on the planet that is more anti-American than Pakistan. In a Pew survey this year, only 12 percent of Pakistanis expressed a favorable view of the U.S.

It's not that difficult. The same survey of seven countries found one of them, Turkey, with an even lower 10 percent favorable opinion of the U.S., and Jordan just a hair above at 13 percent.

More important is Zakaria's conclusion:

There is a fundamental tension in U.S. policy toward Pakistan. We want a more democratic country, but we also want a government that can deliver cooperation on the ground. In practice, we always choose the latter, which means we cozy up to the military and overlook its destruction of democracy.

To be clear, he thinks siding with the military over democracy is a bad thing.

But he also thinks the United States "always" choose repression over democracy. This is notable, in that as of this summer he was writing that "all American presidents have supported and should support the spread of democracy." As we pointed out then, this does not square with the record.

And in March 2007, Zakaria wrote critically of the Bush record of intervening in Latin American countries, which he saw as a break with a Reaganesque policy of democracy promotion:

American foreign policy toward Latin America had been on the right track for two decades. Ronald Reagan orchestrated an extraordinary turnaround, supporting human rights, democracy and free trade in several countries.

As FAIR noted, this was a remarkable whitewash of the Reagan record.

And then there was the time Zakaria attempted to argue that U.S. policy towards Haiti was one long attempt to promote democracy:

Consider, for example, Haiti, where the United States has attempted to foster democracy on and off for almost a century--with almost no success. Why? Surely Haitians yearn to be free. But there are aspects of its politics, economics and culture that have made it very difficult to establish liberal democracy.

As FAIR pointed out, this period included U.S. military occupation along with support for a coup against Haiti's democratically elected government.

I suppose there's a chance that Zakaria's views towards U.S. power are becoming more critical. But if he's really reaching this conclusion, why talk about the "tension" between supporting democracy and working against democracy? Maybe he's just having trouble remembering which side of the argument he's on.

Washington Post editorialist Lee Hockstader wrote a puff profile on Haiti's thuggish President-elect Michel Martelly ("Haiti's 'Sweet Micky' Martelly Turns Presidential," 4/24/11), whom he depicts as

a fresh, vital force on the political scene, bringing with him energy and a new (mostly untested) crop of advisers, unbeholden to any recent political establishment. Little wonder that in the runoff election, Martelly, who is 50, beat a professorial 70-year-old former first lady 2 to 1.

How can you write about Martelly's run-off "victory" without noting that both rounds of the election had historically low turnout--not just for Haiti, but for the Western Hemisphere? According to the Center for Economic and Policy Research (4/5/11), which follows Haiti closely, Martelly "won only 4.6 percent of the electorate in the first round and 16.7 percent in the second round." There is indeed "little wonder" that even a candidate with ties to the bloody Duvalier dictatorship who promises to restore the hated Haitian army can get that much support.

Speaking of Duvalier, Hockstader includes the usual spurious equation of the dictator with twice-deposed President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, calling both "divisive former presidents who have recently returned to Haiti from exile and who might face prosecution." In the most recent election he was allowed to participate in, Aristide got 92 percent of the vote with a 68 percent turnout. So who's really the "divisive" president?
UPDATE: The Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, an intergovernmental organization, calculated the turnout for the 2000 election at 78 percent, which may be a more accurate number.

Here is Michel Martelly, one of the two conservative candidates vying to be next president of Haiti, courtesy of Kim Ives in an Institute for Public Accuracy release:

In the years following Aristide's restoration to power in 1994, Martelly became obsessed with hatred for the man. In a video from not too long ago, which can be seen on YouTube, the candidate threatens a patron in a bar where he has performed. "All those shits were Aristide's faggots," he says. "I would kill Aristide to stick a dick up your ass."... [Video]

The New York Times has a profile today (3/18/11) of Martelly which alludes to this video--while omitting the worst part. The piece is headlined "A Roguish Candidate Taps Haitians' Discontent."  The Times' take on the video is that Martelly "describes a sex act he would perform on a former president whose politics he disliked." The piece goes on to refer to Martelly's opinion of Aristide as "the popular former priest and two-time president he so obscenely dismissed."

He said he wanted to kill him--that's more than an obscene dismissal.

In another Times piece on Haiti, the paper calls Aristide a "former firebrand priest beloved by the poor but dismissed by others as corrupt," before drawing this equivalence:

He will be the second polarizing figure in Haitian politics to return in recent months: Jean-Claude Duvalier, the former dictator known as Baby Doc, suddenly returned from exile in January and is living quietly here while courts iron out pending human rights and corruption charges related to his government.

As we pointed out before, comparing Aristide's human-rights record to Duvalier's bloody reign is obscene.

It was certainly surprising to see former Haitian dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier return to the country on January 16. To say he has blood on his hands is an understatement--the Duvalier regimes were responsible for tens of thousands of deaths and widespread abuse, and stole millions of dollars from the country.

Soon thereafter, former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide announced his intention to return to his country. Aristide, twice elected and twice removed from office, remains a popular figure in Haitian politics. His first stint in office was remarkably peaceful; his second, during which he faced armed attacks that eventually succeeded in overthrowing his government, was scarcely more violent. But some media accounts are expressing concern about Aristide's return, in effect equating him with the bloody Duvalier.

USA Today columnist DeWayne Wickham wrote a piece on February 8 headlined "U.S. Meekly Allows Despots to Return to Haiti." Wickham recounts the horrors of Duvalier's reign of terror, but for some unfathomable reason decides that Aristide poses some comparable menace to Haiti--his return might "push Haiti closer to turmoil," and the two of them are "old troublemakers from returning at a time when Haiti's democracy is most vulnerable to the havoc they almost certainly will produce."

Wickham seems mostly concerned about democracy:

With another round of voting scheduled for March 20, the thing Haiti needs more than anything else now is a level of stability and calm. But what it's likely to get once Aristide returns--and once he and Duvalier rally their old supporters to their side--will be a return to the bloody factionalism that punctuated their time at the helm of Haiti's government.

It might be worth pointing out that Aristide's Lavalas party--still enormously popular--was banned from participating in last year's election, which as a result had the lowest turnout of any election held in the Western Hemisphere in the last 60 years.

The Duvalier = Aristide equation could be seen elsewhere. A New York Times report (2/9/11) warned that "experts inside and outside Haiti fear that the presence of the two former leaders could further destabilize the country." The Times went on to note that "members of the international community expressed concern that Mr. Aristide...could create widespread instability at a precarious moment." The story does note that Aristide was "beloved by the poor but criticized by many"--given Haiti's massive poverty, it's hard to know what to make of that.

A short Los Angeles Times piece (2/8/11) conveyed a similar message: Aristide "has broad popular support but remains a polarizing figure in Haiti." That article also equated Duvalier and Aristide, reporting that "the return of the two former leaders comes at an unsteady moment for the country."

One would hope reporters could find a way to make a meaningful distinction between a ruthless, bloody dictator and a popular elected president. It is obscene to refer to them both as "leaders" or, as the USA Today headline put it,  "despots."