(First of two articles)

As the world's attention remains fixed on the looming war in Iraq, the U.S. and its local allies are carrying out a similar offensive against the government of Haiti with a goal of "regime change" before 2004, the bicentennial of Haitian independence and history's only successful slave revolution.

Just as in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Washington-sponsored offensive in Haiti has three fronts: diplomatic, media, and military. The three elements are tightly synchronized and interdependent. A brief examination of each reveals that today's struggle spans decades, involving politicians, bureaucrats, and soldiers who are not new to counter-revolutionary intrigue, subversion, and destabilization.

The Diplomatic Front

Around the time of "President-for-Life" Jean-Claude Duvalier's fall in 1986, the U.S. government was waging a low-intensity war in Nicaragua against the progressive government of the Sandanista National Liberation Front, which overthrew the Somoza dictatorship in 1979. In many ways, that conflict resembles the one in Haiti today, and this is no coincidence. The architects and engineers of the bloody campaign which eventually removed the Sandinistas from power in 1989 are in key positions in the government of George W. Bush. Let‚s examine a few of them.

Elliot Abrams, National Security Council (NSC), Special Advisor on Democracy, Human Rights and International Operations. As Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs under the Reagan administration, he oversaw the murderous war waged from Honduras by Somoza's former soldiers, the Contras, against the Nicaraguan people. He was convicted of lying to Congress about how the Reagan administration made secret, illegal weapon sales to Iran to fund the Contras, but was pardoned by Bush senior in 1992. The Nation's David Corn calls him "as nasty a policy warrior as Washington had seen in decades."

John Poindexter, Director of Information Awareness Office. As Reagan's National Security Advisor, he masterminded the Iran/Contra affair with his assistant, Lieut. Col. Oliver North. Both were convicted on five counts of conspiracy, obstruction of justice and destruction of evidence but were later let off the hook by an appeals court on a technicality. Even conservative columnist William Safire calls Poindexter a "ring-knocking master of deceit."

John Negroponte, U.S. Ambassador to the UN. As U.S. Ambassador to Honduras from 1981-85, this Cuban-American had a hand in the Iran/Contra affair and helped cover-up political killings, disappearances, and the role played by the CIA and Pentagon, human rights groups charge. He is also a former aide to Henry Kissinger. "It is indeed horrifying to think that he should be chosen to represent our country at the United Nations," writes Sister Laetitia Bordes, author of the book Our Hearts Were Broken, who met personally with Negroponte and worked in El Salvador for almost a decade.

Otto Reich, Special Representative for Hemispheric Initiatives and formerly Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs. Born in Cuba and one of the most well-known anti-communist zealots in the present administration, he was deeply involved with Poindexter and North in the Iran/Contra scandal. Senior CIA and Pentagon intelligence and psychological operations officials used "a domestic political and propaganda operation run through [Reich's] obscure bureau in the Department of State" to illegally work at "influencing Congressional votes and U.S. domestic news media" while raising funds for North to disburse, according to a House Foreign Affairs committee staff report cited on the National Security Archive's website.

Roger Noriega, Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs and formerly Ambassador to the Organization of American States (OAS). Of Cuban heritage but born in Kansas, he was chief of staff to recently-retired arch-conservative Sen. Jesse Helms (R-NC) and helped draft reams of reactionary legislation for Latin America. Before that, as an aide in the State Department's Latin Affairs bureau, he was a collaborator of Abrams and Reich in the State Department's "dirty war" against Nicaragua.

"The resurfacing of the Iran-Contra culprits has been nothing short of Orwellian in this administration," Peter Kornbluh of the National Security Archives told Newsday last Decemeber. "These are not 21st-century appointments. They are retrograde appointments, a throwback to an era of interventionism when the U.S. was the big bully on the block."

Interventionism continues and clearly is growing, with Reich and Noriega leading the charge against Haiti today. When at the OAS, Noriega charged that Aristide is becoming an "illegitimate president" of a "pariah state" and urged invoking the OAS's new Inter-American Democratic Charter to take sanctions or possibly stronger action against Haiti.

Reich, for his part, will be the unspoken leader of yet another OAS delegation due to visit Haiti on Mar. 19. The delegation will likely accuse the government of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide for not fulfilling its commitments under OAS Resolution 822, passed last September (see Haïti Progrès, Vol. 20, No. 26, 9/11/02).

Meanwhile, Washington makes no effort to hide its support for the Haitian opposition. In mid-December, the International Republican Institute (IRI), the Republican arm of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), invited over 50 opposition politician and "civil society" representatives (mostly businessmen) to a three-day strategy session in Santo Domingo (see Haïti Progrès, Vol. 20, No. 41, 12/25/02). The meeting took place after the failure of a major opposition march and bourgeoisie-sponsored "general strike" in early December. When the IRI invitees returned, they launched a broadened "civil society" initiative known as the "Group of 184" (see Haïti Progrès, Vol. 20, No. 45, 1/22/03). The NED replaced the CIA in 1983 as Washington's tool for meddling in other nations‚ electoral contests and political life, what it disingenuously calls on its website "strengthen[ing] democratic institutions around the world through nongovernmental efforts."

One Canadian official, Secretary of State for Latin America, Africa, and the French-speaking World, Denis Paradis, will not be a part of Mar. 19 OAS mission as previously announced. He dropped out after a Canadian magazine revealed his role in convening a meeting of U.S. State Department officials, a French government representative, the Salvadorean Foreign Minister and OAS diplomats to discuss plans for Aristide's removal and the installation of yet another military occupation of Haiti (see Haïti Progrès, Vol. 20, No. 51, 3/5/03). The article also quoted Paradis as making insulting remarks about Haitian officials and saying Haiti is "a time bomb which must be defused immediately."

The Canadian Ambassador to Haiti, Kenneth Cook, sent a Feb. 28 letter to Haiti‚s Foreign Minister Joseph Philippe Antonio admitting that the January gathering, to which Haiti was not invited, took place but claimed that it was only an "informal meeting... to enlarge the support for the OAS process" and "deplor[ed] any misunderstanding which might be caused by this article." Antonio responded on Mar. 5 that short of "a rectification or formal denial from Ottawa," the Haitian government would be "justified in doubting the good faith and objectivity of any Canadian official intervening in the process for resolving the political crisis" and would be "apprehensive to dialogue in full trust or deal without reticence with interlocutors who accept such malicious information" as that contained in the article. To date, no formal denial from Ottawa has been forthcoming.

Marc Lortie, Canada's deputy minister for the Americas, will replace Paradis in the OAS delegation.

Haiti observers believe that the "Ottawa Initiative," as Paradis‚ meeting was called, was orchestrated by Washington, using Ottawa as its front-man, much as Washington has used Britain in its campaign to attack Iraq.

In short, Washington uses its diplomatic resources primarily to line up bribed or bullied nations behind its policy objectives in Haiti, so as to provide a cover for its actions. But just as it has failed miserably in finding backers for its illegal war against Iraq, the Bush administration has found most Latin American and Caribbean nations unwilling to support its aggressive policies against Haiti, a problem for which Reich is surely hoping to compensate during this week's visit to Haiti.

There is no point in building diplomatic camouflage around imperialist machinations if there is no media to uncritically echo the threatening pronouncements of officials and disapprovingly frame the targeted nation's "recalcitrance." When it comes to the press, the U.S. is not lacking lackeys, either in the case of Iraq or Haiti.

(Next week: The Media Front and the Military Front)