AT LEAST HE GETS THE UNILATERAL REGIME CHANGE RIGHT:

Randall Robinson on Haiti's Tortured Past, Troubling Present: a review of AN UNBROKEN AGONY: Haiti, From Revolution to the Kidnapping of a President By Randall Robinson ( Theola Labbé, Washington Post)

[R]obinson is most appalled at the way Aristide and his wife (he resigned from the priesthood in 1994) were removed from the country in 2004. By far the most gripping and enlightening sections of the book are ones in which Robinson, relying on interviews with Aristide's helicopter pilot, Frantz Gabriel, describes how U.S. troops whisked Aristide out of the country. Gabriel arrived at the president's house at 3:30 a.m. on Feb. 29, after getting a call from security guard who sensed that something strange was happening and told him to come. When he got there, he found the president alone, but soon U.S. officials pulled into the driveway. One walked into the living room and told Aristide, "I'm the one that has to announce to you that you've got to go."

The Aristides were driven to the airport in a convoy of 10 white Suburbans; they boarded a plane and, after some uncertainty as to where they would be taken, were flown to the Central African Republic. Robinson spoke to Aristide nearly daily after the forced exit and traveled to Africa along with Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) to find out what had happened.

In recounting these events, Robinson often takes on a crusading tone, using words such as "abduction" and "kidnapping" to describe Aristide's departure. These are more than opinions to Robinson; they are his truth, but with his urgent tone, he risks alienating the kind of reader he may want to edify, someone ignorant of Haiti's unusual history as a rebel slave colony.

To the contrary, it's an action that Americans are insufficiently proud of and for which, like Liberia, W gets far too little credit. Haiti has a dishearteningly long way to go but all of the recent good news is directly attributable to this unsung American intervention.

Posted by Orrin Judd at October 19, 2007 11:52 AM