Haiti Update, Part 3

Jibing with what I said yesterday, one of Josh Marshall's readers points out that Haiti is now effectively our new Afghanistan (emphasis mine):

We're talking about providing forces in the short term, and funding and training forces in the long term, to provide security in a state that has not functioned in a generation. This will require a willingness to exercise force, and yes, a willingness to accept casualties. We're talking about an ongoing presence measured not in months, but in years. We're talking about a commitment of funds and resources that makes the initial figure of $100 million seem trivial. We're talking about the longterm resettlement of population, reconstruction of institutions and infrastructure, and rethinking of the basic fabric of a state. We've just seen how difficult and costly it can be to build a state in Iraq and in Afghanistan - I don't see how to avoid the conclusion that we have just found ourselves again committed to reconstructing a state.

Even if we do not accept the moral burden, even if we hew closely to the cold calculus of realism, we are obliged to act. It is difficult to imagine that desperation will not force thousands, perhaps even hundreds of thousands, to take to the ocean on anything that will float. Many will drown, but many will reach our shores. If we are too callous to provide aid where it is needed, the disaster will wash up on our shores where we cannot avoid it. ...

I know that it seems to soon to think of this tragedy as perhaps the most important political event of the last year. But we're going to be enmeshed in Haiti at least as long as we are in Iraq or Afghanistan - there's no avoiding that. How this response unfolds, how we structure our responsibilities, whether we choose to assume them alone or through international institutions, what sort of future we design for Haiti - these are vital questions. Ultimately, they are also political questions that will be decided by political actors. And the answers they provide will shape and constrain a wide array of seemingly unrelated policies. It's not to soon, I think, to make that point.

What 7 years of war have done to Afghanistan and Iraq was done to Haiti on one idle Tuesday afternoon.  We are now committed to rebuild Haiti from the ground up.  It will require a coalition of the willing, and billions of dollars and millions of manhours in rebuilding.  Haiti has no infrastructure, no government, no hope at this point.  They are off the map right now.

If we don't rebuild, we will deal with the blowback:  a hostile and angry nation of millions who feel we have abandoned them and left them to die.  We already have a few of those on our hands these days.  The difference is this particular nation won't be 8,000 miles away, but a few hundred.

Guess what?  Whether we like it or not, the stability of Haiti just became the top foreign policy and national security priority of the United States of America in this hemisphere.  We have to make sure Haiti prospers or unafirly or not, we have another Afghanistan on our hands.

If I'm a non-state actor and I wanted to spread anti-Americanism, I'm heading for Port-au-Prince right about now, ya dig?