WaPo Editorial Board Calls For US Military Invasion Of Haiti

Apparently ignoring every “lesson” of the last two decades of utterly failed and disastrous US foreign interventions and adventurism abroad, which has left especially the Middle East burning and in a state of perpetual destabilization, The Washington Post editorial board is calling for yet more experiments in nation-building, this time much closer to home in a seeming throwback to era of the Monroe Doctrine. 

“Haiti’s spiraling mayhem, florid lawlessness and humanitarian meltdown were predictable following the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse in July,” the op-ed published earlier in the week began. “In a country already crippled by governmental dysfunction, the vacuum of political legitimacy and authority after that murder left a breeding ground for anarchy.” Naturally the premier hawkish beltway publication owned by Jeff Bezos and tied at the hip with the D.C. national security state sees only a singular “solution”…

🚨Alert🚨:

The Washington Post’s editorial board is calling for a US invasion of Haiti 🇭🇹. pic.twitter.com/8mJy0dGPMk

— Alan MacLeod (@AlanRMacLeod) October 19, 2021

The article links Biden administration ‘inaction’ with the recent kidnapping of 17 Ohio-based missionaries in Port-au-Prince. Currently a criminal gang is demanding $17 million for their release, as FBI agents are reportedly on the ground searching for clues as to where they are being held.

“The mess was largely ignored by the Biden administration, which has been preoccupied with other crises, until the kidnapping Saturday of 17 missionaries — a Canadian and 16 Americans, including five children — near the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince,” WaPo continues.

“Now the maelstrom in the hemisphere’s poorest nation is no longer ignorable,” the editorial board writes. And quickly bypassing any other possible efforts or options that might be available for Washington to help mitigate the ongoing crisis in Haiti, such as foreign aid or diplomatic or charitable efforts, the WaPo authors go straight to advocating direct military intervention and occupation to “fix” the Caribbean nation.

Here are the key lines calling for US military action:

Yet for all its unintended consequences, outside intervention could also establish a modicum of stability and order that would represent a major humanitarian improvement on the status quo, and with it, the prospect of lives saved and livelihoods enabled.

In 2010 the US sent a major Navy and Marine deployment to Haiti as part of Operation Unified Response in the wake of a deadly earthquake that devastated the country. Also this summer a couple hundred Marines were sent in response to an earthquake that resulted in the deaths of more that 2,000 Haitians. 

The editorial board concludes, “In the cost-benefit analysis that would attend any fresh intervention, policymakers must be alert to the risks, but also to the enormous peril of continuing to do nothing.”

Though of course the obvious irony is that there will be zero “risks” for the WaPo armchair interventionists themselves. Fresh off one ‘forever war’ endless occupation in Afghanistan which just wrapped up after two failed decades a mere month ago, these beltway hawks are already salivating for more… all in the name of “helping others” – despite the whole ‘humanitarian intervention’ rationale being long ago exposed as a falsehood especially in places like Libya or Syria, where Washington meddling has only destabilized and destroyed once stable societies.