[R-G] Mike Davis Interviewed on Haiti and Iraq

[Anthony Fenton]

From: K M Ives <kives at toast.net>

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                             HAITI LIBERTE
                   "Justice. Verite. Independance."

                    * THIS WEEK IN HAITI *

                           June 4 - 10, 2008
                              Vol. 1, No. 46

MODELS OF COMING U.S. INTERVENTIONS: IRAQ OR HAITI?
BEN TERRALL INTERVIEWS MIKE DAVIS

Mike Davis is the author of several books; the best known deal with U.S.
urban issues, particularly in Southern California where he grew up. They
include Prisoners of the American Dream: Politics and Economy in the  
History
of the U.S. Working Class (1986), City of Quartz: Excavating the  
Future in
Los Angeles (1990), and Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the  
Imagination of
Disaster (2000).

He is a history professor at the University of California, Irvine, and  
an
editor of the New Left Review. Defining himself as an international
socialist and "Marxist-Environmentalist," he is a frequent contributor  
to
The Nation and the British publications New Statesman and Socialist  
Review,
the organ of the Socialist Workers Party of Great Britain.

This interview, conducted by Haiti journalist and activist Ben Terrall  
in
early February, was first published by the online publication Dissident
Voice in March with the title "Toward a Better World: Interview with  
Mike
Davis."

-----

Ben Terrall: I wanted to get in a question about the United Nations in
Haiti. In Planet of Slums you talk about the Pentagon's global  
approach to
counter-insurgency being more focused on a kind of urban warfare. Having
gone to Haiti and seeing what the UN is doing, I wonder if you see  
that as a
new role for UN peacekeepers, as a kind of counterinsurgency proxy, in  
areas
where politically, after Mogadishu [the "Black Hawk Down" debacle of  
U.S.
troops in Somalia in the early 1990s -ed.], it's too risky for U.S.  
forces
to be there.

Mike Davis: Well to be honest with you, I'm very disturbed that groups  
like
the Friends [American Friends Service Committee] and CARE, Save the  
Children
and other NGOs have supported the establishment of this State Department
Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization and  
support
the Haitian Stabilization Initiative.

This whole idea of having a "smart" foreign policy is what this stuff  
really
is about. I think it was in the Spring of 2006 when the State Department
issued this extraordinary report which found almost everything possible
wrong with the U.S. occupation of Iraq and then argued for a new  
policy that
avoided expensive reconstruction and in favor of a combination of  
imposing
law and order and then small-scale economic progress.

It's very clear that's what's still going on Iraq with the surge  
represents
the past, but Haiti is the future. And what the United States is looking
for, or at least the State Department and almost certainly an Obama or
Clinton administration, would be a form of intervention that can  
establish a
minimum threshold of control and stability in the areas recognized as  
most
potentially volatile or dangerous from the standpoint of U.S. interests.

It's done this in Haiti not only using the UN, including the first  
Chinese
contingent, but it's part of this extraordinary, and I think much  
overlooked
alliance between the Bush Administration and the Workers Party in  
power in
Brazil, which includes consensus about "peacekeeping" in the  
Caribbean, but
also the joint development of biofuels internationally.

What is also extraordinary about Haiti is that the object of  
intervention
isn't just Haiti or Port-au-Prince, but it's specifically Port-au- 
Prince's
largest slum and probably the poorest in all the Americas, Cite  
Soleil, with
a combination of building police stations and paving roads, and  
setting up a
few popular projects.

It's explicitly a strategy to take control from the so-called Chimere  
gangs
to the new government of Haiti, in a context where the democratically
elected President of Haiti is in exile, and has been deposed by a
combination of French, American and Brazilian intervention. It's quite
extraordinary, and I think the program, though relatively small scale,  
is
more the template for the future than the occupation of Iraq.

In a world where a lot of governments have been reduced to a bare  
minimum
after structural adjustment, where huge areas of the cities have been
essentially abandoned by the state, how do you re-establish state  
control,
how do you prevent groups of any kind from achieving dual power and
sovereignty in the slums?

The experiment in Cite Soleil is supposed to provide a model for that,  
and a
model for future U.S. interventions. In a sense it meets  
[neoconservative
author] Max Boot's demand in a column last year that the United States
should basically have a Department of Colonial Affairs - well, that's  
the
Office of Reconstruction and Stabilization.

BT: One things that's clear to me, from following what's going on in  
Haiti
since the 2004 coup, which forced out Aristide and his democratically
elected government, is the role that NGOs play in taking back  
democracy from
the people. This has been the case since before the coup. I recently  
heard
from a grassroots group that does work with the poor in Cite Soleil.  
Just to
keep people alive they're ready to give over the group to these right- 
wing
funded characters behind the coup.

MD: I think you're absolutely right, and I think the State Department  
has
now made explicit - and indeed even the Bush Administration, by  
transferring
the primary responsibility for stabilization, at least theoretically,  
from
the Pentagon to the State Department - that throughout the world the  
United
States is going to work with these NGOs, and these NGOs are kind of
soft-power American intervention.

But what I find very disturbing is that groups like the Friends, who  
for so
long have advocated for peace and nonintervention, would endorse a  
policy
where basically the small-scale job schemes, and free clinics, are  
part and
parcel of strengthening the police and dramatically repressive  
strategies.
For them to buy into this line, I wonder if this is not what a Clinton  
or
Obama administration would give us on an even larger scale. Of course,
McCain is more apt to keep using a big stick.

I think people are so focused on the horror of what the American
intervention in Iraq has brought that they're not paying attention -  
and, of
course, nobody's being forced to debate - what's happening in Haiti,  
what's
happening in the horn of Africa, U.S. interventions in West Africa. It's
just all off the radar screen.

BT: A politically engaged geography professor wanted me to ask you how
activists might effectively counter the nationalist logic that governs
discussion on matters of immigration (emphasizing "illegality" and the
supposed "right" of countries to control their boundaries and who  
comes in
and out).

MD: My position on this is virtually the same as many people in the  
Catholic
Church - including those with whom I would disagree with vehemently on  
other
issues - which is that human rights come first, that borders are  
essentially
systems of violence imposed on landscapes and human lives.

It's very important that there's something like an abolitionist minority
that reject borders as a way to ration rights in the world or to manage
conflicts. There are differences between borders: The U.S./Mexican  
border is
fighting against an inexorable fact, which is that Mexicans and North
America are totally entangled. Europe, which already has its own  
internal
Mexicos, like Poland, would try to go to an absolute border, and to  
have an
almost Orwellian-type border patrol. This is what a lot of the  
nativists in
the country want to do, to move toward something more like the Schengen
system in Europe, total exclusion, total control.

But the violence of borders, and the number of wall borders, of  
course, has
increased exponentially. A lot more people die now at the borders of  
Europe
than they did in the age of the Iron Curtain.

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