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BILL MOYERS:
Why should we care? I mean, it's hard to maintain concern for Iraq.
JAMES DOBBINS:
Well, I think there are both practical geo-political, economic and humanitarian reasons to be concerned. It's on our doorstep. It's an overnight boat ride away. We can prevent large numbers of Haitians arriving in the United States only by sending them back without fulfilling what most would argue are international obligations to determine whether or not they were, in fact, valid refugees.
BILL MOYERS:
Escaping persecution and ...
JAMES DOBBINS:
Escaping persecution. We, in fact, do not make any such determination. We simply return them automatically. We treat Haitians very different from the way we treat Cubans for instance in terms of those who flee and reach the United States. So, we're sort of forced to turn a blind eye to the political as well as economic circumstances that force these people to flee the country. And, return them -- rather cold-heartedly -- lest we have a million of them on our shore, which we could easily have within a matter of weeks if we opened the floodgates.
That's an unstable and unsatisfactory situation to have right on your border. Haiti is a poor, largely ungoverned society, which is prey to drug smuggling. It's a transit point for drugs from South America. It's a potential breeding ground for terrorism. It's certainly a breeding ground for diseases -- AIDS for instance. And, other potentially communicable diseases. It's a black hole the way Lebanon was a black hole in the 1980s.
BILL MOYERS:
And, yet today, it's flourishing again.
JAMES DOBBINS:
It is, but I mean, for a decade it was sort of an international black hole, a source of criminality, violence, terrorism. Haiti could easily become that and so we have those reasons, and we have the plain humanitarian reasons of having one of the poorest nations in the world right on our doorstep.
BILL MOYERS:
Do you think those elections coming up later this fall with be fair and free?
JAMES DOBBINS:
I think they'll be as fair and free as the U.N. can make them. I think they probably will not achieve a level of participation that marked the elections that occurred in the first half of through the middle of the 1990s, including Aristide's first elections and the elections, which while not perfect, were probably better than you'll have this time that occurred during the Clinton intervention.
The levels of violence are higher. The levels of intimidation are higher. On the other hand if Aristide supporters participate, if you have an election in which the full spectrum actually gets out there and competes for the vote, that'll be the first time in over a decade that you haven't had one side or the other boycott the election process.
The problem with Haitian elections is that one side or the other always declare them invalid and refuse to abide by the results. If you get an election this time in which all of the major contenders for power actually participate, that would be a big step forward.
BILL MOYERS:
You have made a career showing up in these volatile states, one after another, Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan. Why this attraction to failed states?
JAMES DOBBINS:
Well, I can't say I volunteered for most of these. I mean, it started when just after the Black Hawk Down incident in Somalia, where they suddenly wanted somebody to help arrange a graceful exit and I was brought in to negotiate, essentially, the parameters for American withdrawal and one thing led to another.
Having gotten us out of Somalia, it was decided I'd be a good person to help get us into Haiti. Having gotten us into Haiti, I was then told I had to wait and get us out. So that was a sort of a two year assignment. And, by the time that was over, it was on to Bosnia and Kosovo, and then finally this administration when it suddenly found itself saddled with a nation-building mission -- after having committed itself in the campaign to avoid such activities -- needed somebody to work with the Afghan opposition in order to install a successor to the Taliban regime.
And, I was once again called on. I would've much preferred to continue my career as a Europeanist and, spend the rest of my tours in Paris and London.
BILL MOYERS:
That was your specialty. That was your earlier trade.
JAMES DOBBINS:
It was.
BILL MOYERS:
So, what do you take away from all these years of experience about American intervention in places that are so volatile, so troubled, so dangerous?
JAMES DOBBINS:
Well, what I take away from it is first of all that we're not going to be able to avoid these kinds of missions. And, secondly that we need to begin to learn to do them better. For too long we've treated each of these successive interventions as if it's the first one we've ever done. We go in with new ideas, new people, new concepts. But, worst of all we treat each of them as if it's the last one we're ever going to do, and when they're completed, we don't make a concerted effort to draw conclusions, create an ongoing doctrine for the conduct of such operations. We don't build a cadre of experienced people who can go from one operation to the next.
And, as the result, we're constantly improvising. We're constantly surprised by the challenges we meet. We need to make this a more professional approach.
BILL MOYERS:
You look at that film and you hear lots of talk in Haiti politics about getting power, getting our group in, our tribe, our clan in, this particular faction in. But, I didn't hear anybody in that film outlining the vision for Haiti once you get power.
JAMES DOBBINS:
Well, that's a not uncommon phenomenon in situations like this where the society's power is highly personalized and it is a question of replacing personalities rather than of thought -- through concepts of governance. And, it's particularly acute in Haiti, which has been so isolated from the world and such an introverted and basically corrupted society, where power is about controlling the instrumentalities of governance and the channels of foreign assistance that are that are provided and rewarding one's supporters.
BILL MOYERS:
I hear you saying it's hard in a country like that to have the equivalent of a Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787. Right? It's very hard to bring together a group of people who have been spending a lot of time thinking about nation-building.
JAMES DOBBINS:
Well, it's certainly hard to bring together a group of representatives that enjoy the legitimacy and the support of the population in the way that the representatives who came to Philadelphia in 1787 did. It's a highly polarized society.
It's had more constitutions than it needs and most of them are long, complex and argued over endlessly. What it lacks is a coherent political class and a sense of national consensus about the basics of governance.
BILL MOYERS:
A lack of a political class. We heard lots of political talk in the film, but this doesn't represent an establishment does it?
JAMES DOBBINS:
Well, it represents an establishment and a counter establishment. The establishment, the small proportion of wealthy people prefer not to themselves exercise power if possible, but to manipulate power from the background. The counter establishment, those who purport to represent the poorest elements of the society and in many cases undoubtedly are genuine in their desire to do so, have no real thought-through programs of how they're going to accomplish that.
And the instrumentalities of the state are so weak that even if they did have programs, it would be extremely difficult for them to implement them.
BILL MOYERS:
And, it will take, if I hear you correctly, it will take an enduring effort by either the U.N. or the United States -- preferably the United States in your judgment -- to keep order there until a certain political stability and a political class can arrive?
JAMES DOBBINS:
I don't think it's either/or. I think there's no option but to have both engaged.
BILL MOYERS:
Both the U.N. and the U.S.?
JAMES DOBBINS:
The U.S. is the only country that has any influence in Haiti.
BILL MOYERS:
Why?
JAMES DOBBINS:
Well, because it's so big, it's so powerful, it's so near all Haiti's other neighbors are smaller than Haiti, less powerful than Haiti and Haiti has no real experience with them. The United States is the only external power.
On the other hand, it's important that the United States exercise that power through international instrumentalities, which legitimize it, which broaden the participation, which bring other countries and the resources of other countries to bear.
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James Dobbins, International Security and Defense Policy Center, RAND Corporation
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