US-backed foreign intervention has led to the disaster in Haiti | Pooja Bhatia

US justifications for intervention ignore the ways in which Haiti has rarely, if ever, been allowed to manage its own affairs

What comes first in Haiti: disaster or foreign intervention? The conventional, i.e. first world, wisdom has it that disaster comes first.

The underlying assumption is that Haitians cannot manage their own affairs. The government is corrupt or ineffective or both. Its people are ensnared in a web of progress-resistant cultural influences", as David Brooks was somehow allowed to opine in The New York Times just after the country's giant 2010 earthquake. Left alone, Haiti would descend into chaos and humanitarian crisis: disease, violence, death. That's when Haiti's so-called international friends - chiefly the US, along with Canada and France - are forced to come to the rescue with their big guns and elite forces.