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Left in ruins, Haiti poses potential threat to U.S.

Even before an earthquake killed as many as 200,000 and injured tens of thousands more, Haitians struggled with natural disasters, extreme poverty and governments that were corrupt, brutal, incompetent, or all three.

As the dead are being counted, a range of experts agree the island's prospects are desperate -- and are a serious concern for the United States.

Compounding that concern is widespread acknowledgment that decades of U.S. and other aid largely failed to make a difference.

"There are all kinds of reasons why a destabilized Haiti is against U.S. national interests and why the U.S. government has always had to act in the past," says James Roberts, a fellow at the Heritage Foundation and economic counselor in the U.S. Embassy in Haiti in 2006-07.

"The problem is that there have been comparatively short-term kind of Band-Aid solutions, and they have not ultimately solved the problems."

Now, a long-term effort to rebuild the shattered nation "should be considered part of the cost of U.S. national security ... and it is going to cost some money," Roberts says.

Peter DeShazo, former deputy assistant secretary of State for Western Hemisphere affairs, says Haiti is "absolutely incapable of bringing itself back under these kind of circumstances."

That leaves it completely dependent on U.S. and international aid, he and others say.

According to Susan Purcell, director of the University of Miami's Center for Hemispheric Policy, the U.S. role will "very big for the foreseeable future."

Mark Schneider, who headed the Caribbean division of the U.S. Agency for International Development during the Clinton administration, agrees: "I think the U.S. has to be thinking about a decade-long commitment ... about the largest single post-disaster relief contribution that it has ever made to a single country."

The United States has a long, often troubled history in Haiti. It is, by far, the largest donor in a land that lived on foreign aid even before disaster struck. Large numbers of Haitian exiles in America send remittances back home that account for about 20 percent of the country's gross domestic product.

Marines occupied the country from 1915 to 1934. In 1994, then-President Bill Clinton restored deposed Haitian President Jean Bertrand Aristide to power, and a U.S. military plane flew Aristide into exile after another uprising in 2004.

Most analysts believe that failing to rebuild Haiti now, when its already-tenuous economic and political systems have been destroyed, will create a growing security threat in the region -- and force the United States to intervene militarily once more.

"It behooves the United States to make certain that a country so close to us and in our hemisphere is not a failed state or an unstable state that could open the door to the influence of international crime or other ... elements that would be a security problem for the United States," says DeShazo, the former U.S. diplomat who directs the Americas program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a private think tank in Washington.

University of Miami's Purcell foresees "a wave of people ... in boats, trying to reach the U.S. shore" if the country is not salvaged.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton meets Monday in Montreal with other foreign ministers for a "Friends of Haiti" donor conference. Other nations attending are Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Costa Rica, France, Mexico, Peru, Spain and Uruguay; the anti-U.S. states of Bolivia, Nicaragua and Venezuela are not invited.

The diplomats will concentrate on immediate relief operations and "some planning for the longer term," according to Schneider, senior vice president and special adviser on Latin America for the International Crisis Group.

He expects the conference to produce "a very strong political commitment and the adoption of a process moving forward."

Yet the way forward is unclear.

Billions of dollars in foreign aid poured into Haiti for decades but "if one were called to account where the money went ... you would be hard pressed to do it," Purcell says.

Heritage's Roberts agrees: "The only thing the (Haitian) government did, in my estimation, was to serve as a roadblock to getting anything done, with palms out to be greased all the way along, in classic Third-World style."

Schneider counters that Haiti made some recent progress on security and judicial reform, which may be a basis to rebuild all of its institutions.

The keys to rebuilding the flattened state, according to DeShazo, include creating a professional police force, a competent government that is credible to the populace, and kick-starting the economy to produce jobs.

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