Episode Info
- Season5
- Episode5
Hosted by Christina Ruffini and Sir Richard Dearlove
Guest
Daniel Foote
Daniel Foote is America's Special Envoy to Haiti who quit the post in protest at how the Biden Administration was handling the crisis.
Episode Summary
Last July, the President of Haiti was gunned down in his bedroom. The assassination plunged the already fragile country further into turmoil. Ambassador Daniel Foote, America's Special Envoy to Haiti quit his post just a few months later in protest at how the Biden Administration was handling the crisis. In an explosive interview, the former career diplomat opens up about the many mistakes and missed opportunities he witnessed while in office.
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Transcript
INTRODUCTION
Mcfarlane: You're listening to One Decision. I'm Julia McFarlane. Each week, we look at the consequential decisions made that shape our world. We speak to guests from all walks of life in government, in the firing line, in the public eye, and ask them why they made the choices that they did. This week, we speak to Ambassador Daniel Foote, the former special envoy to Haiti, and we ask him why he resigned in protest from the Biden administration last year, attacking the State Department, the United States government, and its legacy in one of the most troubled countries on Earth. Haiti, by all accounts, is in free fall. Last July, the president was gunned down in his bedroom, assassination still under investigation. The United States is increasingly taking the lead and bringing the perpetrators to justice amid mounting questions over the Haitian government's ability and even willingness to uncover the truth. Suspicion looms large over the current acting prime minister who is accused of having links to one of the main suspects with whom he's maintained close contact even after the killing. The assassination plunged the fragile country into turmoil, its institutions crumbling, its capital city ravaged by gangs, its economy in tatters, and its infrastructure battered after another devastating earthquake that came a month later in August 2021. Despite being a former French colony, the US has long had strategic interests in Haiti. Its location in the Caribbean places it on a superhighway of the arms, trafficking, and drugs trade from Southern and Latin America and beyond to the United States. Haitians have long accused the US of being behind some of the country's multiple coups and interfering in Haiti's democratic process. After the turbulent summer of 2021 following the president's assassination and another devastating earthquake, scores of Haitians fleeing the crisis arrived on the US southern border in Texas last year. Scenes of mounted border police attempting to encircle Haitian migrants on foot like cattle on the banks of the Rio Grande became emblematic of the accusation that US policy towards Haiti and its people had become dehumanizing. One of the most devastating attacks of US policy over Haiti came from inside the house when former special envoy Ambassador Daniel Foote penned his furious resignation letter last September. He began by telling us where he was when he heard the news that the president was dead.
INTERVIEW
Foote: Well, I came down in the morning, and my son who went to sixth grade in Port-au-Prince told me first thing, he was like, my god. They assassinated Jovenel Moïse. I was shocked. I mean, the only thing or one of the the African bombings on our embassies, 9/11, the death of Ambassador Chris Stevens in Benghazi are the only things during my career that kind of affected me like this. It was really hit me hard. And as instable as the world sees Haiti, this is the first time since 1915 that they've had a head of state assassinated. So it's quite it was quite a blow to the Haitian people. They they have been through a ton. Right? And we can talk about the reasons behind that. But I have never seen the Haitian people so angry, so hurt, so violated. And it's not because necessarily they liked Jovenel Moïse. His popularity was actually quite low. It's just the fact that foreigners can come into their country, break into the president's bedroom and kill him there at the foot of his bed, imagine how they feel. So it really was a huge event.
Mcfarlane: And it's an extraordinary story still because we still don't know who it was who ordered the assassination of the president.
Foote: That's one of the fascinating things of what's happened with this assassination. And I guess I would start by saying one of the the issues in Haiti throughout history is other countries have made Haitian sovereignty and their ability to determine their own future impossible to date. And this Moïse assassination is another example. He was killed in the wee hours of July 7, and it broke the constitution because it just didn't envision the current situation, which is no quorum in parliament and and no one of the successors constitutionally had died of COVID, and there was constitutional successor. But the acting prime minister at the time, Claude Joseph, stepped forward, said, I'm in charge. Everybody accepted that for ten days. And then on July seventeenth, eighteenth, I believe, eleven days later, the core group, which is made up of the US, the UN, the Brits, the the Spanish EU, the French, Canada, they issued a statement saying they were now going to work with Ariel Henry as the prime minister, which really caught the Haitian people by surprise and frankly didn't make them very happy because they do not really take kindly to foreigners continuing to meddle in their affairs. It turns out that there are explicit phone records. Ariel Henry talked to the chief suspect as one of the intellectual authors who's still on the run 12 times between the month before the assassination and several hours after, including twice afterwards for seven minutes. Press reported that this suspect, Joseph Badio, visited Ariel Henry while he was acting prime minister. It's put the country, which was already in political crisis, even into a more entrenched and difficult situation.
Mcfarlane: Let's talk about Ariel Henry, the man who has taken control and has assumed the acting presidency and is now acting prime minister as well. He is not a man who ever had your support, was he?
Foote: Not necessarily. I wouldn't say that. I I did not not support him. He was certainly put in the position in an exceptionally illegitimate way, but I like to think I gave the guy a chance as a person. He was pleasant. He's a neurosurgeon, so he's a he's a smart individual. I didn't find him to be terribly charismatic or dynamic. And I don't think the Haitian people have seen any evidence of dynamic leadership or leadership period in the six months that's that he's been in charge. And I'd also like to say he's not the acting president in anybody's mind but his own. He's the de facto prime minister, I think, the best way to describe.
Mcfarlane: De facto prime minister, okay, fine. He is a 71 year old neurosurgeon, as you say, and his background as a health official, aside from the fact that he's been in and out of government all these years, was what led to him serving on the country's COVID-19 task force as it were. So he already had one foot in the government working on Haiti's COVID response when this assassination took place. The fact that he was on the phone to the Haitian justice official who has been implicated in the assassination, the fact that he was on the phone to him in the hours after the killing, I mean, as someone who has met him and talked to him, what do you make of that? Do you think it is possible that Ariel Henry had a role in the assassination of Moïse?
Foote: Would it be possible? Sure. It's Haiti, absolutely. Anything's possible. The phone records themselves don't prove that Ariel Henry played a role. But the fact that he came out and answered the question about this once, and he said something to the effect that, Oh, I got a lot of phone calls that night, and I don't remember. And one of them was seven minutes long, the combination of those calls was seven minutes long. How does he not remember it? So he has just hasn't answered the question, and the Haitian investigation has gone nowhere. And I would surmise that that's because of political will to some extent. The Haitian police aren't the greatest investigators in the world, but they've it just looks like they've had their hands tied politically. We're not saying he did it, but he's implicated in an assassination and he won't answer questions or or support the investigation. So what does that tell you? I mean, I think people can draw their own conclusions there.
Mcfarlane: Let's look at the situation in Haiti today. There are armed gangs freely roaming across the street and you have essentially hundreds, if not thousands of people who fear for their lives and who do not believe they can live safely within their own country. And unsurprisingly, a lot of them have taken part in the migration routes up towards the United States. To what extent do you think so many Haitian migrants felt like they had no choice but to flee their country and head to the US?
Foote: So this has been going on for forty years, probably. That the the Haitian boat people began in the seventies and then in the eighties got very difficult and then tapered off. It happened in the nineties again. It's been quiet for for twenty years, but it is the US's biggest policy nightmare in in Haiti, and it started again. So this migration cycle has been going on for a long time. It has accelerated now because of the the absolute catastrophes, plural, going on in Haiti, but it had been going on. The images were horrendous. Can you imagine being the guy in the US government who's supposed to be trying to bring peace and stability to Haiti, seeing those images, knowing that we're sending them back to what's for all practical purposes, a war zone in Port-au-Prince. I learned about it on the news. And that's pretty that slaps you in the face. And and I watched two news cycles, and and I was like, I'm the special envoy. I'm not I can't be associated with this. And that's where I kind of popped out the door.
Mcfarlane: That's extraordinary. As you say, you are the person tasked with bringing peace to Haiti, to representing the United States, to the Haitian people and trying to work collaboratively with the Haitians to try and reach peace and political dialogue and hopefully political settlement. And you have no idea that your country is deporting thousands of Haitians by the plane load. I mean, who was your What did you do when you saw that on the news?
Foote: Well, it's crazy, first of all, right? And it borders on diplomatic malpractice because on the one hand, we're tasked, and we we really are, I think, in a well intentioned way, looking to try to help Haiti in the right way. We don't know how. We never have, but but that exists in the US government. But on the other hand, they're they don't know what to do. Never have over the past ten fourteen no. Twelve and eight and four, twelve years, thirteen years in Central America, we never solved immigration. And and so they're trying to send a strong message. Don't come here at the same time. And you cannot send you can't help Haiti and then break international law and send their people back to Haiti without asylum due process and expect to be able to help Haiti fix itself at the same time. They're just almost mutually exclusive.
Mcfarlane: You say against international law. Do you believe that is the case? Do you believe the Biden administration is acting in contravention of international law by deporting these people without giving them a right to claim asylum?
Foote: Absolutely. 100%. When I was the US ambassador to Zambia, I had to go in screaming and yelling to the Zambian government because they were working on refouling or returning an individual claiming asylum because of persecution concerns. They refouled. They wanted to send this guy back to Zimbabwe without due process. As the US representative, Washington was all over me. You got to go in do this. I did it because it is international rule. Turns out now we're doing the same thing. People who are fleeing persecution, danger, etcetera, have a right to claim asylum in any other country that's signatory to the convention, which is, I think, everybody in the United Nations. And if they don't give them due process and return them or send them someplace else, it's in contravention of them, those international conventions.
Mcfarlane: Talk to me about this Title 42, that the Biden administration is using this Trump-era COVID policy to deport these migrants because the administration has made the argument that it is not breaking the law. It is in fact acting on a very old public health law, which entitles health officials to take extraordinary measures to prevent the spread of infectious disease in border patrol stations and detention centers. That's justification that they're using for these deportations. And in fact, they have expelled more migrants under Title 42 than the previous Trump administration. There was a Biden appointee who anonymously told CBS that the administration was in this unusual position of deporting more people than the Trump administration before them.
Foote: It's amazing. This is the candidate who ran on a human rights platform and equality and inclusiveness. And he's using Trump-era xenophobic procedures and actually with more gusto than the Trump administration did. Look, at this point, I don't know how many people are traveling into and out of the United States each day. I don't know the answer to that. How many asylum claimees are there each day? Probably a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of the number of people traveling in and out of the United States. So why can't we process their claim? Are they really the ones that are causing eight hundred thousand new cases of COVID a day? I don't think so. It's hypocritical, but it's unscientific, and it doesn't work to stop the spread of COVID. Just be honest and say, we're deporting them because we don't want dirty brown and black people coming to the United States. Just say that. Don't say it's for public health. It never was.
Mcfarlane: I mean, that's a very, very strong accusation. You're implying that the implementation of the Title 42 is an act of racism by the Biden administration. Is that what I'm getting from you?
Foote: It's an act of using a big hammer to try and screw in an immigration screwdriver or a screw. It's not the right tool, and it's not actually a good tool for what they're trying to do. I'll let the immigration experts fill people in about what's going on behind this. But I will tell you that that over the the the Haiti's history, I believe that racism, maybe unintended in some instances, certainly not in most, and American racism, international racism, has been one of the biggest negative impacts on Haiti and its people and its future.
Mcfarlane: You say that the United States should have listened to these peoples, should have allowed them to make their claims for asylum. And what allegedly happened was that hundreds of Haitians were boarded onto planes. Some of them allegedly telling journalists from the Associated Press that they believed that they were being put on flights to Chicago or flights elsewhere to the United States when actually they didn't realize that they were being flown back to Haiti until they had landed on the airport at Port-au-Prince. This one journalist said that they had to stay there for days in very close quarters in these deportation centers, one meal a day, they weren't able to shower and they didn't realize that they were being sent back to Haiti. They thought they were being sent to another place of confinement. I mean, how does that make you feel? You are a United States ambassador, you travel the world representing the US. What does testimony like this make you feel like?
Foote: It's heartbreaking. Had this kind of treatment been extended to Western European immigrants one hundred years ago, my grandparents wouldn't have made it into the United States, nor would have many of us, and we wouldn't be here because they wouldn't have survived. I would like to see us start to fall back a little bit on American principles and ideals, life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses. I mean, we grew up. Are these just empty phrases? Or did what I grew up believing and learning? Is that really what America is about? In my mind, it is, and I think we can continue to do that. But we're not showing American leadership anymore. This immigration crisis is part of it.
Mcfarlane: So I think we've arrived at the point at which you decided that you could no longer continue in your post. And on the September 22, you wrote to Secretary of State, Tony Blinken, you said that you would not be associated with the United States' inhumane, counterproductive decision to deport thousands of Haitian refugees and illegal immigrants to Haiti. You said, our policy approach to Haiti remains deeply flawed and my recommendations have been ignored and dismissed when not edited to project a narrative different from my own. What is it that you are referencing there? When were you, when did you feel that you had been forced to edit and project a narrative different from the one that you believed was true?
Foote: I wrote a memo at the request of State Department leadership from Dan Foote, Special Envoy to Tony Blinken, Secretary of State, with my analysis and recommendations. The State Department decided, as it had during the previous ambassador's tenure, to have the ambassador down there clear my memo, which means they get to edit it. And she edited my memo to turn the meaning 180 degrees different from what it was. So so the the State Department's inner procedures and the people in charge kind of would were trying to prevent the truth from getting up to the Secretary of State, I believe.
Mcfarlane: So when when was this memo in question and who was the official who edited it?
Foote: The official who edited it was Ambassador Michele Sison, who was the previous American ambassador in Haiti. And what happened was everybody was all, you know, hugs and kisses for my first month within the US government. And everybody seemed to be playing ball and listening to me. And I went down to Haiti several times. I went to Miami a few times. I talked to Canadian diaspora in France, the whole world. And it became crystal clear to me, as we've discussed, that A, Ariel Henry, totally illegitimate, and that any government or elections that a government led by him were to hold would not be acceptable to the Haitian people, which means it's it's a useless exercise to to back this guy and move forward. And all the Haitians want, not all, but a vast consensus, want to have their own political agreement come together and have the international community support that because Haiti does not have the resources that it needs to to move forward. And it was clear that there was a rift. The embassy and the State Department were supporting Ariel Henry and this just non nonviable government of a dude who might have killed the president of Haiti. It's not going to work. I could not They're backing Ariel and would not listen to me. And I believe the only true solution is the one that the Haitians have been working on, civil society, opposition political parties, since March. And they now have a broad consensus in Haiti. And so I was looking at the people of Haiti and their desires. The embassy and the State Department were like, we'll just stick with Ariel Henry and close our eyes and hope it gets better. And hope is not a strategy.
Mcfarlane: I just want to ask you about one last line in your resignation letter, which I think packs a whole lot of punch. You wrote in your letter to the Secretary of State, The hubris that makes us believe we should pick the winner again is impressive. That is a damning sentence coming from a former United States ambassador to the Secretary of State. Is that truly how you feel about United States foreign policy and state building when it comes to countries like Haiti?
Foote: Certainly in Haiti's case. We sent the US Marines to Haiti in 1915 after the last assassination. They took over the country. They took over the central bank. They administered the country. There were plenty of allegations of human rights abuses and much worse. They administered the country for nineteen years. Okay. That was a US intervention. Didn't go well. We backed the dictator, father son, Papa Doc, and Baby Doc Duvalier from 1957 to 1987. They were genocidal maniacs, but they kept Haiti stable and they didn't like communists. So the United States backed them. Another intervention, not great. Duvaliers leave. They go through a bunch of churn in Haiti. Jean-Bertrand Aristide is the first democratically elected president of Haiti, elected, I think, '90 or '91. He's pushed out in a in a pretty bad coup shortly thereafter. In 1994, Haiti's going crazy again and there's a lot of unrest. President Clinton decides to return Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who was in exile to Haiti, and install him into the Haitian government as the head of state again. That's what we did. That didn't go so great. And ten years later, in 2004, Jean-Bertrand Aristide leaves Haiti, leaves his post under another putsch under questionable circumstances. Aristide said the US grabbed him and took him out. The US says no, he left for his own. He asked us to take him out for his own security. And then in 2011, the US is seen as having kind of cooked the books so that Michel Martelly, who allegedly finished third in the initial round of running of elections, was moved to second place, put into the runoff and became president. And the Haitians believed that the Clintons installed him as president of Haiti.
Mcfarlane: So, I mean, essentially what you're saying is that the United States has interfered in Haitian politics for you believe it is to the detriment of the Haitians building up their own society, their own system of governance to the extent that now many Haitians are disenfranchised with their own system, with their own politics. And part of what you wrote about in your resignation letter was that you believed the importance of the Haitians to chart their own course without any kind of interference from the international community. I was reading an interview from the former Ambassador Pamela White, who was speaking in 2019. And she said something very striking that I would like to put to you. She said, The Western solution to immediately hold elections in countries that have been controlled for decades by dictators and ruthless militias has never worked and never will. We need some creative thinking about how a country with low education and high poverty levels can function in order to provide basic services to its citizens. Elections are so corrupt and the people running inexperienced that they cannot possibly be considered a good solution. But if anyone thinks another election is going to solve all of Haiti's woes, they are sadly mistaken. Do you agree with that assessment?
Foote: Largely, yes, I do. Ambassador White knows Haiti well, having served there before, and I do largely agree with that. However, we're we're kind of in this conundrum. Right? So it really is time for us to get out of the Haitians' way and let them come up with a creative solution to move forward. While we're saying that, we're kind of telling them what to do, but that's okay because that's what pundits and academics and stuff do. It should not be what diplomats and states people do. That's the situation that we're in. Haiti is actually getting quite close to what Pam envisions with this broad sociopolitical accord that they've reached. The only remaining piece is maintaining unity, obviously, which is going to be a challenge. But that's the next challenge. I don't believe the Haitian people have been able to find it in their hearts to include Ariel Henry and his party into this transition government. And until people accept that, we're going to have a tough time moving forward.
Mcfarlane: Going to a theme of rebuilding, one thing I would like to ask you about is Plan Colombia, which was a Clinton-era foreign policy initiative in 1999, I think. And it was a US funded plan, which tried to solve the problem of drug trafficking and internal conflict in Colombia. And at the time, I think more than 200,000 people had died in the chaos in Colombia, which ironically I think is around the same number of people who were killed in the Haitian earthquake. And the Colombian government believed that that plan had been successful. Colombia had been almost a failed narco state, but after this, the implementation of this plan, it was radically transformed and you had an important role in Plan Colombia, right?
Foote: I did. I was at the end of Plan Colombia as we were looking to next steps. When Colombia basically, there almost failed narco states of the late 90s, got to the point where it was able to put enough pressure on the FARC to get them to come to the table and negotiate. And now they have peace. Now we did not solve the drug problem yet. And that was my role in Colombia. And I'll be the first to admit that that that needs to be rethought a little bit.
Mcfarlane: But there were huge successes in Colombia. I think homicides were cut in half. At the time, there were guerrillas and armed groups that competed with the police in terms of asserting power on the streets. Much like Haiti. Right. And what Plan Colombia did was, part of what it did was it diversified the Colombian economy to make it less reliant on the narcotics industry. But it also, it required a substantial military plan as well, did it not? And so, the part success of Plan Colombia was what led a lot of US officials to think that maybe it could be recreated in other problematic states like Afghanistan, but they found that that wasn't the case, right?
Foote: I also worked in Afghanistan and there were parts of Plan Colombia that were transferable and and parts that weren't and parts that we we used. And I'm not gonna go into detail on Afghanistan. But in Colombia, it it largely worked. It wasn't perfect. Like I said, narcotics trafficking is still a huge problem in Colombia, but it took a country at war and has made it much more safe, successful. The economy is better. They have the best police force, although everybody has problems in national police force, perhaps in the world. And we created that. Now, Haiti's different. A lot of this is transferable. There's not a war going on. There is a gang infestation, which is similar, which needs a security force. But you don't need helicopters and mortars and tanks and all that stuff. And the the solution here really has no military component, but you have the problem of insecurity. You have the problem of no government reach or ability to provide services to the people. You have the problem of the people don't trust the government and impunity and violence are rampant. There are some things that I think we learned from Plan Colombia that are transferable to Haiti. But Haiti doesn't need a Plan Colombia. Haiti needs a Plan Haiti that sort of, at least the intellectual light bulb comes from the Haitians. I believe that Plan Colombia was successful largely because Colombia at the time had some real visionaries who kind of understood what they needed and were willing to commit to it. You know, they were willing to commit and get away from the corruption and taking money and all that, the kind of stuff we see in developing countries around the world. And the plan was written in tandem with the Colombians. So unlike Afghanistan or Iraq or almost any other place, Haiti, the Colombians bought in, were part of the process, knew what they needed, and we just had to come up with support mechanisms and resources from our own systems and a lot of a lot of patience and a lot of handholding to make it work. That can be done in Haiti, but not if we not if Dan Foote goes in and say, Hey, we're going to do Plan Colombia again. It worked once. Maybe it'll work again. I've already tried that about four times in other countries, and it doesn't necessarily work again. I believe they need to just take the initiative and and tell everybody, look, this is ours. We need your help and we admit this, but we're going to we're going to guide you. We can't follow what you tell us to do because it's never worked in Afghanistan, not Iraq, etcetera.
Mcfarlane: So the key is, I think you're saying the key is to have dependable visionaries, as you say, local partners on the ground, leaders who can take that vision forward. It cannot be orchestrated directly by the US. The US has to take a supporting role in state building.
Foote: Correct. And Haiti or the state to be built, fill in the blank, needs to take the lead role and and and be committed. And and if that doesn't happen, state building doesn't work. As we used to say in Iraq, they need to want it more than we do. And that's nothing truer has ever been said.
Mcfarlane: And you don't believe Ariel Henry could be a dependable partner for the United States?
Foote: At this point, no, because he'll never regain or he'll never gain the trust of the Haitians at this point because he's had six months to do something and he's done nothing, except for, concentrate his own power.
ANALYSIS WITH SIR RICHARD DEARLOVE
Mcfarlane: More than six months on from the devastating earthquake last year, and Haiti is still struggling to rebuild. The government estimates it needs $2,000,000,000 to help rebuild. And what's more, it's having to compete for international aid against other disaster struck countries like Afghanistan and Ethiopia. I caught up with Sir Richard Dearlove for his thoughts on the interview with Daniel Foote.
Dearlove: To be honest, I find reading and talking about Haiti really depressing. I know you've got a significant country which has played an important role historically in the Caribbean, and it's just gone from bad to worse. I mean it had this brief period under Papa Doc, who was Duvalier, and then Duvalier's son Baby Doc, when the Americans tolerated an autocrat and kept him in power. But during that period of so called stability they did nothing to create a civil society which was kept in when the government was kept in power really by the Americans. It's just been a catastrophe, and the population of Haiti's economies is around 10,000,000 I think. And I mean the issue for the United States really is the speed at which they're leaving, and of course the obvious place to go apart from several Latin American countries to try to go to the United States.
Mcfarlane: The former envoy, Ambassador Dan Foote, he talked a lot about Plan Colombia. It seems like that was a pretty rare example of successful US state building, but it's a model that totally failed disastrously in Iraq and Afghanistan. Do you think there are lessons that can be learned from Plan Colombia, do you think it's a plan that could translate to Haiti?
Dearlove: Well I think what I mean I'd certainly went to Colombia at the start of Plan Colombia and saw it in action, and the UK has participated to an extent in aspects of it, I know a bit about that. I mean the problem is if you're going to do a plan like that it has to be specifically matched to the country, the needs, all the weaknesses and the strengths of what you're dealing with. And I mean Colombia in comparison, apart from well there were two problems the massive organized drugs problem and the FARC insurgency, both of which the US through clever and successful policies largely came to terms with. But I mean it's taken fifteen years to get an outcome in Colombia which is beneficial for the country as a whole. I think the problem in Haiti is where do you start? You know how do you get this off the ground without massive infusion of people and money, I mean both. Of course if you look at Afghanistan it illustrates how wrong you can get those policies, and you know since time immemorial, you know starting with the British in the nineteenth century, people have tried to get to grips with Afghanistan, but because of its tribal nature, because of its geography, because of its cultural influences, I mean it seems to be impervious to external help, or you could say external intervention. You know both help and intervention neither have worked. And of course Iraq is altogether you know another issue, and we could have a separate discussion on Iraq at some point.
Mcfarlane: For sure. This, the idea that, you know, Western countries have tried to replicate Western institutions, the army, civil society, judiciary, legislature, trying to replicate these Western structures in countries that are not in the West, in countries that have totally different ethnicity, religions, geographies, the way that has cataclysmically failed in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, does that mean that Western ideals like democracy and civil liberties, does that mean that those cannot translate everywhere?
Dearlove: Well I think it's often an issue of timing, and what I mean by timing is over long spans, long periods of time. And I think that clearly in Haiti the Haitians want to rule themselves, but they need a lot of help to do that. I mean obviously if I was trying to look for a recipe for starting the country up again, you would probably want to appoint a council of elders or technocrats and not elected who would have access to advice and money and support internationally, but at some point you know you're probably going to try to hold an election. How long does that take? It probably takes a very very long time. And I mean if you take a country like Colombia, I mean Colombia is really quite a sophisticated place. I mean we've been to Bogotá. I mean it's a very attractive, easygoing city, you know, with a very sort of sophisticated cultural infrastructure. You know, it's truly a delightful place. Okay if you go out of Bogotá it's dangerous, but we all know why it was dangerous. And I mean I think the Americans were able to build on strength that was already there. You know they were able to form units inside the Colombian police which they were confident were not corrupt, and then extend that power and that network through other aspects of government. They rebuilt the Colombian Armed Forces rather successfully. God, I mean in Haiti it's desperate, but I don't think personally, I mean for example my recipe for Iraq would have been to run the country with a military council for a significant period of time before you attempted to hold an election, because I mean I don't want to go into the intricacies of Iraq's past and Saddam Hussein and all of that, but the army was not particularly, you know, it wasn't at the core of the regime. There were paramilitary forces around Saddam who were at the core of the regime which you had to get rid of, but you could have taken some of the army people who weren't too contaminated by the Baathist influence, and you could have administered and run the country using that Baathist infrastructure over a long period of time before you tried to hold elections. And you know look what happened even in somewhere like Egypt when you held an election, you know, I would say in the wrong circumstances prematurely. The Muslim Brotherhood, you know, apparently won the election and you ended up, you know, with an extreme or Islamist government, which didn't last long, and then Sisi came in, you know, with a popular support of the army to chuck them out because they were such a miserable bunch. I mean things can get badly wrong, I think, if you hold elections too soon and too quickly, when these structures in civil society are not sufficiently sophisticated to sort of honor and uphold the idea of a democratic election.
Mcfarlane: Ambassador Foote unloaded a stinging rebuke of the State Department and of US foreign policy towards Haiti in his resignation letter. What did you make of of his criticisms, of his accusations that the US's hubris of thinking we could pick the winners without consequences. The fact that his his memos describing the situation in Haiti were edited without his consent to fit a narrative. What is going on with the State Department, and what do you think of the criticisms that Ambassador Foote unlaid on the State Department in that stinging resignation letter?
Dearlove: Well I think the State Department has always been problematic, and it's not a prestigious part of the US government. And the reason is that all the plum jobs go to political appointees, so the number of career officers that emerge into important ambassadorships in the United States are few and far between. So well unlike let's say other diplomatic services which have a good reputation, it always gets kicked around. I mean so this is a rather independent view by any administration. I mean Dan Foote's letter of resignation is magnificent, I mean it's but you know is it a futile gesture? You have to sort of consider the political circumstances, and someone in his position which let's face it isn't politically a powerful position even if he has considerable executive powers in relation to a specific issue, you know he gets sliced up. I mean American politics is very unforgiving in that respect, and I don't think, you know, he won't get thanked by the State Department, but you have to admire his integrity, his forthrightness, and of course he's right. But on the other hand, it doesn't take enough account in my view of the reality of the situation and the difficulties the administration are facing in dealing with the crisis. As I said, individuals don't by and large make policy, and the views of individuals don't by and large make policy.
Mcfarlane: Thanks for joining us for this week's episode of One Decision. We want to hear from you. Get in touch and tell us what decisions have shaped your world. Where should we go next? We're on Twitter at one decision pod and on Facebook at one decision podcast. Don't forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode. From me and the team, thanks for being with us, and see you next time.
