From one of the comments on David Brooks’ column, this one by Stephen Reichard:

While some of what you say is true, you studiously avoid the very central role of the United States in the tragedy that is Haiti today. This is not simply limited to the myriad U.S. military occupations of Haiti or the support for the brutal dictatorships of the Duvaliers. It is the ongoing intervention into Haiti that has included the imposition of IMF rules that devastated the agriculture sector and the long-standing, and continuing, refusal of the United States to allow the presumptive leader of the Haitian people, Jean Paul Aristide, to even live in his home country, let alone rule. And today, in Haiti’s most dire hour, the United States continues to refuse to allow Aristide to return from his U.S.-imposed exile in South Africa. While it is true that dependency is vice, history does not happen in a vacuum. The fingerprints of the United States lie all over the on-going Haitian travesty.