Curiously, the casualty statistics released by the Pentagon contradict those of the U.S Army. While the Pentagon contends that 2722 soldiers have been wounded in action and 417 in non hostile fire as of March 1, the U.S. Air Force confides that it has flown approximately 12,000 wounded soldiers into Andrews Air Force Base over the past 9 months.

Only Rob thinks differently: "They could have overthrown him themselves, those f**king Iraqi's?I'm convinced that the people we are training there are the ones who are fighting us, because the screening process is so weak. I have no respect for those f**king Iraqi's. The more of them that die, the better. They use women to hide their weapons and kids to detonate them, but we have to stick to the Geneva Conventions? At least in public."

But over the past week the Haitian people have been not actors but spectators in their own destiny, watching one band of armed thugs, who supported a leader with diminishing democratic legitimacy, replaced by another band of armed thugs, who support a movement with none at all, with the help of foreign governments. The death squad leaders, army officials and US marines are back. There are no longer any democratic violations to criticise because there is no longer any democracy. What happened was not a revolution but a coup. And no simple domestic overthrow either. This was the kind of regime change that the French and the US could sign up to.
What cannot be seriously contested is that Aristide did not go voluntarily in any meaningful sense, and that the Bush administration was the primary instrument in his removal.

You do not have to be an apologist for Aristide or an anti-American conspiracy theorist to grasp this. Just follow the quotes from the US secretary of state, Colin Powell, over the past month and the policy shifts are clear. On February 12, Powell told the Senate foreign relations committee: "The policy of the administration is not regime change [this will come as news to the Iraqis], President Aristide is the elected president of Haiti."

On February 17, he said. "We cannot buy into a proposition that says the elected president must be forced out of office by thugs and those who do not respect law and are bringing terrible violence to the Haitian people." By February 26, after a week of shopping around, he decided to buy into it after all. "[Aristide] is the democratically elected president, but he has had difficulties in his presidency, and I think ... whether or not he is able to effectively continue as president is something that he will have to examine." A day later he was selling it, arguing that Aristide, having "the interests of the Haitian people at heart", should "examine the situation he is in and make a careful examination of how best to serve the Haitian people at this time".