PRE-EMPTIVE
SELF-DEFENCE
When in 1915 the first
German War was two years old and seemed to go
well for the
aggressors the U.S. government headed by President Woodrow
Wilson had
reason to become apprehensive for the country's security.
Though he had
proclaimed after the outbreak of the war that the U.S. would
stay neutral,
Wilson was enough of a realist to understand that in 1916 the
bellicose Germans
would respect American neutrality no more than that of
Belgium in
1914. In 1915, a German submarine
sank the British liner
Lusitania
despite the fact, well known to the German government, that she
carried mainly
passengers of neutral countries, Americans among them. The
then Secretary
of State William J.Bryan resigned because he thought
Wilson's
protest note to Berlin too strong.
In the same year the
U.S. government feared that the Germans might
seek to gain a
foothold in Haiti, beset by domestic unrest, and there pose
a direct
military threat to U.S. shipping through the Panama Canal. They
could achieve
this by setting up a naval base in the Western hemisphere,
perhaps in
Haiti itself, for their dangerously successful U-boat warfare
against Allied
shipping in the Atlantic. Though he had promised in his
inaugural
address in 1913 that "the U.S. will never again seek one
additional
foot of territory by conquest", Wilson ordered the Marines to
occupy
sovereign Haiti in 1915 as a defensive measure to pre-empt possible
German
aggression in the Caribbean region. Haiti became occupied territory
and a de facto
protectorate against the will of its government and people.
The American occupation
of Haiti went on for 19 years, well beyond
the immediate
needs of self-defence in l916-18, and long after the German
threat had
ceased. The people of Haiti who
had never been a threat to the
U.S. resented
the continued occupation. They staged on and off an "intifada"
(an Arabic
term borrowed from the present Palestine–Israel conflict) against
the American
occupiers. It was "ruthlessly suppressed" (according to an
American
encyclopedia) by the U.S. Marine Corps. There were also hostile
reactions
throughout Latin America, especially after the defeat of Germany.
The U.S.
occupation of Haiti ended only in 1934, at the insistence of
Congress.
Conflict regrets it has
not enough space to dwell on the political
and legal background of the American
occupation of Haiti, unprovoked by
that country
and serving no other purpose than the security interests of
Uncle Sam
during the first German war. This episode of American military
history is cited
here for the principle and practice involved: is such
pre-emptive
action or even occupation justified to prevent the calamity of
war against an
aggressor as dangerous as the Germans? Must it be condemned
regardless of
specific circumstances in which such self-defensive action
is taken?
When Israel occupied
Arab territories on the Golan Height, on the
West Bank of
the Jordan and the Gaza Strip in 1967, it acted at the time in
self-defense
against the unprovoked aggression of three of her neighbours.
Had Israel
occupied, say in 1966, the territories on the same grounds which
the U.S. used
to invade peaceful Haiti, she could have justified it on the
much stronger
grounds of a threat to her security and of the urgent need for
self-defense.
Holding on to these territories proved justified by the next
Egyptian-Syrian war against Israel in 1973. The plea of an ongoing need
for
self-defence
is strengthened by the fact that Israel's neighbours, excepting
only Egypt,
have maintained a formal state of war for nearly 43 years.