In the winter of 2003, when war loomed in Iraq and every rock was suspected of concealing a terrorist, one might have imagined that the last thing on the minds of American diplomats would be a little impoverished country like Haiti, a mere third of an island, which lacks even an army. But the United States has a foreign policy everywhere, and, as a rule, the weaker and poorer the nation, the more powerful the policy is.

Most Americans if they visited Haiti would, I imagine, come away with new definitions of poverty. What you notice most of all are absences of the most basic things. Water, for instance. In a recent survey of the potable water supplies in 147 nations, Haiti ranked 147th. It's estimated that only 40 percent of Haiti's roughly 8 million people have access to clean water.

In the capital, Port-au-Prince, the morning after rain, you see working men take up manhole covers and lean in beneath the pavement, dipping buckets into the city's brimming drainage channels. They use the water to wash cars for pay, and occasionally, when the day gets hot, you'll see one of them invert a bucket over his head. This is very dangerous, because any contact with sewer water invites skin diseases and a mere thimbleful swallowed can cause bacillary dysentery.

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