As tragic as the Haitian calamity is, it is merely symptomatic of a far deeper tragedy that’s completely ignored; namely self-inflicted poverty. The reason why natural disasters take fewer lives in our country is because we have greater wealth. It’s our wealth that permits us to build stronger homes and office buildings. When a natural disaster hits us, our wealth provides the emergency personnel, heavy machinery and medical services to reduce the death toll and suffering. Haitians cannot afford the life-saving tools that we Americans take for granted. President Barack Obama called the quake “especially cruel and incomprehensible.” He would be closer to the truth if he had said that the Haitian political and economic climate that make Haitians helpless in the face of natural disasters are “especially cruel and incomprehensible.”

The biggest reason for Haiti being one of the world’s poorest countries is its restrictions on economic liberty. Let’s look at some of it. According to the 2009 Index of Economic Freedom, authorization is required for some foreign investments, such as in electricity, water, public health and telecommunications. Authorization requires bribing public officials and, as a result, Haiti’s monopolistic telephone services can at best be labeled primitive. That might explain the difficulty Haitian-Americans have in finding out about their loved ones.

Corruption is rampant. Haiti ranks 177th out of 179 countries in the 2007 Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index. Its reputation as one of the world’s most corrupt countries is a major impediment to doing business. Customs officers often demand bribes to clear shipments. The Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom says that because of burdensome regulations and bribery, starting a business in Haiti takes an average of 195 days, compared with the world average of 38 days. Getting a business license takes about five times longer than the world average of 234 days – that’s over three years.

Crime and lawlessness are rampant in Haiti. The U.S. Department of State Web site (travel.state.gov), long before the earthquake, warned, “There are no “safe” areas in Haiti. … Kidnapping, death threats, murders, drug-related shootouts, armed robberies, home break-ins and car-jacking are common in Haiti.” The Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade warns its citizens that, “The level of crime in Haiti is very high and the police have little ability to enforce laws. Local authorities often have limited or no capacity to provide assistance, even if you are a victim of a serious crime.” Crime anywhere is a prohibitive tax on economic development and the poorest people are its primary victims.

Private property rights are vital to economic growth. The Index of Economic Freedom reports that “Haitian protection of investors and property is severely compromised by weak enforcement, a paucity of updated laws to handle modern commercial practices, and a dysfunctional and resource-poor legal system.” That means commercial disputes are settled out of court often through the bribery of public officials; settlements are purchased.

The way out of Haiti’s grinding poverty is not rocket science. Ranking countries according to: (1) whether they are more or less free market, (2) per capita income, and (3) ranking in International Amnesty’s human rights protection index, we would find that those nations with a larger free market sector tend also to be those with the higher income and greater human rights protections. Haitian President Rene Preval is not enthusiastic about free markets; his heroes are none other than the hemisphere’s two brutal communist tyrants: Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and Cuba’s Fidel Castro.

Haiti’s disaster demands immediate Western assistance but it’s only the Haitian people who can relieve themselves of the deeper tragedy of self-inflicted poverty.

We shall never surrender — unless the war gets too expensive, in which case, we shall quote Dwight Eisenhower on “the need to maintain balance in and among national programs” and then insist that “we can’t simply afford to ignore the price of these wars.”

The quotes are from President Barack Obama’s West Point speech announcing the Afghanistan troop surge. What a strange speech it was — a call to arms so ambivalent, so tentative, so defensive.

Which made his last-minute assertion of “resolve unwavering” so hollow. It was meant to be stirring. It fell flat. In August, he called Afghanistan “a war of necessity.” On Tuesday night, he defined “what’s at stake” as “the common security of the world.” The world, no less. Yet, we begin leaving in July 2011?

Does he think that such ambivalence is not heard by the Taliban, by Afghan peasants deciding which side to choose, by Pakistani generals hedging their bets, by NATO allies already with one foot out of Afghanistan?

Nonetheless, most supporters of the Afghanistan War were satisfied. They got the policy, the liberals got the speech. The hawks got three-quarters of what Gen. Stanley McChrystal wanted — 30,000 additional U.S. troops — and the doves got a few soothing words. Big deal, say the hawks.

But it is a big deal. Words matter because will matters.

Success in war depends on three things: a brave and highly skilled soldiery, such as the U.S. military 2009, the finest counterinsurgency force in history; brilliant, battle-tested commanders such as Gens. David Petraeus and McChrystal, fresh from the success of the surge in Iraq; and the will to prevail as personified by the commander in chief.

There’s the rub. And that is why at such crucial moments, presidents don’t issue a policy paper. They give a speech. It gives tone and texture. It allows their policy to be imbued with purpose and feeling. This one was festooned with hedges, caveats and one giant exit ramp.

No one expected Obama to do a Henry V or a Winston Churchill.

But Obama could not even manage a George W. Bush, who, at an infinitely lower ebb in power and popularity, opposed by the political and foreign policy establishments and dealing with a war effort in far more dire straits, announced his surge — Iraq 2007 — with outright rejection of withdrawal or retreat. His implacability was widely decried at home as stubbornness, but heard loudly in Iraq by those fighting for and against us as unflinching — and salutary — determination.

Obama’s surge speech wasn’t a commander in chief’s, but a politician’s, perfectly splitting the difference. Two messages for two audiences. Placate the right — you get the troops; placate the left — we are on our way out.

And apart from Obama’s own personal commitment is the question of his ability as a wartime leader.

If he feels compelled to placate his left with an exit date today — while he is still personally popular, with large majorities in both houses of Congress, and even before the surge begins — how will he stand up to the left when the going gets tough and the casualties mount, and he really has to choose between support from his party and success on the battlefield?

Despite my personal misgivings about the possibility of lasting success against Taliban insurgencies in both Afghanistan and the borderlands of Pakistan, I have deep confidence that Petraeus and McChrystal would not recommend a strategy that will be costly in lives, without their having a firm belief in the possibility of success.

I would therefore defer to their judgment and support their recommended policy. But the fate of this war depends not just on them. It depends on the president. We cannot prevail without a commander in chief committed to success. And this commander in chief defended his exit date (versus the straw man alternative of “open-ended” nation-building) thusly: “because the nation that I’m most interested in building is our own.”

Remarkable. Go and fight, he tells his cadets — some of whom may not return alive — but I may have to cut your mission short because my real priorities are domestic.

Has there ever been a call to arms more dispiriting, a trumpet more uncertain?

“Niki, I’m dying. Don’t have much to leave you. Just three envelopes. Open them, one at a time, when you get into big trouble.”

A few years later, first crisis. Khrushchev opens envelope 1: “Blame everything on me. Uncle Joe.”

A few years later, a really big crisis. Opens envelope 2: “Blame everything on me. Again. Good luck, Uncle Joe.”

Third crisis. Opens envelope 3: “Prepare three envelopes.”

In the Barack Obama version, there are 50 or so such blame-Bush free passes before the gig is up. By my calculation, Obama has already burned through a good 49. Is there anything he hasn’t blamed George W. Bush for? The economy, global warming, the credit crisis, Middle East stalemate, the deficit, anti-Americanism abroad — everything but swine flu.

It’s as if Obama’s presidency hasn’t really started. He’s still taking inventory of the Bush years. Just this Monday, he referred to “long years of drift” in Afghanistan in order to, I suppose, explain away his own, well, yearlong drift on Afghanistan.

This compulsion to attack his predecessor is as stale as it is unseemly. Obama was elected a year ago. He became commander in chief two months later. He then solemnly announced his own “comprehensive new strategy” for Afghanistan seven months ago. And it was not an off-the-cuff decision. “My administration has heard from our military commanders, as well as our diplomats,” the president assured us. “We’ve consulted with the Afghan and Pakistani governments, with our partners and our NATO allies, and with other donors and international organizations” and “with members of Congress.”

Obama is obviously unhappy with the path he himself chose in March. Fine. He has every right — indeed duty — to reconsider. But what Obama is reacting to is the failure of his own strategy.

There is nothing new here. The history of both the Afghanistan and Iraq wars is a considered readjustment of policies that have failed. In each war, quick initial low-casualty campaigns toppled enemy governments. In the subsequent occupation stage, two policy choices presented themselves: the light or heavy “footprint.”

In both Iraq and Afghanistan, we initially chose the light footprint. For obvious reasons: less risk and fewer losses for our troops, while reducing the intrusiveness of the occupation and thus the chances of creating an anti-foreigner backlash that would fan an insurgency.

This was the considered judgment of our commanders at the time, most especially Centcom commander (2003-2007) Gen. John Abizaid. And Abizaid was no stranger to the territory. He speaks Arabic and is a scholar of the region. The overriding idea was that the light footprint would minimize local opposition.

It was a perfectly reasonable assumption, but it proved wrong. The strategy failed. Not just because the enemy proved highly resilient but because the allegiance of the population turned out to hinge far less on resentment of foreign intrusiveness (in fact the locals came to hate the insurgents — al-Qaida in Iraq, the Taliban in Afghanistan — far more than us) than on physical insecurity, which made them side with the insurgents out of sheer fear.

What they needed, argued Gen. David Petraeus against much Pentagon brass opposition, was population protection, i.e., a heavy footprint.

In Iraq, the heavy footprint — also known as the surge — dramatically reversed the fortunes of war. In Afghanistan, where it took longer for the Taliban to regroup, the failure of the light footprint did not become evident until more recently when an uneasy stalemate began to deteriorate into steady Taliban advances.

That’s where we are now in Afghanistan. The logic of a true counterinsurgency strategy there is that whatever resentment a troop surge might occasion pales in comparison with the continued demoralization of any potential anti-Taliban elements unless they receive serious and immediate protection from U.S.-NATO forces.

In other words, Obama is facing the same decision on Afghanistan that Bush faced in late 2006 in deciding to surge in Iraq.

In both places, the deterioration of the military situation was not the result of “drift,” but of considered policies that seemed reasonable, cautious and culturally sensitive at the time, but ultimately turned out to be wrong.

Which is evidently what Obama now thinks of the policy choice he made March 27.

He is to be commended for reconsidering. But it is time he acted like a president and decided. Afghanistan is his. He’s used up his envelopes.

President Obama’s speeches often claim “the time has come” for something, or “the days” of this or that “are over.” It’s as if his presidency has introduced a new epoch.

I used to think that invoking the vision of a new age was merely a rhetorical device to distinguish him from George W. Bush. Now I think it is something more – a way to make a very old philosophy sound new and failed policies of the past seem fresh and exciting.

The trope was in full view last week when the president spoke before the U.N. General Assembly. “The time has come to realize that the old habits, old arguments, are irrelevant to the changes faced by our people,” he intoned. But when he got around to presenting his new arguments and ideas, they sounded rather familiar.

Every policy and theme outlined in the president’s speech has been tried; most have failed. They only appear fresh because their failure happened so long ago that some of us have forgotten and others who don’t know history think them untried.

Take Mr. Obama’s “comprehensive agenda” to rid the world of nuclear weapons. This dream is as old as the first atomic bomb explosion. Arms control agreements have failed so many times, it’s hard to keep track of the failures. Despite all these agreements, North Korea and Pakistan managed to get their own nuclear weapons, and Iran is close behind.

Mr. Obama would have us believe that nukes have proliferated due to (a) a lack of good faith gestures by America (i.e., unilateral disarmament) and (b) a need for new agreements. But the problem with North Korea and Iran, who are merely the worst proliferators, is not the lack of agreements but their failure to live up to those they’ve signed.

Don’t get me wrong. When arms control negotiators are hard-headed, as Ronald Reagan was, agreements can be beneficial. The trouble starts when you can’t tell friend from foe, and you assume America is as much a part of the problem as, say, North Korea. In this version of “blame America,” Mr. Obama’s arms control approach is a throwback to the days of Jimmy Carter’s failed Strategic Arms Limitation Talks and Bertrand Russell’s Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) of the 1950s. The real disarmament target of the CND was not rogue states but the United States and Western powers.

Another already-tried idea of the president’s is “engagement,” which appears in many forms. It was particularly prominent in the U.N. speech, when he said he has “re-engaged” by joining the disappointing U.N. Human Rights Council.

Engagement is one of those words diplomats love, often adorned with such clever modifiers as “selective” and “constructive.” It can mean practically anything, but it sounds good because, whatever it is, it’s not war or conflict.

The hallmark of Mr. Obama’s engagement strategy was Iran. The sheer act of offering to talk was supposed to convince the Iranians to give up their nuclear program. It didn’t work. His Iran policy came crashing down last week when yet another secret nuclear site was discovered. He discovered what Mr. Bush learned when he and the Europeans repeatedly offered negotiations to the Iranians: They prefer to keep their program regardless of the incentives we offer.

Engagement should be a means to an end, not an end in itself. If circumstances are ripe for negotiations, by all means, negotiate. But if they are not, don’t pretend that repeatedly offering diplomatic talks and getting nothing in return will change anything. For countries like Iran and North Korea, the problem is not that we don’t respect them, but that they want something we don’t want them to have – namely, nuclear weapons.

If you value engagement more for what it promises, as Mr. Obama does, rather than what it delivers, then you will often err on the side of letting things slide. You can always excuse delay and deferral of solving hard issues because the cost of acting appears to be greater and riskier than no action. The problem, of course, is that sometimes no action is the riskiest strategy of all, as we saw in the years of neglect of al Qaeda that led up to Sept. 11.

This is a hard lesson of history. But if you make a virtue of forgetting that history, which is the president’s habit when he makes exaggerated claims about the benefits of engagement, then you not only lose a record of what has worked and what has not worked. You also lose a balanced view of what is possible and what is not.

A little modesty is in order, Mr. President. The “time has come,” indeed, not for recycling failed policies of the past, but to drop the pretense of ushering in a “new” age, which didn’t work out so well the last time it was tried.

“President Obama, I support the Americans’ outstretched hand. But what did the international community gain from these offers of dialogue? Nothing.”

– French President Nicolas Sarkozy, Sept. 24

When France chides you for appeasement, you know you’re scraping bottom. Just how low we’ve sunk was demonstrated by the Obama administration’s satisfaction when Russia’s president said of Iran, after meeting President Obama at the United Nations, that “sanctions are seldom productive, but they are sometimes inevitable.”

You see? The Obama magic. Engagement works. Russia is on board. Except that, as The Post inconveniently pointed out, President Dmitry Medvedev said the same thing a week earlier, and the real power in Russia, Vladimir Putin, had changed not at all in his opposition to additional sanctions. And just to make things clear, when Iran then brazenly test-fired offensive missiles, Russia reacted by declaring that this newest provocation did not warrant the imposition of tougher sanctions.

Do the tally. In return for selling out Poland and the Czech Republic by unilaterally abrogating a missile-defense security arrangement that Russia had demanded be abrogated, we get from Russia . . . what? An oblique hint, of possible support, for unspecified sanctions, grudgingly offered and of dubious authority — and, in any case, leading nowhere because the Chinese have remained resolute against any Security Council sanctions.

Confusing ends and means, the Obama administration strives mightily for shows of allied unity, good feeling and pious concern about Iran’s nuclear program — whereas the real objective is stopping that program. This feel-good posturing is worse than useless, because all the time spent achieving gestures is precious time granted Iran to finish its race to acquire the bomb.

Don’t take it from me. Take it from Sarkozy, who could not conceal his astonishment at Obama’s naivete. On Sept. 24, Obama ostentatiously presided over the Security Council. With 14 heads of state (or government) at the table, with an American president at the chair for the first time ever, with every news camera in the world trained on the meeting, it would garner unprecedented worldwide attention.

Unknown to the world, Obama had in his pocket explosive revelations about an illegal uranium enrichment facility that the Iranians had been hiding near Qom. The French and the British were urging him to use this most dramatic of settings to stun the world with the revelation and to call for immediate action.

Obama refused. Not only did he say nothing about it, but, reports the Wall Street Journal (citing Le Monde), Sarkozy was forced to scrap the Qom section of his speech. Obama held the news until a day later — in Pittsburgh. I’ve got nothing against Pittsburgh (site of the G-20 summit), but a stacked-with-world-leaders Security Council chamber it is not.

Why forgo the opportunity? Because Obama wanted the Security Council meeting to be about his own dream of a nuclear-free world. The president, reports the New York Times citing “White House officials,” did not want to “dilute” his disarmament resolution “by diverting to Iran.”

Diversion? It’s the most serious security issue in the world. A diversion from what? From a worthless U.N. disarmament resolution?

Yes. And from Obama’s star turn as planetary visionary: “The administration told the French,” reports the Wall Street Journal, “that it didn’t want to ‘spoil the image of success’ for Mr. Obama’s debut at the U.N.”

Image? Success? Sarkozy could hardly contain himself. At the council table, with Obama at the chair, he reminded Obama that “we live in a real world, not a virtual world.”

He explained: “President Obama has even said, ‘I dream of a world without [nuclear weapons].’ Yet before our very eyes, two countries are currently doing the exact opposite.”

Sarkozy’s unspoken words? “And yet, sacré bleu, he’s sitting on Qom!”

At the time, we had no idea what Sarkozy was fuming about. Now we do. Although he could hardly have been surprised by Obama’s fecklessness. After all, just a day earlier in addressing the General Assembly, Obama actually said, “No one nation can . . . dominate another nation.” That adolescent mindlessness was followed with the declaration that “alignments of nations rooted in the cleavages of a long-gone Cold War” in fact “make no sense in an interconnected world.” NATO, our alliances with Japan and South Korea, our umbrella over Taiwan, are senseless? What do our allies think when they hear such nonsense?

Bismarck is said to have said: “There is a providence that protects idiots, drunkards, children, and the United States of America.” Bismarck never saw Obama at the U.N. Sarkozy did.

While the specific policies to which the U.S. committed itself (reducing the deficit and strengthening regulatory oversight of financial institutions) are laudable in themselves, the process and the precedent are frightening. We are to subject our most basic national economic policies to the review of a group of nations that includes autocratic Russia, China and Saudi Arabia. Even though our GDP is three times bigger than the second largest economy (Japan) and equal to that of 13 of the G-20 nations combined, we are to sit politely by with our one vote and submit to the global consensus. Europe has five votes (U.K., France, Germany, Italy and the EU) while we have but one.

And the process will be administered by the IMF, whose counsel to less developed nations over the past two decades has consistently called for social pain and economic austerity. The IMF’s misguided policies have been responsible for more revolutions than Marx, Engels and Lenin combined. Its bureaucrats’ arrogance is legendary and their search for appropriate punishments to fit the crime of spending too much on the poor smacks of colonialism and imperialism. They are our new overseers.
This combination of the IMF and the G-20 will not only work to structure national economic policies but to limit executive compensation at financial institutions. The watchful, wise leaders of such nations as Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Indonesia — among others — will monitor Wall Street to assure themselves that its compensation is not out of line. One particularly looks forward to the views of the Saudi monarchy on this question of excessive personal enrichment.

Perhaps as part of his public spasm of apology, President Obama also strove, successfully, to increase the voting strength of the debtor nations on the IMF from the current 43 percent to 48 percent. This is the economic equivalent of giving deadbeat debtors more votes on their bank’s governing board of directors.

Thus, the world’s most successful economy — ours — which is the only one that has produced reliable economic growth for three decades and has lifted real personal incomes almost every year, is going to subject itself to the burden of justifying its own economic policies in front of a global community of 20 nations, some of which do not even embrace free-market economies in the first place. Indeed, it is only through access to our markets that nations have been able to escape poverty. Japan, Germany, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, China and India have sequentially trod this path into prosperity.

Obviously, we live in a global economy. But the United States is 24 percent of it. We are entitled to more than one-twentieth of a voice, and it is the world that should be following our policies — not the other way around.

Much of the damage of the Obama administration can be undone at the next election. But such grants of sovereignty to autocratic, backward, bureaucratic and even communist nations will be hard to undo. The world is recovering from its leftist obsession — e.g., the Merkel victory in Germany. But by the time the voters discover how phony, failed and fraudulent these policies are, we may have given it all away already. Irrevocably.