Can you judge a book by its foreword?

So, I picked up a new book the other day: Haiti in the Balance: Why Foreign Aid has Failed and What We Can Do About It.

The foreword has already triggered a lot of my defences. In merely two pages, they've touched on:

1. The idea of Haiti as a "failed state" (which is a concept central to Canadian and American attitudes toward Haiti)
2. Praise for the Interim Cooperation Framework (the central organizing agreement that foreign partners have developed -- without much say from Haiti, itself)
3. A reiteration of the Canadian/U.S. position: the main thing that Haitians need are jobs, but before you build an environment that can attract new jobs, you need security.
4. They've also touched on how the government has been "historically corrupt."

I'm not going to like this book; I can tell. And I've only read the foreword.

Thought for the Day

In 1980 aid [to Haiti] was about $131 million [US Dollars]. In 1983 the UN Development Program (UNDP) estimated that foreign assistance to Haiti was at least $167 million, and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) place it closer to $200 million. From 1990 to 2003, though, Haiti received more than $4 billion in foreign assistance from bilateral and multilateral sources. (In addition to that, remittances from Haitian expatriates amount to $1 billion annually.) From 2005 to 2006 foreign aid rose by another $1.3 billion or so. But how much good did the aid dollars do? For example, some of the money paid for U.S. Coast Guard interdiction of Haitian refugees, refugee support, drug trafficking curtailment, and military expenditures. These are costly, and they are not considered by many to be aid, though they have been included in the aid totals. In many cases, it remained unclear where aid was spent.

— Haiti in the Balance

Thought for the Day (Encore Edition)

[...] I received a phone message from one of my strongest supporters. She was a small-business owner, a mother, and a thoughtful, generous person. She was also a lesbian who had lived in a monogamous relationship with her partner for the last decade.

She knew when she decided to support me that I was opposed to same-sex marriage, and she had heard me argue that, in the absence of any meaningful consensus, the heightened focus on marriage was a distraction from other, attainable measures to prevent discrimination against gays and lesbians. Her phone message in this instance had been prompted by a radio interview she had heard in which I had referenced my religious traditions in explaining my position on the issue. She told me that she had been hurt by my remarks; she felt that by bringing religion into the equation, I was suggesting that she, and others like her, were somehow bad people.

I felt bad, and told her so in a return call. As I spoke to her I was reminded that no matter how much Christians who oppose homosexuality may claim that they hate the sin but love the sinner, such a judgement inflicts pain on good people -- people who are made in the image of God, and who are often truer to Christ's message than those who condemn them. And I was reminded that it is my obligation, not only as an elected official in a pluralistic society but also a Christian, to remain open to the possibility that my unwillingness to support gay marriage is misguided, just as I cannot claim infallibility in my support of abortion rights. I must admit that I may have been infected with society's prejudices and predilections and attributed them to God; that Jesus' call to love one another might demand a different conclusion; and that in years hence I may be seen as someone who was on the wrong side of history. I don't believe such doubts make me a bad Christian. I believe they make me human, limited in my understandings of God's purpose and therefore prone to sin. When I read the Bible, I do so with the belief that it is not a static text but the Living Word and that I must be continually open to new revelations -- whether they come from a lesbian friend or a doctor opposed to abortion.

— Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope