Can you judge a book by its foreword?

[bcholmes]

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.