Long ago in a different life I was drinking nonstop vodka with a chap name of Ed Daly in his office overlooking the Oakland International Airport. Ed owned World Airways and if you grew up during the 1970s you might remember how Ed helped make the world a smaller place with $99 coast to coast and international air travel.

Of course when you grow up in a tough Chicago neighborhood with the likes of Paul Marcinkus, later known as Cardinal Paul Marcinkus, who was director of the Vatican Bank, you do other things too. He organized a team that flew to Rome and got to the bottom of the Getty kidnapping. He had government contracts for heavy lifting to and from Southeast Asia and his planes airlifted millions in the World of Islam to the annual Haj. So one afternoon in 1981 when he said “I'm getting a 747 back off lease from Air Algeria and I want to blow it out down to Somalia with a load of medical supplies wanna come along,” it was an offer I couldn't refuse.

This was the Horn of Africa described by Pulitzer winner Phillip Caputo in the book by the same name. Somalia just came back off lease after two deacdes as a client of the Soviet Union in the final phase of the Cold War when Moscow and the Kremlin were trading nations like baseball cards. And the US embassy at the time was the size of a Pizza Hut. There was still an Italian Club with tennis courts in Mogadishu, a large Roman Catholic church and you could feel the riff of radical Islam when people walked the streets near the Juba Hotel and around the main post office in the cool hours of the night.

The flight was the first 747 to ever land in Somalia and Daly was using it as an example of how humanitarian assistance supports the nation building process. At the same time he was angling for a potentially lucrative Pentagon contract to move supplies and possibly troops into the strategic Horn of Africa.

I flew out to reconnoitre the refugee camps along the Somali-Ethiopan border with a couple of journalists from the Oakland Tribune and met with the UNHCR representative Lino Bordin. We smoked Papastratos cigarettes I brought from Athens and talked about the politics of humanitarian assistance and why there were few men (mostly aged ones) in the camps, which sheltered around 200,000 people. The young warrior age men were elsewhere, fighting an unreported war. With the change of franchise brainpowered by Zbig Brezinski, among others, the East Germans and Soviet cadre were advising the Ethiopian forces and providing some air support with nasty unconventional warfare stuff best left out of this piece of storytelling. It was Caputo's rumor of war redux.

Haiti 2010 is no different than Somalia 1981. Both situations represent successive failures at nation building. And as has been pointed out elsewhere, those failures create ungovernability, relative deprivation, and sow the seeds of terrorism and other forms of extremism. Beyond the teachings of fundamentalist Islam, Somalia's needs qat and other narcotic drugs to ease the pain. Haiti's underground economy is driven by the global drug trade. Perhaps that's why Hillbilly Heroin's best friend Rush Limbaugh has taken an interest in Haiti. Opposing aid as he is doing on his talk show only helps incubate terrorism in America's backyard. What follows is cross-posted from the Huffington Post, and portions of it appeared in Le Monde inteactif and Tout-Ca in French.

International Monetary Fund Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn has proposed a “Marshall Plan” that might help Haiti put in place a new foundation for nation building. But the Marshall Plan was designed to contain the spread of communism and if this one is to succeed it will need to contain the global drug trade that dominates Haiti's economy and its political culture that has been supported by the United States. Earthquake notwithstanding, Haiti is one of the major transshipment points for cocaine and other drugs destined for North America and Europe.

The CIA World Factbook outlines the problem. The big items in the $500 million a year export economy include cheap t-shirts sold at Wal-Mart, baseballs for Major League Baseball and Barbancourt Five Star rum.

Without the figures from the underground drug economy Haiti's booked exports amount to less than the value of the bundled contracts of US sports stars Alex Rodriguez, Kobe Bryant and Gilbert Arenas.

The lucrative global drug trade is what keeps Haiti poor, what keeps it ungovernable and what jeopardizes the"Marshall Plan" proposed by DSK.

If the global drug distribution system has taken a hit from the earthquakes, it's the media's job to put the spotlight on who's picking up the slack and where. So far that's not happening.

A good place for online and print journalists to start asking questions would be US Senator John Kerry, whose name is on a famous report about the drug trade in Haiti, which leads back to deposed Panamanian leader and CIA asset Manuel Noriega and the old anti-communist Cali cartel. Like his pal singer James Taylor, Skull and Bones man Kerry was part of the 60s generation that launched comic book hero Freewheelin' Franklin who said, "dope will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no dope..."

And in the Obama-Bernanke-Geithner flat affect US economy there isn't much money trickling down. One reason a hit of crack still costs less than a value meal on the Paseo in Kansas City, at 93^rd and Hough in Cleveland and outside the Toussaint L'Overture High School down in Florida's area code 561.

With one of the big drug warehouses down it makes sense from the global security perspective for the Pentagon to recommend to Obama that he sign off on orders that send 10,000 troops to effectively occupy Haiti and control logistics and communications on the island of Hispaniola, which includes the Dominican Republic, another big drug drop.

The Marshall Plan worked in Europe because it had a strong military component. Notably the US, British, Canadian and French troops garrisoned in an occupied “West Germany.” The US presence on the island of Hispaniola now provides that. And it's consistent with Washington's efforts to bring the Caribbean Basin and the Central American isthmus back under what France and other governments dans le couloirs are calling neo-colonialist domination in the name of the Monroe Doctrine.

Honduras. The big base deal with Colombia. Plans to redeploy the mothballed 4th Fleet to patrol around the Caribbean and South America. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton playing petty soft power games, giving Taiwanese aid efforts priority over China and blocking the French Medecins sans Frontieres  aircraft carrying doctors and relief supplies from landing in Haiti. And the expanded offshore activities of the US Coast Guard, a unit of the Treasury Department. American leadership is less concerned with taking back what is becoming a racially divided America than it is with taking back America's backyard.

According to the US General Accounting Office, Team Obama is already spending $12 billion each month to stabilize Iraq and prop-up the Karzai narcocracy in Afghanistan. Financing the billions in monthly hard power costs for 10,000 US troops to occupy Haiti dwarfs the "investment fund" set up by Obama and former US leaders Bush and Clinton. When fully funded, that fund will amount to less than the contract value of NFL Indianapolis Colts star quarterback Peyton Manning.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon has already had to deny that the US mission in Haiti is at cross-purposes with peacekeeping efforts. Last week US Black Hawk helicopters buzzed over a Brazilian food distribution operation in front of the National Palace creating chaos and causing the Brazilian flag to fall to the ground. Brazil plans to send another 1300 troops to Haiti in an effort to strengthen the UN peacekeeping force.

With more than half of Brazil's $208 million aid package to Haiti wasting away due to red tape foreign minister Celso Amorim met in Haiti with president Rene Preval on Friday in an effort to expedite distribution of the badly needed food and medical supplies.

One would expect Ban's dollar-a-year man, UN Special Envoy to Haiti Bill Clinton to have the clout to reconcile the differences though. After all, he learned a lot about Haiti from  his dearly departed friend, former Democratic National Chairman and US Secretary of Commerce Ron Brown, who was personal lobbyist for the family of dictator Papa Doc.

But when the dust settles it will become clear that Haiti is morphing into a Somalia waiting to happen, a situation far more volatile than than keeping the peace or earthquake relief. As the New York Times and other sources have pointed out, UN peacekeeping troops in Haiti are fighting drug gangs and their teams of looters one street at a time. A Marshall Plan for Haiti is a great notion, but it won't put an end to stuff like that.