More Haiti
The flak started quickly. Rusty suggested taking Red Cross training and being part of the solution—the very solution that can’t reach the country. kharris compared me (un?)favorably to The Drudge Report for saying (after Robert Gates did) that the delivery obstruction was “deliberate.”
The problem is the evidence keeps mounting—and it’s all on my side. Exhibit One:
US forces last week turned back a French aid plane carrying a field hospital from the damaged, congested airport in the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince, prompting a complaint from French Cooperation Minister Alain Joyandet. The plane landed safely the following day.
The State Department has also been denying many seriously injured people in Port-au-Prince visas to be transferred to Miami for surgery and treatment, said Dr. William O’Neill, the dean of the Miller School of Medicine at the University of Miami, which has erected a field hospital near the airport there.
“It’s beyond insane,” Dr. O’Neill said Saturday, having just returned to Miami from Haiti. “It’s bureaucracy at its worse.”
Exhibit Three (wrong people doing distribution):
When the aid helicopters descend on the Pétionville Club golf course, once a playground for the wealthy and now a sprawling city of makeshift tents, the residents hurry toward them. But to get there, they must climb a steep embankment to a landing zone on top of a hill where the 82nd Airborne Division distributes the food and water….
The elderly get priority, but some of them cannot make it up. Families with young children also have priority, so some people are said to have borrowed babies and hauled them up the hill….
Since members of the 82nd Airborne, from Fort Bragg, N.C., began distributing food on Saturday, their delivery method has evolved.
On the first day they wore rifles slung around their backs. By Monday, they had ditched the rifles and were trying to present themselves more as aid workers than as soldiers. [emphases mine]
This is the job usually done by the Red Cross (or that was done the first few days in New Orleans by the SCA, who had the advantage of knowing how to move a large amount of supplies through mud and floods), and who know the issues involved in distribution. This is the job those $10 contributions by texting are supposed to be supporting.
This is the job that isn’t being done for nonexistent “security” issues.
Ken:
I’ve been in disaster zones, although nothing as big as this (usually floods).
Piling up anecdotes about problems does not lead me to conclude organizaed sabotage or anything of the like, especially with the devastation of infrastructure. Not to mention street mobs.
Apparently the French are bitching about a US “invasion,” at the same time they are bitching about our failure to fix infrastructure.
We could probably move faster if we imposed martial law and just took over the entire wretched country for two or three weeks, but that would be politicially incorrect.
So choose your poison.
Haiti is a sad, sad, sad mess and it is not surprising that helping them is difficult, almost impossible. But Haiti has been this way, an ongoing tragedy, for decades and more. So in a way, the general disaster there is nothing new. In this case, I am tempted to say a colonial regime might be the only way ahead, but here I doubt anybody even wants to colonize the place.There is almost nothing to exploit.
First off, let me second what Rusty has to say. When there are no good options, blaming those who are choosing among the bad options is very likely to lead to mistaken judgements.
Beyond that, Ken, playing fast and loose with quotes doesn’t prove anything, even if we allow carefully selected anecdotes to serve as proof. You have not shown a quote in which Gates uses the word you have enclosed in quotes, or any of the words nearby. No “deliberate”. No “obstruction”. This wiggle, wiggle, wiggle business suggests to me that you have gotten yourself on a hook.
“Evidence” keeps mounting because there are problems, the press reports the problems, and you cite them. There is evidence of something, but it is not necessarily evidence that the US is deliberately obstructing delivery of aid.
So, further along the line that Rusty was pursuing, have you every looked into the planning for one of these things? Not the adjustment after it’s underway, but the generic planning that takes place ahead of time? You should. It would be enlightening. There certainly was a plan on the shelf for providing massive assistance to Haiti. Was there a specific plan for an earthquake that would level Port au Prince? Don’t know. More likely there was a plan for yet another hurricane, but the Pentagon has lots of plans, so maybe there was one for an earthquake, too.
Such plans involve assessments of available resources, contigencies and assumptions. How many airports are there? Harbors? Container ports? What would be the best use of each? What happens if one or more goes out of service? How do we house 10,000 people? How do we house 100,000 people? Do we try to house people if the number rises above X? Do we house them in place or transport them to healthier, more manageable environs? What do we do about random violence? What about organized violence? The list goes on and on.
Once a whole lot of hypotheticals and scenarios have been put together, model responses are put together. The point to doing that is that when the president says “go”, you pull a plan off the shelf and execute it, without having to start from scratch. A custom-made plan would surely work out better, exept that on the way to writing the plan and drawing together the resources to execute it, a bunch more people would suffer and die. So we go with the canned plan, and modify it as appropriate.
Your comment about our troops starting with guns and then shedding those guns very likely reflects an adjustment to an off-the-shelf plan. Now I think making that kind of adjustment is a good thing, but your writing suggests you think showing up prepared for a problem that did not, in fact, develop is reason to comdemn. Well, have fun condemning.
One final point, about the nature of pursuasive writing. I assume that’s the intention here. You, in writing your piece, aim at convincing your audience of something. In this case, you aim at convincing us that the US in intentionally withholding aid to Haiti, preventing others from aiding Haitians and preventing Hatians from seeking aid in the US. OK, I’m part of the audience. I tell you your case is not pursuasive. What do you do? Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle? That doesn’t actually make your case any more pursuasive.
The US has devoted millions of dollars, thousands of people, lots of rations, medicine, logistical support of all kinds, to help in Haiti. You seem to be arguing, despite all the resources we are pouring into the place, that we want to delay assistance. I think, given the level of effort and expense the US has gone to, it is hard to attribute bad intentions, but that seems to be your point. I think a far more likely blameworthy […]
What STR said. This sort of thing is HARD. When nobody is really in charge, and EVERYBODY is flying by the seat of their pants, it’s even harder. Many, many countries and organizations were trying to fly aid into the devastated single runway airport. The remarkable thing isn’t that there was difficulty getting things organized on the ground, it’s that there were no fatal aircraft collisions, either in the air or on the ground.
Even the military, which has experience in flying everything in and creating bases out of nothing has difficulties doing this. But it is a rigid heirachical organization where you can figure out what will be in each plane and schedule them accordingly. Now imagine how difficult it is when nobody knows who is in charge, and half the planes get diverted because there is only one runway, and noplace left to unload them. Where well meaning organizations duplicate the efforts of others and diverted flights mean that some, critical people and equipment never arrives in the order intended.
All this in a country that is a clusterf— in the BEST of times, where the government probably has little ability to figure out what is actually NEEDED and what can wait. The common rule applies: “incompetence is usually a better explanation than conspiracy.”
My coworker is a Haitian doctor who still has family and property in Haiti. He made it out by foot during the coup in the 80’s and continues to talk about how much of a cluster F the country is.
As for the airport, ABC national news reported last night that the Haitian Airtraffic Controllers were “overwhelmed by the volume” and the USAF took over their duties on Monday. Also the runway was “shut down for two hours as the Chinese staged a photo-op, and the Russians lied about being low on fuel to” be extended preferential treatment on landing order.
If Ken is guilty of anything here I have most certainly been guilty of similar instances of what kharris referred to as a “howl”, so, I thought I might try to keep things going, not because Ken needs any help from me, or because I disagree with k’s comment, but because I think I know what causes some of us who actually have a deep appreciation of this country to maybe howl a little more than we maybe should.
What has happened, slowly and quietly, over the past 30 or so years is that progress in this country has stalled. In part we are trying to adjust to a global economy but our problem is not so much economic, as it is a flaw in our democracy. Essentially, the Founding Fathers designed our government to allow a balance between a small, educated, inspired and well-intended class of landowners to rule over a much larger, uneducated class of people who were considered a threat to what was a delicate balance of power. But those demographics have changed dramatically. Now, corporations with an ever increasing number of investors have the same legislative advantages that the Founding Fathers afforded themselves. So instead of a population with roughly 1% in one class, and 99% in the other, we have something more like 25% and 75%, or 50% and 50%, depending on a variety of distinctions. But by whatever distinction, the demographics no longer fit the framework as intended and this is making some us a little too prone to “howling”.
Then too there exists what some have called willful or intentional ignorance. Many seem to lack concern because they cherish having someone else mow their lawns, or clean their pools, or maybe they are distracted by hitting little balls with a club, and/or sexual exploits, or whatever. But when people ignore the sound of an alarm bell, we have the choice of giving up, or hitting the bell harder. And if that fails perhaps an occasional howl is called for, it’s not as if the opposition abides by a strict reverence for integrity.
If this turns out to be as bad as Katrina we won’t hear about it because of the remoteness. CNBC reported tonight the Haitian Government had collapsed as most were either dead or had vanished. The country is in near total chaos.
Yet, but all accounts the Haitian people have not rioted and have been unbelievably patient under the circumstances. Maybe we could learn something from them.
Our relief workers look remarkably like an occupation army. Taking off their equipment and rolling up their sleeves is a good thing.
I also noticed they are giving out emergency rations. I realize this was what was probably on the shelf, but did anyone stop to think how they would eat spaghetti and noodles? They have no fire to cook (I know it is pre-cooked) or warm the food and no utensils. Its not like they go back to their kitchen and open up a drawer.
If it keeps people from starving I’m all for it, but I hope someone is taking the time to do some longer range planning. Tents, medical facilities, infrastructure, communications, roads, running water. Things like that.
***US forces last week turned back a French aid plane carrying a field hospital from the damaged, congested airport in the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince, prompting a complaint from French Cooperation Minister Alain Joyandet. The plane landed safely the following day***
The problem as I understand it is that Aeroport Toussaint L’Ouverture is a very small airport with very limited tarmac space. You can verify that for yourself by invoking Google Maps and searching for “Port au prince airport”. So, they are cycling planes in and out with two hour time slots for unloading, refueling, and getting back in the air and out of the way. Assuming that the hospital plane is something on the order of an Aerobus 330 that weighs maybe 1500 tons, you can’t just park it in a field as you might have a DC3 seventy years ago — not if it might ever want to leave. Looks to me like there is room for maybe a dozen aircraft on the tarmac at any given time and that might be pushing it.
It’s claimed that there was simply no safe place to put the hospital plane without interfering with the flow of supplies. Sounds plausible to me.
Codger,
During those first days after the quake some of the planes that landed lacked enough fuel to fly away. There were also problems with lighting the tarmac so that planes could fly out after dark. Then too planes were unloaded in the wrong places at the wrong time etc. The chaos was mostly avoidable and it was obvious from the start that the Haitians were unable to take command. It was a tough call but that is why we have leaders. ~ray
Ken:
This seems to be very critical of the US response. With all respect, I think the US is probably doing the best job of any coalition. The US carrier is already on site, distributing supply as best they can, and the carrier is working on supplying over 200,000 galleons of fresh water to the Haitian Capital. The US hospital ship “Comfort” has also arrived in Haiti. Over 10,000 US troops is on the ground trying to provide the very basic needs for survival.
Remember, Haiti is already a very poor country with virtually no infrastructure in place. The Earth quake destroyed what little left of the Haitian Capital. With no workable road, one barely functional airport, what are you propose the US government do for 3 million people? The US is the only power that have “projected” it’s power to this devasted island nation by invitation! Did UN send anyone there? The EU?
As a survivor of hurricane Hugo on St. Martin, I think I just can only imagine what it’s like in Haiti. The best we can do is to pray for the people of Haiti, and donate personal time/wealth for the Haitian for survival/rebuilding