james_davis_nicoll | I suppose this will be off the new cycle by the end of the week

The formatting of that link looks off.

To listen to the right wing, you'd think Obama's failure is in trying to use American dollars to help at all.

Haiti was all French failure from the beginning.

your link is mangled.

Tell me the disaster whose relief effort was effective. Is it the Indonesian tsunami? The earthquake in China last year, or the one in Iran a few years earlier? These things are always mangled, which is not surprising because the infrastructure was destroyed in the disaster. And it's not like we could get aid to the Haitians BEFORE they were affected by the Western Hemisphere's worst earthquake in two centuries.

Anyway, why would this be Obama's fault and not René Préval's?

Well, in the case of Katrina, you had: (1) the initial failure on the part of the Bush administration to acknowledge that there was in fact a crisis, (2) a near-total clusterfuck in attempting to supply aid once the crisis was acknowledged, and (3) the insistence that things had gone well when they obviously had not.

Obama already has (1) beat. As for (2), whether the problems with getting aid to Haiti rise to the level of "that could have gone better," "near-total clusterfuck," or somewhere in between remains to be seen. And (3) is contingent on (2).

As long as the aid efforts go less than catastrophically, I think Obama will end up getting a passing grade on this one.

The right wing *would* fan up outrage, except that they've already taken the stance that the brown people had it coming.

Also, a lot of Americans, and Canadians, are going to think it's entirely reasonable to prioritize evacuating foreigners over getting aid in to Haitians, because they see themselves as the foreigners wanting to go home. Tbey may not come out and argue in favor of it, but they won't be angered by it either.

> choked back by transportation bottlenecks, bureaucratic confusion, fear of attacks on aid convoys, the collapse of local authority and the sheer scale of the need.

None of these (possibly 2, depending on *which* bureaucracy, and I'm betting it's the UN, the Haitian government, and the US all together) can be traced back to the Obama administration.

I would like .... a stiff drink and this not to be happening. And, possibly, a rocket launcher.

Let's see. I start the blame with Jefferson and subsequent U.S. administrations using military force to force Haitian to provide reparations to France for fighting themselves out of slavery.

Then the subsequent U.S. military occupations crammed down Haitians' throats as well as military support for their crazy and corrupt surrogates for keeping the Haitian population 'under control.'

Not to mention the bushes and clinton's interference in Haitian affairs, including the forced kidnapping of Aristide.

Also the so-called journalists of the U.S.A. primary noose media, who haven't a clue about anything Haitian, and probably couldn't have found it on the map a week ago.

As well as the determination that now more than ever the population must be controlled by U.S. military to keep the people from getting what they've often said they'd like, a nation that is more like Cuba than what they've got. Cuba, Venezuela -- these are among the U.S.A.'s greatest terrorist enemies, after all. Let those satanists get influential in Haiti and the next thing they've got Miami.

Nearly 2000 rescue and relief orgs in Port-au-Prince; how many have they actually rescued so far? About 70.

Love, C.

The problem is that there are too many competing priorities. Medical personnel and supplies are badly needed; so are food relief and emergency shelters; so are rescue specialists; so are heavy excavators (to clear roads so that everything can leave the airport) and port clearance gear; so are security personnel; so is water.

There's basically no infrastructure left in much of Haiti; what was there is largely buried, or is unsafe to use. Only so much can get in at any given moment thanks to that lack of such basics as roads, docks, and bridges. So which top priority items do you make wait because you can't bring it all in at once?

-- Steve finds much of the criticism of the relief efforts underinformed and overly-dismissive of the difficulties, and in the main issuing from the usual chairborne regiments.

What's Harper done wrong in this case? I hadn't heard anything bad about the Canadian response.

Disaster relief is extraordinarily difficult even when you have prepositioned assets and trained first responders. When you have wide spread destruction of infrastructure, no strong governmental response, and a choke point for deliveries, you get the current situation in Haiti.

New Orleans was a compounding set of assumptions and errors, with multiple road blocks secondary to racism and classism, and NOLA didn't have to be the clusterf*ck that it was. Haiti hasn't had enough time or resources to develop the programs it needed to have in place before the earthquake, although bits and pieces certainly did get started. Haitian firefighters came to the US for training in urban rescues, collapsed building rescues, and other advanced firefighting techniques -- I'm sure they had all the desire and none of the equipment they needed.

When the infrastructure goes away, and you have to do everything by hand, as it were, of course things aren't going to work right.

This is in a country where the people were receiving aid to begin with, before the earthquake.

Now they have less than they had before, when they were merely starving. I don't blame them for looting. Taking the weapons with them, on the other hand, is drama, more than anything else. It is a poor choice by people who are desperate to begin with.

The world is doing what it can to help them, now. You can't just drop troops in a country without a plan and diplomats to set things up. Oh, wait, you can, it's called "invasion." And if we invaded Haiti, that wouldn't go well, and would set a bad precedent. "Well, we decided that your people were in danger, so we invaded."

You have to figure out what is going on at an incident, before you stick your nose into it. In the fire service, we call that "doing a 360." The chief himself takes the time to walk all around the burning structure and see for himself what's going on. The bigger the problem, the longer it takes to do the walk around. This is a pretty big incident, since it involves the whole country. Admittedly, this is a country that's pretty small, but there's a lot of people in there, none the less.

Plus there's a matter of scale. It's easy enough to hand one guy a sandwich. Or take him to the hospital. When you've got hundreds of thousands of people looking for a sandwich or a doctor, you have to rethink how you hand that sandwich over, or allow someone to see that doctor. Who goes first?

This is much more complicated than "send them the money, they'll get better right away." No matter what anybody thinks.

--Hawk
23 years fire service
12 years EMS
WTC responder

ISTR that in WWII field-expedient airfields were often made very quickly.

I *hope* someone is working on that.

When you are torn between getting food/medicine in, and making sure that the distribution path is secure so that aforementioned supplies get to where they are needed, you are going to get someone unhappy.

I think he will come off looking pretty good, no matter what problems come up, because of military edict #1 - "Do something - anything - because doing something is better than doing nothing." aka "When in trouble or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout." Which means that no matter what happens, he can point and say either "They did it" (the military) or "We were doing something".

Casting no aspersions here, just pointing out that if - if, mind - things go pear-shaped, that he has numerous escape clauses.

2% of the country just died. 1/6 are now homeless -- 1.5 million people, more than 3x the population of pre-Katrina New Orleans. All the hospitals were destroyed. There's one, small, airport. If everything went right it'd still be going wrong.

My metric for the response to eastern-seaboard-of-North-America disasters is "How long does it take for the US government to get the hospital ship USNS Comfort to the scene"?

Of the top of my head, I seem to recall that took the Comfort five days to sail from Baltimore to post-Katrina New Orleans (post-Katrina).

(This page - http://www3.ausa.org/webpub/depthome.nsf/byid/cton-6fuplu - implies seven days, counting from August 31, 2005.)

This week, it took the Comfort four days to cast off, and it isn't expected to arrive in Haiti until Wednesday, Jan. 20th: call it eight days, maybe 8.5 days.

In September 2001, the Comfort cast off in about 30 hours, and "arrived at Pier 92 in Manhattan at about 8:30 p.m. September 14." (Wiki)
Call it 3.5 days, but over a significantly shorter distance.

I haven't clicked the results of the poll, but I have a feeling the results need a "memetic prophylactic" tag.

That's an odd question. How many countries' populations is the US government to regard as the same as our own citizens?

(I think I'm in favor of a broad answer to that, but "they're the same" means we get to tax them.)

"ihttp:"?

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Quoting the article

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Here's the truth:

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