Haiti (Catch all)

[Tom Kratman]

Tom, No offense intended - I did say Sorry !

I enjoy your "no Bravo Sierra" approach, but I doubt your conclusions would work much better than our current abysmal system. Funds are being mismanaged and the aid has never fully reached those in need. Yep, flawed and bankrupt but not because we've lost our own moral fiber.

Our disaster relief teams just returned as did many others. So, with all this fuss it seems the problem was either smaller than projected or ?

Having been a member of a three-man team in a refugee camp with 800,000, I can tell you we would have had to shoot and hang 750,000 before someone took notice.

Better to send ammo or food when 4,000 a day die of cholera while we ponder over looting?

BTW, a belated Welcome Aboard !

Regards, Stan

Oh, surely you could have gotten more lumber to build a higher gallows to get them to notice sooner, Stan.

I note how very quiet and cooperative the Haitians rioting in the camps at GTMO, circa late 91-early 92, became once we committed one Marine artillery battery and one Army infantry company, in riot control gear, to quelling those riots. And I don't think we had to hurt anyone, but merely demonstrate that we would.

When I refer to lack of moral fiber, in the case of the west, I'm generally referring to the unwillingness to do the bad thing, or at least the harsh thing, to prevent the worse, or the simply frightful. Forex, we could have probably saved 800,000 innocent Tutsi for well under a billion with the commitment of a single brigade with ROE to shoot. I personally suspect that the reason we didn't was that the domestic political cost of shooting black folks, be they never so evil, in order to save other black folks, be they never so innocent, is simply too high. The ones we kill end up on the news (though they don't say much) while the ones we save are ignored as, at best, speculative.

In any case, yes, 3 for 800k drawfs my worst ratio (2, plus a Dutch Marine company, to about 20k), by orders of magnitude. I can understand why you couldn't get a lot of cooperation.

Ammo or food depends on both the need for food and the seriousness of the looting. No cookie cutter will do.

I don't have any conclusions, Stan. I don't think that anything we can do, and that we're willing to do, will work, long term. And in the places where they seem to, one wonders if we were needed in the first place for anything but to keep people alive, short term.