Guns and Gauze - or blaming the military.

[tabatha]

The Airport

But a senior US military official, briefing reporters on condition of anonymity, said priorities on which aircraft could land were set by the Haitian government and the United Nations, with the United States playing only an enabling role.

The US military official said US military flights accounted for 28 percent of the traffic at the Port-au-Prince airport, with the remainder belonging to the United Nations, non-governmental groups, other US government agencies and other international efforts.

The US Agency for International Development was identifying medical supply requirements to allocate time slots for aircraft to land at the airport, with input from the United Nations, non-governmental organizations, another senior military official said.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5jkG6AVse8STcejoWk_o4-4_AuZIA

The Supplies
If 100 % percent of the flights were aid, who would distribute the food, water and medicine? Medical supplies include many pallets of supplies and equipment. To fully feed the population - 3 million bottles of water and MREs three times a day are needed. In addition to other supplies of personal hygiene products, tents, blankets, beds, stoves, etc. All of the above constitute a huge amount of material. And there are no warehouses, and cold storage facilities --- only tents to hold cargo. Thus a certain percentage of the flights into Haiti had to be personnel to assist in providing supplies to the population. There also had to be personnel to make the airport usable, fix the port, clear roads, etc. 28% of all flights as military flights does not seem unreasonable.

If "gauze" is to be distributed, it must be done without the assistance of doctors, nurses and the Haiti population. There has been a lot of complaining about "gauze" not getting to medical centers fast enough, but when the military land to help deliver the "gauze", then it is stated the place is becoming too militarized with guns. Who else can deliver the "gauze" ---- contractors --- surely, not. Besides the fact that they are undesirable, they are also incredibly expensive and wasteful. All money raised must be spent as prudently as possible. The UN could also be used; but they do not have the vast numbers and equipment of the military. This disaster has seen the largest number of UN personnel killed at one time.

Blaming the US military
For once in their deployments, the US military is not being used to fight or kill people - this is a purely humanitarian undertaking in Haiti. Yet their presence on the ground is being described as “Guns” when they are not using them - instead they are using mostly sweat. The complaint in the beginning of the Democracy Now video was: “ If we had gotten the supplies, people, by now, would be more than likely out of the city of Port-au-Prince. There’s plenty of places in Haiti for them to go to. We didn’t have any fuel.” Who was supposed to deliver the supplies and fuel to the people, when in the early days after the quake the airport was barely functional, lots of supplies were coming in first, but there few boots on the ground to deliver the aid. Also, if airplane had a choice of medical supplies and fuel, what would the priority have been - medical of course. And the medical need was overwhelming. So the accusation that there should have been fuel first is hardly fair. The problem is that Haiti was so poor, there were no stockpiles of fuel - it was not anyone’s fault that there was no fuel, and especially not the military whose first task was to get the airport functional so that planes full of medical aid could land first. One is damned if one does and damned if one does not.

In the initial days, the UN was the chief distributor of aid because there were no military boots on the ground to do so - incoming flights were heavily prioritized for medical aid. The Democracy Now Video interview - “ From what I’m understanding and from what I’m seeing, you typically see like the big organizations have their big white vans, and they’re quite sealed off from the community. They’re not—because of security restrictions, they’re not allowed to take local transportation. And the types of normal interactions you might expect people to have after being in—working in a country for a long time, they’re not really allowed to develop, because of their security policies. And so, what we’ve seen here is that the aid delivery is very slow.” The only big white van I saw was marked UN. And she talked about “the big organizations” and did not mention the US military, because at that point there were not many boots on the ground. But somehow, “the big organizations” was morphed to mean the US military, the “Guns”. As far as I could tell, the UN has been in Haiti for a long time, and would probably have avoided the high risk security areas as she stated that they were in the country “for a long time”. The US military only recently arrived as boots on the ground in Haiti, probably after the DN trip was over.

Accomplishments of the US military
- fixed the airport, set up traffic controllers who worked from tables out in the open. An airport control tower is on the way to Haiti.
- opened up three new airports in Haiti and the Dominican Republic
- fixed the port, so that large quantities of cargo can be offloaded from ships and driven straight out, bypassing the airport logjam
- dropped supplies directly to Haitians on the ground, so that the airport logjam could be bypassed
- arranged with Cuba for overflights to shorten the flight to Gitmo by 90 minutes for quake victims
- 63 helicopters and 20 ships in the Port-au-Prince area, ranging from an aircraft carrier to an amphibious-ready group, to Coast Guard cutters
- hospital ship Comfort is full for the first time in its existence
- distributed over 1.4 million bottles of water, over 7000 meals and roughly 22,000 pounds of medical supplies.
- there is a waiting list of over 1,400 flights waiting to get into the small airport at Port-au-Prince
- 12,000 US military are in Haiti and on ships offshore. An additional 2,000 marines are expected to be deployed offshore by Sunday.
- At Gitmo, a tent city that could house 12,000 or more migrants is slowly rising in case any Haitians are found off their shore
- Military are considering using amphibious landing at areas away from Haiti where there is no assistance

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/world/story/82812.html
http://rawstory.com/news/afp/US_using_four_airports_to_support_H_01212010.html

So with all that assistance, aid, equipment and military personnel purely on a humanitarian mission (no war), people are bitching about “Gauze not Guns”. There is probably more gauze on the USS Comfort than has been in Haiti for the last several years. Who else would have the capacity to deliver that quantity of help that fast?

The trashing of the US military is completely out of line. They have done stellar work. And after having watched the Democracy Now video three times, I find no reason to complain about the US military - the UN, possibly yes.

[Kaleva]

1. My rec canceled out someone else's unrec.

[Lasher]

2. Good for you, I just sent it to the greatest page.

I believe in giving credit where credit is due.

[Obamanaut]

3. K and R nt

[KharmaTrain]

4. What's To Gain By "Occupying" An Economic Basketcase?

This is the part of this meme that makes zero sense. Haiti is poor on many levels...including natural resources and a poor, agrarian society. Any "occupation" would cost far more than it ever would return as it couldn't be "exploited" for years until the infrastructure is completely rebuilt (or built, since one never really existed) and created a workforce to be exploited. There's zero upside as any "savings" of cheap labor would be offset by costs not only to the military but the corporates who can find the cheap labor and a far better deal in India or the Marshall Islands.

I'm very proud of the job our military has done to quickly respond and take a lead role in getting aid into the country. It's a land totally void of any centralized civil authority (many ended up underneath the rubble)...and the security is needed both to protect the many NGOs and volunteers on the ground trying to administer assistance and the Haitian people who need the help the most...children, elderly and the injured. Without a semblence of order, the situation could turn chaotic, further hurting any relief efforts.

[TxRider]

5. It's all that prime Ganja Mon....

[Kaleva]

6. kicked