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Big Government and natural disaster relief (Haiti from Foreign Policy viewpoint)
- Thread starter scoolbubba
- Start date
You're missing the point, probably because I worded it poorly. Had there been a history of stable, effective government and culture in Haiti, what would the situation be like now? And how long would it take for them to recover? Dramatically different than the situation they are facing today and in the years to come.
That IS an interesting problem. Where does Haiti "recover" to from here exactly?
And yes, culture is an easily midunderstood descriptor. Christian voodoo and Creole food aren't what keep the Haitians from organizing effective government.
Unfair comparisons have been drawn to the 1989 San Fran quake, which killed some 63 people, but the epicenter was 70 miles away from town vice 16 in Haiti. A more apt comparison is the 8.0 quake in Sichuan which killed some 70,000. It was poverty, not culture or government, which aggravated the toll from these disasters. What exactly about Haitian "culture" is causing their suffering?
Get off your soapbox.
http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/thu-january-14-2010/haiti-earthquake-reactions
There is no soapbox, here, just the facts. The root cause of the poverty is the corruption - lack of effective property rights (which is the single biggest issue keeping most third-world nations from improving), government siphoning off the tax and aid money for their own benefit instead of improving the infrastructure.
Yes, culture is much more than the religion and food.
Where do they recover to? They need a complete revamping of their society, or they will never get out of this cycle.
But I suspect that nothing significant will happen - there will be a short-term influx of aid for the next few months, one result of which will be to strengthen the corrupt elements which currently hold the power, because they will control distribution of a lot of the aid, either directly or indirectly.
Nobody's controlling shit there right now, which is the problem. Normally our large-scale foreign disaster relief is oriented towards assisting the local government in doing what it can't, until they can re-establish authority and/or normal life. But it sounds like what notional government there was in Haiti is dispersed or dead. There's no infrastructure anymore, not even the crap that served as infrastructure before all this. Something like a third of the population is homeless and most likely several hundred thousand dead by the time this is over, from trauma, dehydration, exposure, disease, etc.
We're all going to go gangbusters on this until the immediate crisis has passed. Then the world's attention will move elsewhere. Then we'll be playing a game of hot potato with the UN, with us trying to hand the job of policing and running Haiti back to them, and the UN insisting that they don't have the money/people/etc. So we're going to be stuck policing Haiti because no one else will do it and we can't afford to have an anarchic failed state in the Caribbean.
We're all going to go gangbusters on this until the immediate crisis has passed. Then the world's attention will move elsewhere. Then we'll be playing a game of hot potato with the UN, with us trying to hand the job of policing and running Haiti back to them, and the UN insisting that they don't have the money/people/etc. So we're going to be stuck policing Haiti because no one else will do it and we can't afford to have an anarchic failed state in the Caribbean.
The violence will begin very soon if it hasn't already. I heard on CNN this morning that 40% of the police force in Port au Prince was accounted for, but big whoop. It's about to be the wild west. Unfortunately, we own it now. Nobody else is going to take it, and we can't just leave it alone. We'll be able to keep a lid on it, and I think this is going to be a good check of our nation building skills. There's no religious zealots involved and we can rebuild it on the cheap.
...Maybe we can do a remodel and flip it to the Dominican Republic.
...Maybe we can do a remodel and flip it to the Dominican Republic.
I kinda think we've "owned it" at least partly since the Reagan era, whether we admit it to ourselves or not. But have another look at the MINUSTAH (the UN mission there) facts and figures . There is a fair sized list of countries lending thousands of their sons and daughters for some time now. Long before the earthquake, Jordan lost two of their own to that mission--exactly four years today as it turns out--but Jordan stayed. Looking at this before the earthquake, try not to compare numbers to our own superpower commitments to OIF+OEF but instead look at it from the perspective of each of the other countries and why it's a big deal for some of them.
Hopefully post-earthquake the survivors in the UN mission stay at least long enough to provide some continuity. Better yet hopefully their countries remain committed because their contributions have real value.
For non-governmental organizations it's a little too hard to get an accurate count but there are a lot of volunteer and charitable organizations working down there (a lot as in numbering in hundreds of charities operating in Port-au-Prince before the earthquake... never mind now and the near future). Or anecdotally, if you could have ridden a commercial flight down there (again, before the earthquake), it was easy to size up how many people on the plane were on personal travel and how many were going there for some kind of aid work.
I agree- the alternative is far worse.
Haiti....the New Somalia! Millions of dollars of aid dumped into a country, and nothing to show for it.
Clux4
Banned
Our scorecard on nation building is not fantastic but let us wait and see. Don't dismiss the efforts just yet. This is a perfect opportunity for State to showcase its strength. State and DOD might just get it this time around. The nation's appetite for contracted involvement is another thing.
Literally, the only thing I can think of when I look at the absolute poverty is "where did all that money go?" Approximately 300 million dollars a year is budgeted to Haiti, and the place is still mogadishu east. The Dominican Republic isn't paradise, but it damn sure isn't a failed feudalist state run by warlords and driven by graft and the only thing that separates the two nations is a line on paper maps.