US Military Doing The Devil’s Work In Haiti

No they aren’t. They’re doing rescue and remediation work that is pretty astonishing in its magnitude and effectiveness. I’m still steamed by Pat Robertson’s insanely malignant remark to the effect that the natural disasters suffered by Haiti are the result of a pact with the devil that empowered them to successfully rebel against the French slaveholders who ruled the country. Apparently Pat thinks slavery is a good thing. Never mind the rest of the implications.

I’ve been reading some of the periodic briefings about the US Southern Command’s activities in Haiti. According to General Douglas Fraser, the Southern Command chief, the military have more than 20,00 personnel in the area, with 6,000 of them physically in Haiti.

The command is operating the hospital ship USS Comfort, which Fraser says had treated 3,000 patients as of Thursday. They’re running 100 flights a day into the airport with supplies and personnel, another 90 or so helicopter flights daily, and more than 200 containers of supplies into the port daily. They’re building or repairing facilities to bump that figure up to 500 containers daily, and they’re also working with various other US government and independent agencies to set up a very large (3000-5000 beds) medical facility in Port Au Prince.

What caught my eye today was a Fraser briefing from last week in which he mentioned the distribution of 43,000 hand-cranked radios. He said that the radios can be cranked up to run for about 45 minutes, and they can be used to charge cell phones, and they have a flashlight-strength light built in. They’re similar to ones you can find on Amazon and in stores. Assuming multiple users, that’s a relatively cheap way of providing emergency information, light and cell phone communications to several hundred thousand people. That’s a pretty cool thing.

As thin as the various military services are stretched, and as deeply screwed as US finances are, it would have been easy enough for the Pentagon to request and the administration to accede to devoting less manpower, equipment and other resources, and hence less money, to the operation. It’s gratifying that the effort seems to involve about as many resources as could be assigned to it without falling over one another. And it’s further gratifying to see the military deployed in significant force to do something that involves saving lives and improving the lot of civilians rather than taking lives and degrading it.

In other military news … This should be read with the opening line of the Marine Corps Hymn playing in the background.

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