Tsunami

[velochat]

I'm sure we've all learned a lot more about our Indian Ocean geography lately. Nice to see the US is really helping after a slow start.

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/horsey/vi ... sp?id=1138

[iaafan]

And there's this:

http://borgenproject.org/

Somewhere between 24,000 and 40,000 (depending on who you ask) children starve to death every day.

[velochat]

I was looking at the medecins sans frontieres site yesterday, and noticed that they have asked people to stop sending money for the Tsunami, which brings up the good point that there are people in misery all over the world and we tend to only care about one place at a time, whichever the media has chosen as the "only other place in the world outside the US" that day. It might be best to send help to one of the aid organisations to use where the need is greatest, in memory of the tsunami victims, rather than to bestow all of our generosity expressly to the tsunami victims.

Of course, we've always preferred giving away guns to peaceful and non self-serving assistance, which makes sense, since one gun can eliminate a lot of other needs.

[Beaker]

And while the UN still holds meetings about aid, the US and Australia are actually doing relief work.

[SonomaCat]

And while the UN still holds meetings about aid, the US and Australia are actually doing relief work.

Actually, the U.N. is currently airlifting food and supplies into affected regions. Fortunately, we are part of the U.N., so we don't need to compete with them for self-congratulations.

[Beaker]

Read the UK's Telegraph paper. Since its registration-only site, heres a clip of the article:

If America were to emulate Ireland and Norway, there'd be a lot more dead Indonesians and Sri Lankans. Mr Eddison may not have noticed, but the actual relief effort going on right now is being done by the Yanks: it's the USAF and a couple of diverted naval groups shuttling in food and medicine, with solid help from the Aussies, Singapore and a couple of others. The Irish can't fly in relief supplies, because they don't have any C-130s. All they can do is wait for the UN to swing by and pick up their cheque...For all the money lavished on them, the UN is hard to rouse to action. Egeland's full-time round-the-clock 24/7 Big Humanitarians are conspicuous by their all but total absence on the ground. In fact, they're doing exactly what our reader accused Washington of doing - Colin Powell, wrote Mr Eddison, "is like a surgeon saying he must do a bandage count before he will be in a position to staunch the blood flow of a haemorrhaging patient". That's the sclerotic UN bureaucracy. They've flown in (or nearby, or overhead) a couple of experts to assess the situation and they've issued press releases boasting about the assessments. In Sri Lanka, Egeland's staff informs us, "UNFPA is carrying out reproductive health assessments".

Which, translated out of UN-speak, means the Sri Lankans can go screw themselves.

One of the heartening aspects of the situation is how easy it is to make a difference. By the weekend, the Australians had managed not just to restore the water supply in Aceh, but to improve it. Even before the tsunami, most residents of the city boiled their water. But 10 army engineers from Darwin have managed to crack open the main lines and hook them up to a mobile filtration unit. This is nothing to do with Egeland and his office or how big a cheque the Norwegians sent.

Indeed, the effectiveness of these efforts seems to be what Miss Short finds so objectionable. Washington's announcement that it would be co-ordinating its disaster relief with Australia, India and Japan smacked too much of another "coalition of the willing". "I think this initiative from America to set up four countries claiming to co-ordinate sounds like yet another attempt to undermine the UN," she told the BBC. "Only really the UN can do that job. It is the only body that has the moral authority."...If you're a homeless Sri Lankan, what matters is not who has the moral authority, but who has the water tankers and medical helicopters. President Bush didn't even bother mentioning the UN in his statement. Kofi Annan, by contrast, has decided that the Aussie-American "coalition of the willing" is, in fact, a UN operation. "The core group will support the UN effort," he said. "That group will be in support of the efforts that the UN is leading."

So American personnel in American planes and American ships will deliver American food and American medicine and implement an American relief plan, but it's still a "UN-led effort". That seems to be enough for Kofi. His "moral authority" is intact, and Guardian columnists and Telegraph readers can still bash the Yanks for their stinginess. Everybody's happy.

[WYCAT]

Game, set, and match - and Beaker wins this one.

[SonomaCat]

Read the UK's Telegraph paper. Since its registration-only site, heres a clip of the article:

If America were to emulate Ireland and Norway, there'd be a lot more dead Indonesians and Sri Lankans. Mr Eddison may not have noticed, but the actual relief effort going on right now is being done by the Yanks: it's the USAF and a couple of diverted naval groups shuttling in food and medicine, with solid help from the Aussies, Singapore and a couple of others. The Irish can't fly in relief supplies, because they don't have any C-130s. All they can do is wait for the UN to swing by and pick up their cheque...For all the money lavished on them, the UN is hard to rouse to action. Egeland's full-time round-the-clock 24/7 Big Humanitarians are conspicuous by their all but total absence on the ground. In fact, they're doing exactly what our reader accused Washington of doing - Colin Powell, wrote Mr Eddison, "is like a surgeon saying he must do a bandage count before he will be in a position to staunch the blood flow of a haemorrhaging patient". That's the sclerotic UN bureaucracy. They've flown in (or nearby, or overhead) a couple of experts to assess the situation and they've issued press releases boasting about the assessments. In Sri Lanka, Egeland's staff informs us, "UNFPA is carrying out reproductive health assessments".

Which, translated out of UN-speak, means the Sri Lankans can go screw themselves.

One of the heartening aspects of the situation is how easy it is to make a difference. By the weekend, the Australians had managed not just to restore the water supply in Aceh, but to improve it. Even before the tsunami, most residents of the city boiled their water. But 10 army engineers from Darwin have managed to crack open the main lines and hook them up to a mobile filtration unit. This is nothing to do with Egeland and his office or how big a cheque the Norwegians sent.

Indeed, the effectiveness of these efforts seems to be what Miss Short finds so objectionable. Washington's announcement that it would be co-ordinating its disaster relief with Australia, India and Japan smacked too much of another "coalition of the willing". "I think this initiative from America to set up four countries claiming to co-ordinate sounds like yet another attempt to undermine the UN," she told the BBC. "Only really the UN can do that job. It is the only body that has the moral authority."...If you're a homeless Sri Lankan, what matters is not who has the moral authority, but who has the water tankers and medical helicopters. President Bush didn't even bother mentioning the UN in his statement. Kofi Annan, by contrast, has decided that the Aussie-American "coalition of the willing" is, in fact, a UN operation. "The core group will support the UN effort," he said. "That group will be in support of the efforts that the UN is leading."

So American personnel in American planes and American ships will deliver American food and American medicine and implement an American relief plan, but it's still a "UN-led effort". That seems to be enough for Kofi. His "moral authority" is intact, and Guardian columnists and Telegraph readers can still bash the Yanks for their stinginess. Everybody's happy.

Yeah... but that's not exactly a hard-hitting news story. That's an op-ed from a conservative UK columnist who is featured on RightWingNews.com (seriously). Just out of curiosity, where did you link to that from? I am assuming that you aren't a regular Telegraph reader?

This article is from the U.N. website, and it seems to outline some of the things the U.N. is doing. The more from the U.N. and the U.S. can do, the better. Again, we're not competing.

http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?N ... unami&Cr1=

[SonomaCat]

Game, set, and match - and Beaker wins this one.

Not quite... that would be like someone shouting "Michael Moore said..." and using that reference alone to proclaim victory in a discussion on Iraq.

[velochat]

That's incomprehensible self congratulations. Taking credit and keeping score doesn't matter.

[SonomaCat]

There are some strange attitudes existing in this country right now. Sociologically, people like to be able to identify someone who is distinctly "the enemy" to villify (the classic "them" that allows the definition of "us"), and invariably leaders of people use these enemies (whether they are straw men or actual threats to their safety) to rally their masses.

However, since our enemy is now hard to really pin down and label (terrorism), and as our traditional enemies have faded ("communists" and "Ruskies"), we seem to have latched on to some really strange ideas of who we are supposed to dislike, namely the U.N. and France. That's kind of strange, though, since we are allies with France and part of the U.N. You'd think we wouldn't try so hard to dislike them.

[SonomaCat]

I think what beaker was driving at was that there was some initial criticism of the U.S. by the U.N. for not putting in more financial support to the effort. The op-ed he quoted begins by explaining that situation, then goes on to explain how much the U.S. is actually doing (subsequent to the criticism, which shows that perhaps the UN guy got the result he had hoped for, which is a good thing either way). Of course, the columnist, consistent with his natural anti-UN disposition, took a few gratuitious and factually incomplete shots at the UN in the process. That's just what political columnists do.

There is always some political bickering between the US and the UN -- that's just the nature of the beast. In this effort, though, we should be applauding the work of both entities, as well as anyone else who steps in to help out.

[Beaker]

Just out of curiosity, where did you link to that from? I am assuming that you aren't a regular Telegraph reader?

Actually it is from the Telegraph, and I do read it often

[SonomaCat]

Actually it is from the Telegraph, and I do read it often

I know it is from the Telegraph -- that's where I read the column in its entirety. Did you find it while browsing the Telegraph, or did you come across a link from a blog or other website that directed you to it today?

[iaafan]

From BAC: [quote]There are some strange attitudes existing in this country right now. Sociologically, people like to be able to identify someone who is distinctly "the enemy" to villify (the classic "them" that allows the definition of "us"), and invariably leaders of people use these enemies (whether they are straw men or actual threats to their safety) to rally their masses[/quote]

I wonder where people in this country are getting that from? [/quote]

[Beaker]

I read it all by myself. Not sure if I can read or something?

[SonomaCat]

I read it all by myself. Not sure if I can read or something?

Most articles on the web aren't first read by browsing the individual paper's online edition -- we get there by reading centralized sources of information that we trust such a blogs or newsletters with articles that are of interest to us. If you happen to read the U.K. Telegraph daily and came across that article, that's great. I was just wondering if you happened to have a resource for articles similar to that which would be interesting to know about for our own reference.

For instance, I tend to come across interesting internation articles in the Slate "International Papers" summary. That's the kind of thing I was asking about. Clearly you can read -- how else would you have known what to put into bold face within the text of the editorial?

[velochat]

Comment
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The victims of the tsunami pay the price of war on Iraq
US and British aid is dwarfed by the billions both spend on slaughter

George Monbiot
Tuesday January 4, 2005

Guardian

There has never been a moment like it on British television. The Vicar of Dibley, one of our gentler sitcoms, was bouncing along with its usual bonhomie on New Year's Day when it suddenly hit us with a scene from another world. Two young African children were sobbing and trying to comfort each other after their mother had died of Aids. How on earth, I wondered, would the show make us laugh after that? It made no attempt to do so. One by one the characters, famous for their parochial boorishness, stood in front of the camera wearing the white armbands which signalled their support for the Make Poverty History campaign. You would have to have been hewn from stone not to cry.
The timing was perfect. In my local Oxfam shop last week, people were queueing to the door to pledge money for the tsunami fund. A pub on the other side of town raised £1,000 on Saturday night. In the pot on the counter of the local newsagent's there must be nearly £100. The woman who runs the bakery told me about the homeless man she had seen, who emptied his pockets in the bank, saying "I just want to do my bit", while the whole queue tried not to cry.

Over the past few months, reviewing the complete lack of public interest in what is happening in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the failure, in the west, to mobilise effective protests against the continuing atrocities in Iraq, I had begun to wonder whether we had lost our ability to stand in other people's shoes. I have now stopped wondering. The response to the tsunami shows that, however we might seek to suppress it, we cannot destroy our capacity for empathy.

But one obvious question recurs. Why must the relief of suffering, in this unprecedentedly prosperous world, rely on the whims of citizens and the appeals of pop stars and comedians? Why, when extreme poverty could be made history with a minor redeployment of public finances, must the poor world still wait for homeless people in the rich world to empty their pockets?

The obvious answer is that governments have other priorities. And the one that leaps to mind is war. If the money they have promised to the victims of the tsunami still falls far short of the amounts required, it is partly because the contingency fund upon which they draw in times of crisis has been spent on blowing people to bits in Iraq.

The US government has so far pledged $350m to the victims of the tsunami, and the UK government £50m ($96m). The US has spent $148 billion on the Iraq war and the UK £6bn ($11.5bn). The war has been running for 656 days. This means that the money pledged for the tsunami disaster by the United States is the equivalent of one and a half day's spending in Iraq. The money the UK has given equates to five and a half days of our involvement in the war.

It looks still worse when you compare the cost of the war to the total foreign aid budget. The UK has spent almost twice as much on creating suffering in Iraq as it spends annually on relieving it elsewhere. The United States gives just over $16bn in foreign aid: less than one ninth of the money it has burnt so far in Iraq.

The figures for war and aid are worth comparing because, when all the other excuses for the invasion of Iraq were stripped away, both governments explained that it was being waged for the good of the Iraqis. Let us, for a moment, take this claim at face value. Let us suppose that the invasion and occupation of Iraq had nothing to do with power, domestic politics or oil, but were, in fact, components of a monumental aid programme. And let us, with reckless generosity, assume that more people in Iraq have gained as a result of this aid programme than lost.

To justify the war, even under these wildly unsafe assumptions, George Bush and Tony Blair would have to show that the money they spent was a cost-efficient means of relieving human suffering. As it was sufficient to have made a measurable improvement in the lives of all the 2.8 billion people living in absolute poverty, and as there are only 25 million people in Iraq, this is simply not possible. Even if you ignore every other issue - such as the trifling matter of mass killing - the opportunity costs of the Iraq war categorise it as a humanitarian disaster. Indeed, such calculations suggest that, on cost grounds alone, a humanitarian war is a contradiction in terms.

But our leaders appear to have lost the ability to distinguish between helping people and killing them. The tone of Blair's New Year message was almost identical to that of his tear-jerking insistence that we understand the Iraqi people must be bombed for their own good. The US marines who have now been dispatched to Sri Lanka to help the rescue operation were, just a few weeks ago, murdering the civilians (for this, remember, is an illegal war), smashing the homes and evicting the entire population of the Iraqi city of Falluja.

Even within the official aid budgets the two aims are confused: $8.9bn of the aid money the US spends is used for military assistance, anti-drugs operations, counter-terrorism and the Iraq relief and reconstruction fund (otherwise known as the Halliburton benevolent trust). For Bush and Blair, the tsunami relief operation and the Iraq war are both episodes in the same narrative of salvation. The civilised world rides out to rescue foreigners from their darkness.

While they spend the money we gave them to relieve suffering on slaughtering the poor, the world must rely for disaster relief on the homeless man emptying his pockets. If our leaders were as generous in helping people as they are in killing them, no one would ever go hungry.

· You can join the campaign against global poverty at: www.makepovertyhistory.org

www.monbiot.com

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005

[SonomaCat]

And now we have the editorial input from the other side of the British political spectrum. It seems that we can't even get a get, set, match consistency within the same country between the competing papers -- it appears that editorials really are based on opinions as opposed to fact.

[SonomaCat]

I just finished reading a pretty interesting book called "The Lucifer Principal" that deals a lot with evolutionary psychology and the sociology of groups of people as it relates back to E.P. (basically the study of how the desire to pass on our genetic material influences our behavior in such dramatic ways in nearly every part of our life).

One contention that the author had (whose politics would be hard to define -- he was kind of all over the board from a strictly political point of view, which made me respect him a bit more) was that sending massive amounts of foreign aid overseas does just as much to make enemies as anything else we can do. In most cultures, especially those who are closer to their primal (manly testosterone driven) orgins (meaning the generally lesser developed countries), being the recipient of aid from a stronger country is insulting. They will accept it because they certainly need it, but they will resent the giver as a patronizing country that they would like to see fall. This is part of the reason that all great empires eventually fall -- everybody is rooting against them, because everybody wants to be on top. You can't bribe your way out of this position, and you certainly can't fight your way out of it. You will just always be disliked until you are no longer the top dog. The author suggests that the moment these empires becomes lax, they will be knocked off by one of the up and comers (tie this into a conversation on our reliance on foreign investment to prop up our economy).

Clearly, the U.S. is the top dog right now, which is why most countries really don't mind when bad things happen to us. If the tables were reversed, we'd probably feel the same way. Everybody wants their "team" to get to the top, and the more bad things that happen to number 1, the better chance they have to move up.

I would suggest that as people become less nationalistic and move towards the utopian "worldview" of thinking, this kind of instinct would fade away. For the time being, though, it is still strong. Even countries like the U.S., with no common ethnic (hence no direct DNA relationship) history and simply an entire culture filled with immigrants from around the world, are pulled by this instinct. We call it patriotism.