I was a participant in January in a discussion of the Tsunami in which
I took the position that the US response was primarily public
relations.

In the interests of being Fair and Balanced, I should now mention that
an emergency worker involved in the day to day operations based on the
USS Abraham Lincoln has weighed in with an article in this month's Far
Eastern Economic Review.

In "Trifling do-gooders vs the US Navy", a Ms. Lynne O'Donnell from her
own first hand experience says that the Navy missions were frequent and
substantive, and far quicker than the UN response which was by
committee.

She also says that many US Military personnel  volunteered to fly extra
missions during their downtime, and that their relatives back home
(primarily, she says, church groups in the American southland) sent
extra supplies to men and women at sea for delivery to the disaster
zone.

She adds that many UN and NGO personnel took up valuable space on board
rescue helicopters because they did not want to overnight it in the
fearful disaster zones, and transformed the Abe Lincoln into a sort of
floating hotel for an interesting variety of "do-gooders" (some, I am
certain, with the defects of character that motivate the eleemosynary
impulse) who, perhaps, got in the swabbies' way as the swabbies
polished the brass.

I respect her first hand experience, and I respect swabbies and
officers below fag (oops, I mean flag) rank who were convinced that
they were doing Good.

The problem is that much Good was done in the initial, 19th century
wave of colonization as a form of comic relief to the background fact
of systematic pillage and exploitation, and I thought Joe Conrad
explained all this in The Heart of Darkness.

The very language of the word "do gooder" tries and I think fails to be
adequate to moral complexity in that the road to hell is paved with
good intentions: for notice that Lynne O'Donnell and the swabbies (as
well as soldiers in Iraq below fag, I mean flag, rank) WANT very much
to be do-gooders, with the same tragic yearning US soldiers in Vietnam:
with the same desparate hope British soldiers had when they walloped
their Christian G-d throughout palm, and pine.

If Lynne's experience was in general the case, then the rapid response
of my country did Good. The problem is that it contained, at the fag (I
mean flag) rank and at policy making level, no good intentions but
instead was conducted as a publicity stunt for the short term, and was
easy enough for the US to perform given the disparity in wealth between
the US and the rest of the world.

The long term has still to be managed by the UN using a variety of
interesting characters from all parts of the world, including UN
soldiers with behavior problems and do-gooders with a Past. The problem
is that at and above fag (sigh) rank and at the level of policy, the US
will refuse to be involved unless it can do so on its own terms and
Look Good at all times.

France's record in the Cote d'Ivoire shows that tragically, the
developed world is recolonizing the underdeveloped world because the
former refuses to treat the latter, in thousands of ways, with dignity
and respect and blames it for its troubles. There may be few
alternatives to some sort of benign recolonization (which does NOT
include the invasion of Iraq). But the Road Not Taken remains Untaken.