Nice piece here.
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.
The
Americans send the UN the occasional postal order, too. In fact, 40 per
cent of Egeland’s budget comes from Washington, which suggests the
Europeans aren’t being quite as "proportionate" as Mr Eddison thinks.
But, when disaster strikes, what matters is not whether your cheque is
"prompt", but whether you are. 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.
Transnational, collective action is so much more effective, isn’t it?
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