The unceasing parade of horror stories dominating our television screens the past two days rends the heart of every sentient, civilized human being. In choosing entities to send help, it is important to weigh two prime factors: (1) a reputable organization that can be trusted to spend the money as intended by the donor; (2) an efficient distributor not unduly encumbered by bureaucracy.
On the first none other than Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said on "Fox & Friends":
SECRETARY CLINTON: But we have systems in place now to be able to track the money, to hold it accountable, to look for results. We’re doing that across the board. I’m revamping our aid system so that I can look you in the eye and the American taxpayer in the eye and say look, I’m not going to spend a penny unless I have some confidence that it’s going to go to the right place. In a disaster like this, you have to put in a lot of resources.
New York Times pundit David Brooks raises a politically incorrect set of truisms: Culture matters in determining which societies become prosperous and thus are able to weather natural catastrophes. Thus the Dominican Republic & Haiti share the same Caribbean island, but the D.R. is in far better shape.
I would add one more, politically incorrect major point: The largest responder to this mega-calamity is--often true, as happened with the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami--once again the United States Navy: aircraft carriers turned into makeshift floating hospitals (in addition to specialized hospital ships), US Marines ashore to keep order.
None of this military-provided humanitarian aid counts as "foreign aid" in the eyes of internationalists like the Norwegian globalist who back then implied that America is "stingy" because its official government aid was not then at the 0.7 percent benchmark established by les bien pensants as the minimum for reputational honor. Hudson Institute scholar Carol Adelman's "Global Philanthropy and Remittances: Reinventing Foreign Aid" (June 2009) detailed how private charity from America exceeds government largesse by a substantial margin; American private charity vastly outpaces contributions from any other population on the planet. (Another very generous source of aid in natural disasters, with little notice given by news outlets, is Israel and Jewish groups.)
John O'Sullivan wrote in NRO that after the Boxing Day Tsunami the UN did far less than the US:
Even when the U.N. gets fully going, the U.S. will still be providing at least 40 percent of U.N. aid. In addition to America's quarter-share of the U.N.'s costs, almost all U.N. aid will be transported to stricken areas by American planes, ships, and helicopters. In short, the U.S. is the dominant force in this disaster- relief program.
There is no great disgrace in that — the U.S. has greater capability than other countries and agencies even in combination — and we should not scorn U.N. relief efforts because others can do more sooner.
What is disgraceful is that there has been a concerted effort by the U.N. and its ideological allies — against the evidence and all commonsense — to insist that the U.N. must take the lead in organizing the relief effort, to allege that any independent U.S. help is "undermining" the U.N., and to claim credit for aid that the U.S. and Australia had actually delivered.
The first case of this was the accusation (since withdrawn) that the U.S. and Western countries were "stingy." Then ideological charities such as Oxfam demanded that all aid should be channeled through the U.N. even though, as Rosemary Righter of the London Sunday Times pointed out, it was clear that the U.N. was not capable of coordinating such a massive effort. Next, Britain's former International Development Secretary, the left-wing Clare Short, declared that the U.S. was seeking to "undermine" the U.N. by joining with Japan, India and Australia in a practical coalition to coordinate aid to Asia. Sadly (and absurdly), Tony Blair seconded her demand that the U.S. should acknowledge U.N. leadership. Most recently (as reported by the blogger Diplomad) a local U.N. representative in Aceh asked that U.S. and Aussie military flying in aid and introducing clean water to the area should wear blue U.N. helmets in order to "soothe local cultural anxieties."
In other words for the U.N. and its claque, helping the stricken takes second place to getting the credit. They have to obscure the realities revealed by the tsunami crisis. Otherwise, American generosity will re-fashion the global image of the U.S. as a callous superpower and American efficiency will shame a U.N. still struggling to catch up with American aid efforts.
Here is Fox News's list of organizations helping the relief effort. I would add to the list Mercy Corps and Doctors Without Borders.
Here is AEI scholar Roger Noriega with lessons for government aid to Haiti over the longer term.
Bottom Line. America will once again do the heaviest lifting, and get little credit for it, because that is what is expected of it. And Israel will, of course, get zero credit from the globalist elite. As for the UN types, they will, as ever, hog the limelight and take most of the credit, while doing little of the real work.
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