Italian Minister Slams U.S. Haiti Aid Effort.

Reported on January 25th Mr. Guido Bertolaso, Italy’s top disaster relief official lambasted and impugned the so-called “U.S.-led” relief effort in Haiti as a “pathetic” failure.

The confirmed death toll for Haiti is now 150,000, which if true represents nearly 1.5% of Haiti’s total population. It is estimated that nearly three million Haitians are now homeless, which would be about 1 in 3 Haitians. Reports from Haiti indicate that the government is all but gone with little or no native police or military presence in ravaged neighborhoods and that mobs of looters have been ravaging the remains of both retail businesses and private residences alike. Further, vigilante mobs have been executing suspected looters without due process or trial. Haiti is on the verge of reverting to the “law of the jungle”. And yet, Mr. Bertolaso believes that the U.S. has confused “military intervention” with “emergency intervention”.

I would invite Mr. Bertolaso to identify just exactly what he would do if given unlimited opportunity. For myself, I have seen angry mobs in the U.S. and they will turn violent if not controlled. And never in the history of our nation have we had to deal with a crisis on the level with the situation the Haitians face. At the same time that the U.N., with assistance from numerous nations, tries to distribute food, water, clothing and medical supplies to desperate Haitians, it has to deal with the fact there is essentially no effective Haitian government that could assist in controlling the victims from violence.

Desperate people will perform desperate acts. We have seen over and over again where well-meaning missionaries or aid workers have been attacked, injured or even killed while trying to distribute supplies to victims of disasters. We have also seen over and over again where those same supplies tend to go to the strong instead of the weak and helpless unless armed men oversee such operations. Strength respects only greater strength, and 13,000 armed soldiers trained in the art of imposing its will on organized enemy resistance will likely find little opposition from bands of thugs trying to monopolize on the supplies being provided by the generous people of the world.

I further suspect that had the United States simply decided to take over coordination over the relief effort, that Mr. Bertolaso would then have lambasted the arrogance of the Americans in taking over what should be a U.N. operation. So the U.S. is damned either way. In such a case, I support the U.S., considering our overwhelming contribution to Haitian relief, to just go ahead and take over the relief operation.

Oh yeah, to date, the United States has delivered about $184 million in aid to Haiti. By the same date, Italy had contributed about $9 million. By my math, that means that the U.S. response to this tragedy is about twenty times the size of the Italian response. That apparently is a fact that Mr. Bertolaso did NOT get quoted on.