Academic

PAUL GOODMAN: ?The humanitarian catastrophe in Haiti is turning out to be a classic illustration of?

By Glenn Reynolds

PAUL GOODMAN: “The humanitarian catastrophe in Haiti is turning out to be a classic illustration of anti-Americanism in seven easy steps.” Like I said, I thought electing Obama was supposed to put an end to that sort of thing.

UPDATE: Reader Gordon Agress writes:

Are we sure our guys are doing so great? We’re hearing a lot of complaints about the prioritization of flights through the airport bottleneck. I read the other day that Bill Clinton arrived in a 757, and that Hilary’s arrival crowded out an aid plane. I would think we could get our own bigwigs in with less disruption — smaller planes, both on the same plane, in on aid-carrying C-130s, helicopters. And I’m not reading many stories of imaginative transport solutions — personnel via ‘copter, staging through Gitmo, bringing people and stuff onshore in light boats or landing craft.

I know it’s a tough, tough job, but sitting here in the peanut gallery I’m not blown away by the quality of our organization.

Well, I can’t tell. Bigwigs should travel on flights bringing aid, and if we had a better class of bigwigs that would be a given. But in anything like this, however well-executed, lots of things are going to go wrong, because that’s the nature of the beast. Have we exceeded that threshold? I have no idea. Regardless, claims that we’re trying to carry out some sort of stealth takeover of Haiti seem rather farfetched. We’ve controlled Haiti before, didn’t like it, and gave it back. Haiti’s best defense against invasion is that if you seize Haiti . . . then you have Haiti. I mean, if this were St. Bart’s or Bonaire you’d have something, maybe, but . . . .

Full post as published by Instapundit.com on January 19, 2010 (boomark / email).