By Dale McFeatters Scripps Howard News Service
It says something about the United States' reputation for being able to do things on a massive scale that the dispossessed Haitians and the overwhelmed relief workers already on the island seemed disappointed and angry that the U.S. had not arrived immediately and set things right.
Almost a week after the catastrophic earthquake, however, the U.S. had 12,000 members of its armed services on the ground or immediately offshore, with more ships and helicopters on the way.
The earthquake made a shambles out of the Haitian government, barely functional in the best of times, and decapitated the local U.N. office, the principal international humanitarian organization in Haiti.
The U.S., for lack of any alternatives, stepped into the leadership vacuum. The Haitian government turned over control of the Port-au-Prince airport, whose tower and terminal had been destroyed, to the American military.
The crush of arriving relief aircraft and chaos on the ground forced the airport to close to incoming traffic. U.S. military air-traffic controllers soon sorted out the mess, but not without bruised feelings.
A French government minister complained that the controllers had turned away a French relief flight. Indeed, the flight was rerouted to the neighboring Dominican Republic, resulting in a 24-hour delay in the arrival of a mobile hospital. But the alternative was to risk a runway collision that would have closed the only truly functional access to the capital.
The same French minister, Alain Joyandet, according to the Associated Press, is urging the United Nations ``to investigate the dominant U.S. role in the relief operation, claiming that the international aid efforts were supposed to be about helping Haiti, not `occupying’ it."
Joyandet should be embarrassed to know that the virulent and loopy critic of the U.S., Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, has made the same charge.
Indeed, the Obama administration is resisting the idea that the U.S. should be in charge of rescuing and rebuilding Haiti. It talks about being partners with other nations and, at most, orchestrating relief efforts.
For the moment, U.S. troops have the unglamorous but vital task of protecting relief workers and aid convoys from violent bands of machete-wielding looters so food, water and medicine can reach the truly desperate. Critics of the American effort should ask themselves this: If the U.S. didn't do it, who would?
Dale McFeatters is an editorial writer of Scripps Howard News Service (www.scrippsnews.com).