Someone asked me the other day why we can't just drop relief supplies on Burma, nevermind what SLORC has to say about it. That seemed like a good question to me, and I didn't have an answer. Barbara Stocking, the director of the UK branch of Oxfam, says this won't work logistically and that there's no alternative to either somehow pressuring the junta into letting relief workers enter the country. Or else, more likely I suppose, to watching more Burmese be essentially slaughtered by the obstructionism of their rulers.
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Aid From Above
14 May 2008 04:22 pm
Comments (28)
The US Ambassador to Thailand had an apt analogy, describing it as dropping a bunch of instruments on the ground and expecting a symphony.
Plus you have to consider the, um, impact of a thousand pound pallet of food landing on a fragile roof, or worse, on grandma.
I realize it's fun to say "SLORC" since it sounds like some evil organization from a James Bond film, but the fact is that SLORC was replaced with the (no less evil) State Peace and Development Council (SPDC) in 1997.
You can't just drop it without an on-ground distribution system, dude. It could spark fighting and riots on the ground. And unfortunately, the country's ruling force has proved they're not up to the task of rational distribution of aid.
Off topic
Time for Petey's head to explode. Edwards officially endorses Obama.
Okay, I know Rotary International is getting into Burma with their ShelterBoxes. How about the Red Cross?
Check these out...grassroots way of getting things done.
http://www.shelterboxusa.org/
Burma's dictators are ignorant, but they're not THAT ignorant. They are aware of the principle of heavier-than-air flight and possess an air force. Some people have trouble understanding that fact. The dictators will shoot down planes that enter their air space without permission, and then make up lies about what the planes contain (spies, weapons for rebels, HIV-infected food (yes, I know that's impossible)).
The choice remains either a shooting war or getting the dictatorship to come along.
And I wonder, if we started just dropping food aid at random today, if we are prepared to keep on dropping food aid for a year or more because the rice crop has been wiped out and they cant plant.
Things may have a way of working themselves out. To borrow from Fire in the Lake, if the government completely loses the mandate of heaven by allowing a famine to develop, it may finally collapse. Perhaps only then will a less self interested government form.
I say this not because famine is a preferred means of 'regime change', but to hope something good arises from what may become inevitable.
I wonder how Matt would respond if/when Burma's junta shot down an aid plane. Probably with stunned silence, since, Matt's intention being pure, the thought of force being used against aid planes would cause near fatal cognitive dissonance.
There are three choices here:
1) Try to get the junta to allow aid (unlikely)
2) Use force to get aid in (bloody, likely to anger China. Bad idea all around)
3) Throw hands in air and just give up, deploring the evils of the junta
A tiny fraction of the money and military power we've pi$$ed away in Iraq would no doubt get the junta to change its mind. But AIPAC wouldn't approve.
So let me get this straight then, kafka - you are asking for a land war in Asia, knowing full well that the Chinese govt would be irritated?
Wow.
Well, at present it'd be more of a swamp war than a land war.
Looks like we're pretty much stuck with throwing up our hands and idly denouncing the junta. I suspect even the tiny hope cmholm holds out for SPDC collapsing under the weight of this disaster is likely to be met with disappointment - starving people in the aftermath of a cyclone don't rebel. If it pushes the Burmese population deeper into destitution and misery, it's good for the junta.
So pray, I guess.
I'm sure Burma has a bunch of black marketeers running around. All those Asian countries do.
Let them handle it. Give them the stuff. They'll either sell it to the victims at outrageous prices and make a fortune - but the stuff will get to somebody - or they'll sell it somewhere else where they could make more money.
But the only effective organizations in societies like that are the criminal ones - at least as long as they're not part of the government.
And who knows? Maybe if they got the stuff for free, they'd think getting it to the victims would be an investment in future business.
Or maybe instead of sending relief supplies by air drop, we should air drop a million AK-47's, M-79 grenade launchers, hand grenades, and ammo to the victims - let them take care of the government.
> Burma's dictators are ignorant, but they're
> not THAT ignorant. They are aware of the
> principle of heavier-than-air flight and
> possess an air force.
I am not in any way advocating the Yglesias Airdrop Theory of International Relations, but as far as anyone can tell Myanmar's entire air force, 24 MiG-21 clones from the PRC and 10 MiG-29s repossessed by Russia from Iraq and sold used, is sitting on the ground for lack of spare parts and money to train their pilots.
When even the PRC won't sell you spare parts you are not in a good way.
Cranky
Shooting down an aid plane might be the best thing the Burmese government could do to ensure an armed ground response by the UN.
I want a show of hands. Who here is willing to die in order to feed Burmese, save Darfurians from the black-hatted Janjaweed, restore order and or democracy to Somalia, or save those angelic Kosovars from the Serbs?
Some in the media, Hollywood and other sorts of Ivy League do-gooders are quick to call for American military intervention to save people in Africa or Asia. These elite Americans are also quick to call West Virginia folks racist, slow, or backward for their failure to vote for their cherished Obama.
Yet many of the soldiers forced to save the stricken Burmese, Iraqi, and Darfurian are similiar to the hated mountain folk of W VA or Appalachia.
American elites play fast and loose with the lives of less fortunate Americans.
You can place me on record as not being willing to die for ANYBODY - including the fucking US of A, the Pope, God, or even Angelina Jolie. Not even myself.
Unless you pay me big bucks, of course - then I'll take a certain amount of risk, as long as I can spend the big bucks to minimize that risk.
Iran wants to get rid of Israel? My latest offer! Pay me two billion dollars - and Israel's state, if not the country itself or most of the Jews for that matter, will be gone within 24 months. Guaranteed (well, you don't get the money back, I'm just saying it WILL happen.)
Such a deal I offer you, Ahmadinejad! What's two billion to an oil-rich country like Iran? Peanuts! You'll make it up in no time once Israel is out of the picture!
I mean, how much have you spent supporting Nasrallah? He's done a good job keeping Israel out of Lebanon, but he can't get rid of Israel. Neither can Hamas. I can. I can take the fight right into Israel.
Want the US out of Iraq? Same deal! Two billion dollars plus the assistance of some of your Quds boys and a guarantee of my safety while in Iran or Iraq (not that I won't take my own steps to do that.)
Of course, if you want both operations done, we might have to adjust the time frames, since I can't do everything at once.
Call me. We'll do lunch.
It's worth going to the link just to appreciate the black comedy of many random commentators claiming that Ms Stocking - who, based on her bio, seems to have led more aid operations than I've had hot dinners - doesn't understand the logistics of distributing aid and that she doesn't care about the plight of people affected by such disasters
It's worth going to the link just to appreciate the black comedy of many random commentators claiming that Ms Stocking - who, based on her bio, seems to have led more aid operations than I've had hot dinners - doesn't understand the logistics of distributing aid and that she doesn't care about the plight of people affected by such disasters
Posted by JohnTh
I think a lot of people who want to back military intervention as a style of argument -- rather than an actual argument with weighted factors, points, counterpoints, advantages, disadvantages, and consequences easily and less easily seen -- are actually quite p*ssed off that now with regard to Burma (do most people even realize who huge that country is?) what they wanted to remain loud declarations of what "must" be done are actually being examined rationally by people who have some insight about the topic.
The ideologues both posit themselves as clear speaking moral military intervention revolutionaries and as hard-hearted, value-free technocrats and simple observers, whose dramatically sh*tty pseudo-arguments are somehow never supposed to be taken as evidence against their pithy declarations.
Uh, sorry, but her post is psychotic. A riot might ensue? Much better that they just starve to death hopelessly. Aid might land too far away, or not include everything they need? Or it might land close enough, might include something they need, as opposed to they just starve to death. Wells? Wouldn't some bottled water now be better than simply dying of thirst and infection in the next 10 days? Might not reach the neediest or hardest hit areas? As opposed to reaching NO areas and *everyone* starves to death.
Sorry, her position absolutely, unutterably, certifiably psychotic, batsh*t insane.
It's because of people like this that we watched Serbians murder all the Muslim men in Srebrenica. It's because of people like this that we will now have another Rwanda-style mass-murder to wring our hands about in our little middle-class armchairs.
What a disgrace.
Sorry, q, but Barbara Stocking knows how to save lives better than you do. She's being somewhat circumspect by not saying that these things will happen with 100% certainty. She smartly gives the ONE example of when air dropping worked and explains why it worked. Our experience is that these things she wants to avoid will happen. And no one is saved.
That's the single most important thing to realize: air dropping doesn't save lives. We've tried it. It doesn't work. It just makes people who are wringing their hands feel better. Personally, I'd rather save as many as I can than create circumstances that will make the situation worse.
There really are professionals at humanitarian response. We know what we're doing when we're dealing with the emergency. I'm the first to admit that we don't always know what we're doing in the aftermath, after the situation has stablized. But emergency response we're good at - precisely because we learn our lessons from every new disaster.
Re Cranky - didn't know the planes were grounded. In an emergency, though, they could cannibalize. And I know they had pilots who could fly them in 1991, I saw them.
Not to mention that slow moving cargo planes also can be shot down by ground fire.
Anyway, all the dictatorship has to do is to say they're going to shoot the planes down, and that's it. They won't go in.
Famines in Africa actually do have a strong predictive capacity when it comes to change of government. But it takes a couple of years.
NGO,
"Not the best way" she says. But if it's the *only* way, then you're cool with: "It's too expensive and inefficient. Let's do nothing at all and feel good about the fact that the hand-wringers don't have anything to feel good about." Whatever you're trying diplomatically or otherwise, you can still do that while air-dropping. If it could save 100 people out of those 1.5m are you honestly saying it's better to let them die? Sad. Especially when you think about the fact that we who are safe and comfortable have done absolutely nothing to deserve those prerogatives. We can't eliminate poverty overnight, but in a crisis we could probably save some lives. When that's not worth trying, there's a real problem with priorities. At the worst it would demonstrate to the regime and to the rest of the int'l community sitting on the fence (or, as with Russia and China, in criminal opposition) that this *doesn't* work and pressure *must* be raised; and it would help demonstrate that the West are not simply self-satisfied hypocrites, which is not at all obvious as one Rwanda and Darfur after another flits by. Again, sad.
It's not just me, right? This whole thing sounds like a Burmese Katrina.
Question: Did Bush accept international help? Or are we so maligned that none was offered?
Just adding re Burma's air force that they had and presumably still do have other aircraft besides the imitation Migs. A cargo plane isn't getting through.
Comments closed May 28, 2008.
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Heads in the Sand
We did drop aid on Burma. The junta confiscated it. That's what's got the UN talking humanitarian intervention.
Posted by Mike | May 14, 2008 4:44 PM