Haiti: Convoy to Nowhere

Seems to me… from looking at the photo set you linked to, what of all of this in Haiti actually demonstrates… is that the US Military is broken from the top down. The top folks can’t work together, can’t talk to each other, and are fighting for their personal top position instead of working together for a solution. How hard is it really to save lives and take stuff to site ‘X’? Why is that so hard? Maybe I am wrong – but what I see here, in this food distribution failure, is that this mess is really all about a top heavy and personality driven over-privileged agency with too much money with no brains. It’s another Katrina but, we can squarely put the blame on the Military leaders and look at the Bush presidency as the empty shelled leader. What does THAT say about how we are REALLY doing in Iraq and Afghanistan? This is BAD!!!

My initial question when the United States began “taking charge” of the Haiti Earthquake Mission was “Why not the United Nations? My second question after viewing images of how things were unfolding was “After the Katrina rescue debacle why the United States?
Looking at the Convoy to Nowhere photos I am utterly amazed of the arrogance of the US media visual machine which attempts to show Haitians as helpless, chaotic, disorganized when in fact the US military and so-called emergency teams show every bit of said behavior.

Nobody has commented about all of the waste we are sending along with the water and food. Instead of setting up kitchens and feeding people, they pass out packaged single person portions. And the bottles of water? Where is all that trash going to end up?

“Where is all that trash going to end up?”
So if your city/town was hit by an earthquake and you had no food or clean water, your biggest concern would be not creating too much garbage? Really?
If there is indeed a distribution problem in Haiti, it’s likely caused by the US trying to work with the horribly inefficient UN. I’ve spent a lot of time overseas around UN missions and a bigger clusterf*ck of an organization you’ll not find.

“Why not the United Nations?”
Becasue they are corrupt and incompetent.

If the effort is done wisely, I’d think that you’d have a two stage process. When aide teams move into an area, they have cases of individual emergency meals and bottled water, which some people can start handing out immediately, while others are setting up the facilities to prepare cooked food, bulk purified water, over a longer time line. Which then keeps people fed for the medium-term, as you rebuild their homes and kitchens, so they can do their own cooking.
I don’t know if this effort is being done this way or not. My point is that the more wasteful but faster aide has its place, as a way of giving time to set up more efficient but slower options.