Wednesday, January 20, 2010

For further demonstration of why I despise so many government agencies

and the UN, first is this:
Food handouts were shut off Tuesday to thousands of people at a tent city here when the main U.S. aid agency said the Army should not be distributing the packages.

It was not known whether the action reflected a high-level policy decision at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) or confusion in a city where dozens of entities are involved in aid efforts
.
Answer me this: does anyone actually think the hungry give a rats ass if the guy handing them food is in jeans or ACUs?
Jordan said that approval was revoked; water was not included in the USAID decision, so the troops continued to hand out bottles of water. The State Department and USAID did not respond to requests for comment.
Probably because
A: "WE are the State Department, and WE do not take such questions."
B: "I think we have a problem; people are upset and just don't understand why WE have to be in charge of giving out food."
No, Sparky, we don't.

And, at the post Insty did on this idiocy, we have this comment:
For the NGO community, to be seen co-operating with the US military was the kiss of death. NGO co-ordination meetings specifically warned against co-operation with the US military, as opposed to UN agencies. The supposed reason was that they wanted a clear line between the “killers” and those that were “there to help”. They would actually COMPLAIN that the military was out doing things like rehabilitating wells and such, whining that these were things that should be left to the aid agencies. The irony of the fact that we were all sitting in a meeting, DISCUSSING it, while the US military had already been out DOING it, was completely lost on them.

Sounds like it’s same-old, same-old. Nothing but tools, the lot of them
.
And if it were left totally to the UN, people would have been dying of thirst while the UN weenies did studies on how long it should take and how many people would be needed to asses the situation so they could decide what equipment would be needed to rehabilitate the well, " and by the way we want more money."

2 comments:

kahr40 said...

I think this is a simple as with the US military giving out the aid the NGOs ability to devert supplies and such into their own pockets gets severely curtailed. Graft makes the UN go round.

Anonymous said...

kahhr got it in one sentence. And don't forget that the state department has NEVER had ANY use for the military(except when they come in and save state's smarmy asses from some new ignorant stupidity that they have pulled).