September 1, 2005

  • I've been wrong before:

     "In response to the official offer regarding the
sending of an Emergencies Situation Ministry plane with rescuers and a
helicopter on board, the USA, through the National Security Council,
made several confirmations within a day of the inexpediency of such a
move," Russian Ambassador to the United States Yuri Ushakov told
reporters on Wednesday evening. 
     "The Embassy was told that federal authorities and
specialized services have all the necessary means and equipment to
conduct relief works in the disaster area," Ushakov said. 
     However, the USA noted that it would consider the Russian proposal, if  need be. 
     Earlier, director of the international department
of the Russian Emergency Situations Ministry Yuri Brazhnikov offered
head of the U.S. federal emergency management agency Michael Brown to
send rescue teams and relief supplies, as well as two or three experts
to coordinate the operation with American colleagues.

    Lemme get this straight....the N.O. mayor has pulled the police - about 1500 officers - off of search-and-rescue so as to keep the looters at bay, but we're handling the crisis without outside aid being necessary?

    I've also read of England offering to send people to help, only to be told "Thanks, but no thanks."

    What idiot is making such chuckleheaded decisions??? 

Comments (9)

  • Because we have the world's largest economy and 250 million people. Those cops who were pulled off search and rescue are going to be made up for by other Americans. By the time you got Russians or Brits mobilized and over here, how many Americans could you have gotten mobilized?

    I'm all for kind offers of help, but a country this size, with this amount of wealth, doesn't need a few people flying in here and there to help. There really ARE enough American cops, guardsmen, what have you, who can get up and runnning faster than people from thousands of miles away with no familiarity with the landscape, language, or culture.

  • Canada's not thousands of miles away, though. They speak English. They've got helicopters. They can whisk people off roofs with panache and pizzazz, I expect.

    I dunno. Seems prideful to me. "We're AMERICANS.....we don't need help, we only give it."

    Allowing others to help is usually a good thing, IMO.

  • It doesn't seem prideful to me, only practical. It's not "we don't need help, ain't we great," but "uh, thanks, we appreciate the thought, but, we've already got twenty-five times what you could send us ready to go, and if we needed that other 4%, we could have it ready as fast as you could anyway, because we're already here. Really, we do appreciate it, but it's not necessary." It just doesn't seem to make sense to ask Canada et al to leave themselves less prepared for their own situations, to give us help that we really don't need because we already do have the manpower and equipment. It hardly bears pointing out that almost anywhere in the US is closer to NOLA than anywhere in Canada. I'd have to look at a map, but I'm pretty sure Canada IS thousands of miles from the Gulf of Mexico.

  • BTW, allowing others to help is a good thing when you need help more than they need to tend to their own affairs. I can't imagine, though, asking one of the struggling moms of lots of little kids in my church to provide meals for my family in event of a family illness, if my own relatives told me I could have an unlimited budget for takeout meals and did all my housework for me at the same time. OTOH, if it were genuinely helpful to me over and above the help I was already receiving, I'd be glad to allow the young mom to help. That's the comparable situation -- others ARE helping -- other Americans have been and are going to be helping, and there are plenty of Americans and plenty of American dollars to help. Why is it morally or practically necessary not just to have others help, but to have "other-others" help?

  • If they're having to decide between controlling looting and rescuing people, this does not qualify as having everything under control. IMO.

    If the situation in New Orleans (never mind Biloxi, which is having similar troubles) is "out of control" as the authorities are publicly saying it is, largely due to a lack of manpower, then I'm not grasping your point that we don't need and can't use outside help.

  • It is due to a current lack of manpower in Biloxi and NO, not a chronic lack of manpower in the United States. I mean, seriously, do we REALLY have a lack of manpower in the US? And if we don't have sufficient manpower in all of the US, we're fried no matter what Canada or anybody else does.

    I don't recall ever saying "everything is under control," just that the resources are all available within the US, and it's not really necessary (and doesn't seem even practical to me) to call in help from outside our borders. The resources just have to be GOTTEN there, which situation is not reduced by then proposing that we bring in the resources from 2000 miles away instead of 500, using people who are not really terribly familiar with the dynamics of hurricane relief.

  • From what I've read, if sufficient manpower is pulled from the other states, this will leave parts of the rest of the country insufficiently protected. You're right that technically there ARE "enough" people to do the job, but there are not enough people to do the job on the coast while simultaneously doing their job at home.

    The war in Iraq has snabbled heaps of National Guardsmen who would normally be available to help in LA and MS.

    We're calling up reservists and I suppose that's okay, but surely even THAT takes time, while there are military and police in other countries who could be here within a day or two. Well, they'd be here NOW if we'd accepted their help when originally offered.

  • But wait, why could cops from Toronto be there in a day or two, but cops from New York couldn't? Comparing cops to reservists is apples and oranges. If it takes time to call up reservists, then it takes time to mobilize Canadian troops. If cops from Toronto can be there tomorrow, then cops from New York could be as well.

    And why is it okay to leave Montreal insufficiently protected, but not Dallas? What am I missing? Are there lots of "extra" Montreal police who just sit around waiting to be sent to help out at disasters in other countries? Or would pulling police out of Montreal have the same effect on Montreal, that that pulling police out of Dallas would have on Dallas?

  • And yes, the war has taken up lots of Guardsmen, but surely unless there is suddenly an earthquake somewhere within the next couple of weeks, Guardsmen could be spared from other parts of the country to go to the Gulf of Mexico. The chance that they'd actually be needed anywhere else for the time they could be used on the Gulf Coast is extremely small.

    I still don't see the benefit of bringing in people from outside the country, unless there really were not enough people, resources, and money in all of the United States to do what needs to be done. Time is just not a factor; if it takes X group of Canadians X amount of time to get there (not even considering how long it would take Russians to get there) then it would not take more than X time for a comparable group of Americans to get there. I'm not suggesting we send in the Hawaii National Guard.

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