Commentary—

America Shouldn’t Be Above Accepting Aid

 By Colonel Daniel M. Smith (US Army Ret)

It was a nine-word sentence tacked onto the end of a paragraph of a USA Today story about foreign aid from 70 countries flowing into the United States for Hurricane Katrina sufferers.

But it spoke volumes: “Among them was Bangladesh, which Monday pledged $1 million.”

Intriguingly, the sentence was not in the four paragraphs describing the contributions from abroad: half a million packaged meals from Britain, 25 tons of food from Germany, military ready-to-eat meals from Italy, tents and blankets from France, helicopters from Canada and Singapore, and the loan of two Greek-registered cruise ships as temporary housing for evacuees. Even Cuba, whose offer of 1,500 doctors and a field hospital has been met with stony silence from the State Department, was clustered with other named donors.

The juxtaposition of “US” and “contributing nations” with “evacuees” and “donors” also is instructive. Since the Marshall Plan, refugees or evacuees have always referred to a “them” living (or trying to live) in some foreign country. Similarly, “donor” is the category in which one always found the United States — while countries like Bangladesh were in the list titled “donee,” “recipient,” or an equivalent. The December 26, 2004, tsunami that struck Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, Bangladesh, and Thailand fell right into this pattern.

Just as September 11, 2001, inverted the general trend of US reactions to manmade disasters such as genocide, Katrina inverted the experience of the last 60 years of US involvement with responses to natural disasters. Maybe that’s why, in each case, the US reaction to offers of aid seemed so ungrateful.

Except for punishing the 9/11 perpetrators, the Bush White House rejected help from abroad after all. Pakistan became the principal intermediary between Washington and the Taliban. The UN Security Council condemned the attacks and passed a resolution calling on all countries to take sweeping action against terrorism. Other nations were pressed to locate and freeze all monetary assets belonging to terror organizations.

The most concrete offer accepted by the United States came as a result of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) invoking Article 5 of its charter. This says, “an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all,” and cites the right of self-defense provided in Article 51 of the UN Charter. On October 9, 2001, one day after the US attacked Afghanistan for refusing to arrest or expel Osama bin Laden, NATO dispatched five Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) planes to patrol US airspace, replacing US AWACS sent to the Afghanistan theater of operations.

Now, four years on, the administration faces intensifying combat in Afghanistan and an unexpectedly long, lethal occupation of Iraq. Over this period, Mr Bush has accentuated, even relished, his chosen self-image of warrior-president able to make events conform to his world vision. Yet the purpose of war is to kill and destroy until the enemy submits or is annihilated. Katrina inverted this image and laid bare its true impotence. The US vision stands exposed as hollow ideology, more concerned with protecting wealth than protecting the welfare of the country against nature’s destructive fury.

The United States is at a tipping point. Hurricane Katrina offers a chance for the nation to bring US troops and equipment home, to transition from destruction to construction, from war to peace, from isolation and distrust to renewed leadership and cooperation. Despite the international ill will and divisiveness generated by the invasion and continuing occupation of Iraq, the US response to the tsunami earned back much of the good will that the US public always assumes is theirs almost as a birthright.

But goodwill is a two-way street that involves cooperation to avoid gridlock. It cannot be accepted unless offered, and if always rejected, it will cease to be offered. Either way, the veneer of diplomacy grows thin and susceptible to being pierced by discord and war.

The world is offering, Mr President. The ball is in your court.

(Colonel Daniel M. Smith (Ret), a West Point graduate and Vietnam veteran, is the Senior Fellow for Military Affairs at the Friend Committee on National Legislation. FCNL is a Quaker-based public interest lobby founded in 1943 and headquartered in Washington, D.C.)