This page contains links to recent blogs by Lincoln Mitchell
Tagged with: Haiti
It was somehow appropriate that no sooner had President Biden finished a major speech about the American departure from Afghanistan before political crises erupted in two countries much closer to home. Recent events in Cuba and Haiti are unrelated and different from each other, but they are a reminder that regardless of the intentions of any functioning president, the US cannot ignore the rest of the world.
The combination of continued population growth, the rumblings of global climate change and consistently increasing demands for all resources including energy, but also for water and land makes all of us particularly vulnerable to natural disasters like the one we have just witnessed. The tsunami should help demonstrate the import of investing in infrastructure and preparing for contingencies, but even doing these things will not be enough.
The events in Iraq and the relatively quiet response to President Obama’s recent speech on the subject suggest, not surprisingly, that Americans are experiencing a relatively acute case of Iraq fatigue. Few Americans who are not directly involved with the war effort seem interested or concerned about the “end” of the war there, but we probably should be paying more attention. The Obama administration has prioritized the war in Afghanistan as their most important foreign policy concern. Other issues such as Iran’s nuclear potential, new, renewed and failed peace efforts in the Middle East and a spate of natural disasters from Pakistan to Haiti have knocked Iraq out of the forefronts of the consciousness of those Americans who think about foreign policy, while the still battered economy has made foreign policy feel less important to most Americans.
Less than seven months after the Haiti earthquake, two other disasters have received far less global support and attention. The fire and heat related problems in Russia are not on the same scale as Haiti, but Pakistan may yet be of a similar scale. In both cases, the relative lack of international concern and sympathy, while not exactly surprising, is still notable. Neither of these incidents have made it to the front pages of American newspapers; public officials are not calling for helping the people of these two countries; and few ordinary people that do not have family or roots in Pakistan or Russia seem to be very concerned about these disasters.
International assistance following a natural disaster of this sort is not new. Many of the same actors provided support to the victims of the Tsunami in 2004. It may, however, become more common in the next decades. Unusual weather events will likely be one of the first impacts of climate change which will be felt. Although the event in Haiti was an earthquake with no likely connection to climate change, the general pattern of a devastating natural disaster occurring in a country that has already had more than its share of misfortune which will both cause immediate tragedy and perhaps set that country’s development back years may become more common.
Recent comments by Rush Limbaugh, Pat Robertson and now US Senate candidate from California Chuck Devore's communication director regarding assistance to Haiti are so hateful, misguided, myopic and, in the case or Robertson, downright strange, that they obscure the question of what they are trying to accomplish by making these comments. Robertson's comments are extraordinarily insensitive, focusing not on the suffering and desperation of the innocent victims of the Haitian people, but on a belief that the earthquake was a form of supernatural intervention as Satan himself has finally extracted his deathly fee for help in liberating Haiti from France.