Slate ran a very interesting article titled, “Why Did We Focus on Securing Haiti Rather Than Helping Haitians?” We’ve all heard various news reports about how aid was reaching the airport, under US control, but not Haitians. This article talks about that.

We sent in naval ships and 10,000 troops, and the military did what it does best: command and control.
“Troops? Port-au-Prince had been leveled by an earthquake, not a barbarian invasion, but, OK, troops. Maybe they could put down their rifles and, you know, carry stuff, make themselves useful….

“Like a slow-witted, fearful giant, it built a wall around itself, commandeering the Port-au-Prince airport and constructing a mini-Green Zone. As thousands of tons of desperately needed food, water, and medical supplies piled up behind the airport fences–and thousands of corpses piled up outside them…the military’s first priority was to build a ‘structure for distribution’ and ‘to provide security.’
Forget hunger, dehydration, gangrene, septicemia–the real concern was ‘the security situation,’ the possibility of chaos, violence, looting.”

The article talks about how military flights were given priority over planes bearing much-needed relief supplies. That didn’t change until the United Nations intervened.

“Meanwhile, much of the aid that was arriving remained at the airport. Haitians watched American helicopters fly over the capital, commanding and controlling, but no aid at all was being distributed in most of the city….

“Why the paranoid focus on security above saving lives? Clearly, President Obama failed to learn one of the basic lessons taught by Hurricane Katrina: You can’t solve a humanitarian problem by throwing guns at it. Before the president had finished insisting that ‘my national security team understands that I will not put up with any excuses,’ Haiti’s fate was sealed. National security teams prioritize national security, an amorphous and expensive notion that has little to do with keeping Haitian citizens alive.

“This leaves the more disturbing question of why the Obama administration chose to respond as if they were there to confront an insurgency, rather than to clear rubble and distribute antibiotics and MREs.”

I suspect all of this has been solved at this point, and the focus is on saving lives, where it should have been from the beginning, rather than on carrying out a military mission. Maybe this emphasis on security only lasted a couple days. But still.