Give
Me a Break on the Giving
By Alan Nathan
FrontPageMagazine.com | January 11, 2005
Progressives
both at home and abroad strangely chastise the US
for its parsimonious aid to the tsunami victims in
Southeast Asia. I’m hard pressed to entertain
a more archetypal representation of wanting math
skills than those applied to this rationale. Once
you compute all the cash, material and military infrastructure
support complete with two aircraft carrier groups,
personnel and 60+ helicopters, no country tops our
donations in the aggregate. (And none of this includes
the 350 million in private donations.) Equally misguided
is the popular criticism holding that we’re
the only country that tosses in our military when
totaling its contributions. Perhaps the reason we’re
the only ones tossing it in is that we’re the
only ones with a military to toss. What
should be at issue is our collective international state of denial when
prioritizing our responses to catastrophic events.
The
body count from the tsunami disaster appears to be
closing in on 160,000 and has evoked record-setting
dollars in aid. However, the 700,000 slaughtered
in Rwanda received only lipservice regret. The 1.3
million butchered by Saddam Hussein barely gets acknowledged.
Question: Why does an event equaling 8% of these
two genocidal death tolls receive so much more money
and 90 times the press?
By
way of a reference to percentage of GDP dollars given
to the Tsunami Victims that excluded our cost of
military distribution, UN Emergency Relief Coordinator
Jan Egeland singled out the United States as stingy.
Isn’t it funny how the UN gets so puffed up
with pride over the 4 billion dollars in aid they’re
helping to coordinate for Southeast Asia while the
21 billion they lost to Hussein through The Oil For
Food Program is treated as trivial? We’d have
to raise 5 times more for these Tsunami survivors
before we’d equal what the UN has already given
to the now-jailed
barbarian.
In
short, we seem more preoccupied with support that
follows the crises we cannot control instead of giving
it before the ones we can.
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