“Offering aid to Haiti, Marines extend stay: U.S. troops have already airlifted 100,000 pounds of food, water,” by wire services, USA Today, 1 June, p. 4A.
We’ve been going to Haiti for about a century now—roughly every decade or so. This time it’s almost 2k Marines doing the HA/DR, or the Humanitarian Assistance/Disaster Relief response. “Since arriving, Marines have cleared garbage, refurbished schools, donated notebooks and pencils and played soccer with street gangs.”
What’s the big difference between this effort and much of the work in Iraq? There’s simply no combat component. Many times the Sys Admin response features no real shooting of any note, and sometimes—like in Iraq since May 2003—it features quite a bit. But either way, the baseline work is largely the same.
And, as is the norm, the UN troops are later and getting later. The UN promised 8k, and so far only a few dozen have shown up. So the Marines hang around longer than expected.
You say, how much can that matter? You’d be surprised how few of the 170k Marines in uniform can actually put their boots on the ground overseas at any one time, so every effort counts in the grand scheme of things when an Iraq is sucking so many resources right now.
But no matter what big fights we choose to wage, the Sys Admin work goes on and on and on and on. Thirty-five coups in 200 years in Haiti. We don’t “break” Haiti, nor do we “fix it,” and that’s why it will remain inside the Gap until further notice—and effort.
All of the Marines, from Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, will be heading to Iraq next.
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