POST: Obama's Public Diplomacy From Haiti Wears Combat Boots, by Galrahn, USNU Blog, January 19, 2009
Reader Gerry left this link after commenting on my somewhat acidic interpretation of Bret Stephen's truly acidic piece on the disutility of foreign aid. It is a very informative blog post from Galrahn, who appears to be doing a yeoman's effort on Haiti, a subject I have yet to gain any serious traction on due to recent nonstop travel.
Gerry's comment was to the effect that the Haiti response could be a Katrina-like, politically damaging affair for Obama--quite possibly true.
It could also reveal, a la Galrahn's observations, that SOUTHCOM was ill-prepared for this sort of thing.
In both instances, then, we're probably running into an old problem: until the s--t hits a particular fan (e.g., new administration, regional command), the great sorting out of responsibilities does not happen. You almost need the catastrophic failure for the "never-again-on-my-watch" response to kick in. Sad and arguably inexcusable, but I nonetheless suspect this is true here.
As for the observed lack of coordination among the NATO allies, it's hard to come up with a rationalizing excuse there (and that's all these things will be--complete if honest rationalizations of very poor performance that will be hard to swallow after similar failures elsewhere in the system or by the previous administration, because it means that learning has not traveled from one realm to the next and every situation is still--and inexcusably--being treated as a de novo experience).
I mean, one thing that's truly easy to imagine is a disaster occurring in Haiti and the government putting on a complete show of incompetence and then a beleaguered population turning on itself via looting and frequent displays of unspeakable cruelty while--all along--complaining to cameras that the world wasn't doing enough.
More generally, we're once again bumping into the consistent global expectation that America step up and make the effort-of-efforts. This expectation arises when the disaster is on the other side of the world (like the Christmas tsunami) and it's damn near overwhelming when we're talking an impoverished nation off our coast, with whom we share a long history of interventions that have never come closing to fixing anything. When push-comes-to-shove like this in our system, there's DoD and there's everybody else. That's just the reality of extant capabilities.
So we confront the usual boiling-down of blame: the world doesn't have its stuff together to respond, so who's to blame? The U.S., of course. The U.S. is naturally boiled down to the US Government, and then to DoD, and finally poor, little, totally under-resourced-for-this-event Southern Command. This process is both fair enough and completely unfair, but it's the nature of the beast: you own the world's biggest military and people expect things, especially when your currency remains the de facto world reserve currency and thus many people in this world understand that that status effectively underwrites your unique capacity in this regard. As with everything in life, people want something for their money.
Galrahn's point about nobody seeming to know who is Obama's point man on the process is easily the most damaging. It'll also make Secretary Clinton look bad, because she's towed the administration line (completely unrealistic, in my mind) that the answer to past poor performance is to bulk up State and make it the clear leadership source across the system (dream on). Defense, specifically Gates, goes along with this charade in hopes that eventually it will come to pass, and because the Pentagon fears getting stuck with this whole package for the long term. In the short run (next decade or so), the DoD knows this will be the case (Mullen has said so in public), because the military knows exactly how long it takes for serious administrative capacity to arise in something like a command (CENTCOM, for example, took about 15 years to get its identity together).
The problem with Gates' projection (summed up by his "we need to get better ourselves in the short run while pushing for State's eventual ascendancy"--defensible if bureaucratically naive from a guy who is anything but, judging by his career) is that near-term failures will intervene to force an even greater effort from DoD in the absence of the fabled Goldwater-Nichols solution that every pundit and his brother dreams about (and I say, keep on keeping-on because G-N was an intra-department affair and thus cannot be replicated easily on a USG-wide level).
As I catch up to events (and please remember I have day job responsibilities that takes precedence over blogging, which remains a fun sideline and simply a way to put all my analytic notes in a searchable database, but it ain't never going to be something I spend hours and hours on daily), my initial impressions are unsurprising for any reader of this blog:
1) Haiti is a recurring problem that we have not fixed in the past, so no surprise its own governmental response to the disaster was beyond pathetic. Remember, this is the third major intervention we've made since the Cold War's end, and since we've begged off any lengthy SysAdmin-like effort and usually apply the same old, same old aid and humanitarian relief, why should we expect anything to improve?
2) Haiti may well become, because of the surprising loss of American lives (who knew so many Americans were down there?), a political System Perturbation of the sort I've often hypothesized about when asked by audiences, "What will it take for your Department of Everything Else to finally come about?" My response has always been, "Absent some visionary political leadership, I think it'll take another serious screw-up--one of undeniable proportions and attached blame." Until this disaster came about, my default position was that Afghanistan itself might qualify, but because there's so many other things to blame there, I wasn't optimistic it would qualify. Better to have something big and clarifying like Haiti come along--sad to say. So we'll see what happens in terms of muckraking journalism, government investigations, reform efforts and the like. My gut says the fallout will be bad, and the cynic in me says that it may be a contributing factor to Obama's fall from power in 2012, the problem there being nothing will get done prior to his departure in that scenario and then we'll simply set ourselves up for the next who-could-have-foreseen-this-disaster? scenario with the next president.
3) Yes, there will always be disasters inside the Gap, where one-third of humanity lives. In these countries, disasters are almost "mega" in size due to the inability of the local government to deal with the scale (meanwhile, on a global scale and thanks to globalization's spread, disasters get more costly in money but the loss of lives has dropped well over 90% over the last century--despite all the hypology to the contrary [and there is plenty that will receive prominent treatment now]). Disasters like this inside the Core rarely reach this level of incompetence--that's why we all found Katrina so stunning. What does this disaster tell us about globalization, development, the future, and what not? It tells us that it sucks to be impoverished and disconnected--not exactly a new idea. Should we flood the place with aid to "fix" that problem? There you consult the record, as Stephens did in his column and as development guru Bill Easterly has done masterfully (see his "White Man's Burden" book). What you can undeniably take away from this reality is that the Core's requirement for SysAdmin work won't be going away any time soon and that there's always another streetcar coming down the tracks in this regard.
4) But the notion, proclaimed by Obama on the cover of Newsweek, that "Haiti matters" is somewhat of a cruel joke. Haiti is a sad situation, to which we must all respond as we can, but it does not matter because it remains such a disconnected place. When a connected place suffers disaster, it matters plenty (like New Orleans because of the energy and trade flows that run through it), so the response is naturally prioritized and pursued with serious vigor, and then the private-sector effort that follows on those heels is likewise substantial, because there's a compelling reason to rebuild the place enough to reassemble sufficiently the old levels of connectivity (with the question of "How many people should be living there" a different subject--a la NOLA). But when the place is a connectivity backwater or deadzone, the system simply supplies the relief, piles on enough follow-on aid to assuage its conscience (because there are ALWAYS competing needs--like when a relative of mine unhelpfully says Vonne and I should consider switching our adoption efforts from Ethiopia to Haiti due to the disaster and I point out that Ethiopia has an orphan population equal to half of Haiti's total population, plus an ongoing famine), and then the status quo returns, leaving the place as vulnerable for the next disaster as it was for the last one. So yes, Haiti may matter to Obama's political future, and it certainly matters to the people there and anyone with loved ones there, but in the grand scheme of things, Haiti's current woes do not matter, because, if they did, this disaster never would have been allowed to unfold to this degree (e.g., all those rickety houses that simply collapsed) because relevant parties would have made the effort a priori to protect their connectivity assets (this important port, that important supply chain point, etc.). Make all the arguments you want about "what this says about us as humans/Americans/wealthier neighbors/good Christians" and the like, but once the smoke clears and our attention is inevitably diverted elsewhere, Haiti will go back to being Haiti--meaning unimportant to the global economy and the real money with the power to "fix" it. And until that situation changes, Haiti will not matter--save for the blame game, which, as I noted above, may actually result in some good if we collectively perceive this failure as too unbearable to ignore and thus worthy of some serious reform.
5) Finally, this whole debacle, as it shapes up, reminds me of the brief conversation I had with Rudy Guiliani when I, along with three other foreign policy types, spent an afternoon session with him regarding his national security ideas for his presidential campaign. During an aside, he made a point of showing me his copy of "Pentagon's New Map," where almost every page had 10-20 sentences underlined (the guy really devours a book, it seems), and so I queried him, having just given him "Blueprint" (with its proposal for a Department of Everything Else) why he was so interested in the SysAdmin concept (note that his Foreign Affairs article outlining his thinking on foreign policy included a bit about creating a new federal agency devoted to SysAdmin-like efforts). His reply was supremely pragmatic and ran along these lines (I paraphrase very loosely here many months later): "Look, I figure that I'll inevitably get stuck with some situation like this, and when it happens, after our previous failures, everyone will say, 'Why didn't you do something in anticipation, knowing what you knew?' So I figure, better to make the effort and be ready rather than get stuck with the blame later on." That's a perfectly fine answer, but it represents a line of thinking that hasn't yet made it to the top of our political system. We know what the logical solution is, but we're unwilling to make the effort, even as we know our current set-up sucks and will fail us time and again.
So maybe Haiti will result in some good--if not for Haitians over the long run.
But, as always, my views must be discounted with the realization that I naively believe in globalization's benefits and inexorable advance, recognizing, as I do, that people the world over like the notion of rising incomes and what they bring, and that nobody has ever advanced themselves economically by walling themselves off (despite the vast and sheer idiocy of the isolationists/anti-globalization types barking most loudly now).
Then again, stupid is as stupid does, so the cynic in me expects more backward movement than forward, given the times. Why improve our capacity or make a serious effort to rehab Haiti when we can use this disaster to disable Obama over his remaining three years! Oh partisan joy!
That way we can replay this sad story all over again in a few years from now, our self-righteousness undimmed by memory.
Thursday, January 21, 2010 at 11:37PM 
