The race to save lives amid Haiti’s chaos

What happened

More than a week after a massive earthquake devastated the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince and much of the surrounding countryside, millions of desperate Haitians still lacked food, water, and medical care. Search-and-rescue teams were engaged in a furious effort to find survivors under crushed houses, schools, and other buildings. More than 100 people were pulled out alive, some after spending five or more days buried beneath the rubble. Officials now estimate that some 200,000 people died in the magnitude 7.0 quake. The U.N. food agency said it had distributed rations to 200,000 people, but that up to 3 million were in dire need of food. Doctors working in hastily erected tent hospitals were overwhelmed by the wounded and short of supplies. Some doctors were sterilizing surgical implements with vodka and performing amputations without anesthesia. “You’re talking Civil War–level care, or close to it,” said retired military physician Jerry Mothershead.

Despite a strong aftershock that rocked the capital midweek, coordination of the relief effort appeared to be improving daily. The U.S. Air Force took control of the Port-au-Prince airport, and nearly 70 relief flights were landing every day. President Obama promised that thousands of U.S. troops would remain in Haiti as long as needed. But as the days passed and vast numbers of Haitians were still awaiting help, anger was mounting. Gangs wielding machetes roamed Port-au-Prince streets devoid of police or soldiers. “Who’s in charge?” asked former Prime Minister Michèle Pierre-Louis. “We don’t feel there is someone organizing all this.”

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What the editorials said

While Haiti’s earthquake was a “natural disaster of massive proportion,” said The Boston Globe, the tragedy has been greatly compounded by human failures. Even before the quake hit, “roads, water systems, and electricity were barely functioning”—the consequence of political ineptitude, intractable poverty, and “erratic” international support. Money is now pouring in, “but there is a difference between emergency aid and development aid.” Only a sustained, long-term international effort can give Haiti any hope of a future.

If only out of self-interest, the U.S. must lead that effort, said the Houston Chronicle. Haiti’s “chronic instability” poses a potential health and security threat to its neighbors, including us. “A country without effective governance is a magnet for drug smugglers and a potential haven for terrorists.” If the U.S. can spend billions on nation-building in Iraq and Afghanistan, “how much more vital is the same process in a country so close to our shores?”

What the columnists said

Watch out, said Bret Stephens in The Wall Street Journal. Here come “the soldiers of do-goodness.” But if history has taught us anything, it’s that paternalistic handouts to Haiti only serve to “foster the very culture of dependence the country desperately needs to break.” Haiti’s immediate humanitarian needs must be met, but after that, Haitians would be better off if we treated them “as people capable of making responsible choices” for themselves.

That’s a nice theory, said Jeffrey Sachs in The Washington Post, but in practice it would lead to unimaginable suffering. Nothing short of a five-year, $10 billion commitment from the U.S. and other rich nations can stave off what is already shaping up as a calamity of historic proportions. “Haiti will suffer a quick death of hunger and disease unless we act, and the United States will suffer a slow and painful moral death unless we respond to the extreme distress of our neighbors.”

Still, we’d be wise to admit that we really “don’t know how to use aid to reduce poverty,” said David Brooks in The New York Times. In recent decades, the world has spent trillions on developing nations, yet it is the countries that have not received much aid, like China, that have seen the most improvement. Why is that? It’s time we face the “thorny issue of culture.” Yes, “we’re all supposed to politely respect each other’s cultures,” but in fact, some “cultures are more progress-resistant than others.” Unless we figure out what it is about Haiti that has given rise to its history of corruption and despair, we’ll be left with “the same old, same old.”