Most people don’t know what the Southern Command does, other than the drug war garbage, but they respond to all of the hurricanes, so they have had a lot of relief experience. The big problem is that while a lot of bi-lingual [English-Spanish] people are available to SoCom, they have a real shortage of French or Creole. Frankly, Canada would have been a better choice, but they don’t have the resources.

I’ll be dealing with why the US is doing what it’s doing in the next part, and it boils down to they were asked to do it.

The guys in SoCom are very aware of US-Haiti relations and how potently touchy they are. The Marines are especially at a disadvantage working in Haiti because of history. The US military isn’t guarding anything they weren’t asked to guard by either the Haitians or the UN. They have done everything they can to avoid any security role.

So far, the direction is repairs to the infrastructure, and that requires men and machines. They can’t stay long because of other commitments, principally in Afghanistan, so they need to do a lot in a short time frame.

The Tsunami is comparable in the loss of life, but the infrastructure of the country wasn’t wiped out as occurred in Port au Prince. That’s a major difference. Indonesia still had resources available from outside the affected area to bring into Aceh. Too much of Haiti’s resources were concentrated in Port au Prince.

The real question should be – what in hell has Haiti got that the US would want? We have plenty of poor and unemployed people in the US, so we don’t need any more, and that’s the main resource of Haiti.

I confess to wondering why that same charge wasn’t raised during the Christmas tsunamis back in 2004 when Naval carrier groups and Marine MEU’s were “invading” various countries around the Indian Ocean, but I am – or so I am told – insufficiently sophisticated…