Washington's "humanitarian" hypocrisy

Lee Sustar argues that the U.S. government
has different standards for declaring a
humanitarian disaster--or determining
if its victims get help.

A DEVASTATING storm with winds in excess of 100 miles per hour sweeps in from the sea through a river delta region, leaving death and homelessness in its wake.

The impact is made far worse by the government's failure to have taken even elementary precautions or evacuated the population in a timely way. The nation's powerful military, with troops stationed nearby, does almost nothing to help, despite scenes of helpless survivors broadcast around the world.

Offers of assistance from neighboring countries are spurned by the incompetent leadership cabal in the capital, because the government is more concerned with projecting an image of self-sufficiency and conducting public relations than helping the suffering victims.

That was the shameful federal response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005--and it should be kept in mind if you hear White House officials criticizing the military junta in Myanmar for its failure to prepare for, or recover from, Cyclone Nargis, which has left an estimated 100,000 dead and hundreds of thousands homeless.

First Lady Laura Bush weighed in on the crisis at a rare news conference, declaring, "We already know that they are very inept"--an apt description of her husband's response to Katrina.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told reporters, "What remains is for the Burmese [today called "Myanmar" by the country's military regime] government to allow the international community to help its people...It's not a matter of politics. It's a matter of a humanitarian crisis."

Obviously, Rice is correct that there is a humanitarian crisis. The repressive dictatorship in Myanmar, which shot dead scores of people to crush protests over rising food prices last fall, bears responsibility for much of the death toll. After failing to warn the population of the threat, it has been unable to provide food and shelter for those affected and unwilling to allow relief agencies to distribute the crisis.

Last weekend, the regime even went ahead with a national referendum designed to solidify its power--while survivors of the cyclone were still scrambling to put their lives back together.

But Rice and the U.S. political elite are utterly hypocritical in declaring that politics isn't involved in Washington's attempt to pressure Myanmar to accept aid. Where the U.S. is concerned, it's politics that determine whether people are "innocent victims" of repressive regimes, or populations whose lives are expendable if they get in the way of imperial aims.

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THUS, EVEN as U.S. diplomats denounced the Myanmar junta for allowing innocent people to suffer and die for lack of aid, the U.S. military and its Iraqi government pawns were barricading, bombing and starving Baghdad's Sadr City neighborhood.

According to CNN, "Weeks of fighting in Baghdad's Sadr City neighborhood have destroyed the main market and isolated civilians from supplies of food and water, the International Committee of the Red Cross warned. In addition, several hospitals in the predominantly Shiite neighborhood have run out of basic medical supplies, including anesthesia and dressings, the Red Cross said."

McClatchy Newspaper correspondents described a U.S. rocket attack that hit next door to a hospital in Sadr City on May 3: "A hospital official said that the explosion shattered all the windows and sent many doctors running from the building, leaving the emergency ward without enough personnel to deal with injury victims. Television footage showed several ambulances with shattered windows and hospital staff racing through corridors with bleeding victims strapped to gurneys."

The report noted that "the U.S. military is facing growing criticism over what residents describe as mounting civilian casualties in Sadr City, a densely populated slum of some 2.5 million people, which has seen heavy clashes over the past six weeks between U.S. and Iraqi forces and militiamen loyal to the hard-line Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr."

Moreover, while the U.S. condemns the Myanmar generals for interfering with humanitarian aid to a starving population, the U.S. fully backs Israel's criminal blockade of the Gaza Strip.

John Ging, director of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) in Gaza, described the situation April 30 in Britain's House of Commons:

Today, there is no solid waste collection in over 50 percent of the municipalities in Gaza, as there is no fuel for the rubbish trucks. Sixty thousand cubic meters of raw and partially treated sewage is pumped out to sea every day, again simply because the treatment plants have run out of fuel...The Costal Water Utility now reports that because of the regular power cuts and a lack of diesel for back-up generators, 30 percent of Gazans have running water for only four to eight hours per week, 40 percent once every four days and the remaining 30 percent every other day...

The economy has also collapsed as no raw materials for manufacturing or construction have been allowed into Gaza since June 2007. This has resulted in almost 80,000 people losing the dignity of work, bringing the number now queuing for UN food handouts to over 1 million...

All too often, solutions to the most pressing, basic and obvious humanitarian needs, if delivered at all, are delivered late and only after the inevitable crisis occurs. Ninety percent of Gaza's 3,900 industrial companies have closed since June 2007, resulting in 80 percent of Gazans now living below the poverty line.

Certainly, anyone with a shred of decency wants to see all necessary humanitarian aid to Myanmar delivered as quickly as possible. But do the residents of Gaza or Sadr City deserve any less?

No one should be under any illusions about the "humanitarian" aims of the U.S., which is only interested in dispensing aid if it furthers the reach of U.S. power. The words of revolutionary journalist John Reed, describing U.S. offers of food aid to impoverished countries following the First World War, still ring true today:

Uncle Sam is not one ever to give anybody something for nothing. He comes along with a sack stuffed with straw in one hand and a whip in the other. Whoever takes Uncle Sam's promises at their face value will find himself obliged to pay for them with blood and sweat.