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| Southeast Asia |
| US military seeking quick exit from tsunami relief: Wolfowitz |
| 2005-01-15 |
| The United States wants to scale down its military's Asian tsunami relief operations and hand the tasks over to countries affected by the crisis, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said. "We'd like to be out of this business as soon as we responsibly can," Wolfowitz told reporters in Bangkok before flying to Thailand's Utapao military airbase which serves as the headquarters for regional relief operations. "The US military has a lot of other work to do," he added. "As soon as our military folks can pass these responsibilities on to other organizations, well, we will," he said without providing a time frame. But Wolfowitz said the ultimate goal remained the alleviation of suffering and the provision of relief supplies to those affected by what he described as a "staggering" disaster. He also praised the unprecedented worldwide relief effort which has already reached into the billions of dollars. The US military was eager to begin a transitional phase that could see it hand much of its work over to governments, other militaries, non-governmental organisations and aid agencies, Wolfowitz said. "My sense is already their role in Thailand is leveling off if not decreasing," he said of the US military. Prior to his Thursday departure to the region, Wolfowitz told reporters he hoped the US military would be finished by the end of March, added it was no surprise Indonesia was sensitive to the foreign military presence. The deputy to US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld held talks in Bangkok with Thai Defense Minister Sumpan Boonyanun before visiting Utapao air base and then traveling on to Indonesia. US embassy officials in Bangkok said he had plans to visit Indonesia's catastrophically hit Aceh province, where most of the 163,000 people died in the disaster. Indonesia said recently it would impose a deadline of the end of March for the withdrawal of foreign troops providing relief assistance in Aceh. The US State Department has said Indonesian Vice President Yusuf Kalla clarified Friday with the American envoy in Jakarta that no fixed time limit would be imposed on foreign troops and that three months was only an estimate. But US marines delivering aid to survivors were forced to scale back their presence on shore and move to ships to address sensitivities in Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim nation. Wolfowitz said he felt Jakarta was not setting deadlines so much as "setting goals and expressing their own desire to take a responsibility in their own country as quickly as possible." "We applaud that," he said. Wolfowitz, a former US ambassador to Indonesia, was to meet Saturday with officials there in the course of his travels through the region. Armed forces from around the world, including Australia, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, France and the United States, have been providing assistance in Aceh in the wake of the December 26 disaster. Vice Admiral Victor Guillory, deputy commander of the US military's relief operations, said there were now 15,000 US military personnel in the region taking part in relief efforts, most of them aboard 24 US naval vessels and one coast guard ship. The latest to arrive is the USS Fort McHenry, a landing ship dock carrying four CH-46 medium lift helicopters and 400 marines and engineers from Okinawa, he said. The United States has committed at least 92 million dollars of the 350 million it pledged for the recovery from the disaster, a US Agency for International Development official said. |
| Posted by:tipper |
| #2 Without the US and Aussie Militaries, this would've been several magnitudes more horrific, thus qualifying as a typical UN horror show of ineptitude and corruption. Assuming that the UN will take over once the US and AUS military personnel finish their work, any contrasts (and there will likely be some) in effectiveness and organization will become apparent soon enough. |
| Posted by: Bomb-a-rama 2005-01-15 4:51:00 PM |
| #1 The spin in the title is typical Yahoo (in the South, this is pronounced yay-hoo - apropos for Yahoo News). Without the US and Aussie Militaries, this would've been several magnitudes more horrific, thus qualifying as a typical UN horror show of ineptitude and corruption. Though blatantly and obviously unappreciated - the most obvious apparent priority of the UN is taking credit, posturing, and pretense - the US & Aussie Militaries will withdraw and go back to doing what they actually should be doing as soon as the whores have played this drama for all it's worth and allowed competent orgs such as USAid, et al, to find substitute equipment and manpower to execute a program of useful aid to the victims without the military's amazing assistance. Under UN "auspicies", of course. None of this has got anything to do with Wolfie or neo-cons (the obvious inference), or any other LLL Socialist MultiCulti Bogeyman. Q.E.D. |
| Posted by: .com 2005-01-15 2:55:56 PM |