USS Clueless              Voyages of a restless mind

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Stardate 20011122.1602 (On Screen): There is nothing so dangerous as a bureaucrat who thinks that you're horning in on his territory; a turf war can achieve a frightful degree of viciousness. It's sad to see it happening among charities, but not really surprising. The charities have, for a long time now, been resentful of the US program to drop individual packets of food from the sky each of which contained enough food to feed one person for one day. At this point we've dropped well in excess of a million of them.

But we made the packets bright yellow, to make them visible. Unfortunately, unexploded cluster bomblets are also yellow, albeit a different shade. And from the beginning such groups as varied as Unicef and Doctors Without Borders condemned the US for the food drops for reasons that never really survived scrutiny, because the real reason was that they objected in principle to the US Military "doing good". That's their turf, you see; you military people are not supposed to cast yourselves as good guys; you're supposed to be vile killers and let us wear the halos.

Now, it seems, there have indeed been a few people who may have been confused. The US intends to change the packaging for the food to a different color, but in the mean time a handful of people (two or three) have been killed by unexploded cluster bomblets that they may have thought were meal packets. So the charities are renewing their call for an end to the food drops. Let's see: a million meals dropped, possibly thousands of lives saved by them, and a couple people killed and a dozen or two wounded as a result. Sounds like a bad idea to me; evidently we should have let all those people starve. (discussion in progress)

Of course, if we hadn't been dropping food, then those agencies would still have been all over us for all the evil starvation we were causing -- which they were anyway. Remember that these are the same groups who were demanding a bombing halt right up until the bombing caused the Taliban to collapse. Their real agenda, besides defending their turf, is to oppose the war irrespective of the secondary harm that stopping the war would cause (like, say, more attacks on US cities).

And, it turns out, they have one more agenda: they have to ingratiate themselves to the people in the countries where they want to operate. If they're seen as part of Western Hegemonic Imperialism™, then they probably couldn't operate. So they are pretty much required to be bitter critics of westen nations and their politics so as to suck up to the locals. Once we understand that, we can listen to them, politely nod our heads -- and then ignore them.