#38 just a small point but it was the US military, with the help of the Aussie and Kiwi military, who provided the excellent initial response to the tsunami.

They were in there preventing secondary disasters such as disease, famine, thirst, etc, while Jan Egeland was whingeing about getting more money for the UN.

Yes. We (Aust) had virtually every helicopter we own and half our navy there within a couple of days. The immediate problem was ferrying in fresh water, engineers to repair roads, providing temporary housing, fix water infrastructure, etc. Donating money to be spent weeks or months down the track wouldn’t have helped with any of that, and it saved thousands of lives. Later aid was valuable in its own way, but I was monumentally pissed off at the time by Jan Egeland’s comment – he refused to recognise the cost of military contributions when he made his “stingy” claim – while his organisation took weeks to even establish a presence. The US contribution was huge and much appreciated, we and NZ just wouldn’t have had the capacity on our own. Don’t forget India either, they were there in the very early stages too, despite having been hit pretty hard by the tsunami themselves.

#42 JR – I don’t have any doubt about your good intentions or those of Jan Egeland for that matter, but you can’t blame all the problems with slow response, ineffective efforts, etc on the member states. The UN bureaucracy is hopeless at dealing with emergency relief. And Egeland was definitely wrong to call the US stingy. How much of the cost of a carrier battle group would you like charged to the UN? You can say they had it anyway for other reasons, but what matters in this sort of emergency is – do you have the asset available or not? Only 4 countries were able to respond in time (all democracies), then the UN parachuted in a few weeks later and tried to take over the operation from the top. Sorry, no – we were doing fine without an extra layer of management to “coordinate the relief effort”.