If not this, what? If not now, when? If not in Wigan, where? If not out of ignorance, why? If not while playing a one-string fiddle, how?
Strangely[1], as the prospects for Decent Left politics ever actually being enacted recede, the demands become ever more expansionary. Cf. Previously in Decent politics, the "responsibility to protect" has expanded from a criterion of "imminent humanitarian disaster" (Rwanda) to "ongoing humanitarian abuses" (Iraq), to "refusal to allow humanitarian aid to be distributed" (Burma). And now, we have this, where intervention is demanded in respect of a country which does co-operate with aid agencies, but where a journalist not living in the country believes, on the basis of anecdotal evidence, that the UN World Food Programme (which has averted two famines in Zimbabwe in the last ten years) is not doing its job.
I suppose I should recognise, however, that Michael Holman is not fully in the Eustonian tradition, as he does in fact have a practical proposal. Sadly, that proposal is for air-drops out of the back of Hercules transports, the least efficient and most dangerous method of aid distribution ever invented (sometimes, as in remote parts of Ethiopia, it's all you can do, but that's not true of Zimbabwe). As a substitute for a proper NGO relief effort, the numbers don't add up. All this suggestion really achieves is to make it clear that that mangled Hillel/Primo Levi quotation is a ripe candidate for addition to the category "rhetorical questions which invite blunt literal answers".
[1]Or at least, not strangely at all; I think it was Matthew Yglesias who noted in the context of all the belligerent gobshites demanding NATO membership for Georgia[2] that whole point of this particular piece of posturing was that it involved making an implicit threat (of war with Russia) that everyone, including the people making it, knew was impossible to carry out.
[2]("NATO Membership For All" is the title of my forthcoming Oliver Kamm/Melanie Phillips mashup album)
I would have thought that, if nothing else, the success of Antony Beevor's "Stalingrad" would have got into the public mind the difficulty of trying to feed a very large number of people by airlift. Leaving aside the inefficiency and the danger, which you are entirely right to mention, it's all about the arithmetic: how many people do you need to feed? How many man-days of food can a single Herc carry? How many Hercs do you have, what is their average availability, and how far do they have to fly in each sortie? This really is back of the envelope stuff. (Two to five million, roughly eight thousand, up to fifty in the RAF, sixty per cent or so, and round-trip from Botswana of at least five hours including cycle time at the Botswana end, so effectively two sorties per day - you don't want to be doing low-level airdrops at night. If you devoted the entire RAF fleet to feeding Zimbabweans, the absolute theoretical maximum would be about a tenth of what you need to feed. Computer says NO.)
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately, I suspect the memory of the Berliner Luftbrucke clouds some people's judgment. I would suspect that the Decents are specially subject to this due to their romanticisation of the cold war.
ReplyDeleteThis is of course a case of "well, if you make it a strategic national priority for the three main western powers, of course there's a chance!"
See also that Zimbabwe is a bigger place than the combined districts of Charlottenburg, Wilmersdorf, Schoneberg, Lichterfelde, Mariendorf and HaveigotthelotyetBrian, and we don't have the entirety of the USAF, RAF, and ADLA transport fleets at their historic peak numbers available.
And there's a railway.
also that the Berlin airlift did involve landing the aeroplanes and unloading them in the normal manner, rather than flying a hundred feet up at near stall speed then chucking the food out of the back.
ReplyDeleteTrue, dd - that wouldn't cut down on capacity too much, but it would certainly cause a lot of spoilage.
ReplyDeleteDoes the USAF have enough Hercs to do it? Maybe if they chucked in the C-5 and C-17 fleets. You can do LAPES out the back of a C-5, so airdrops of food should be possible. But even so, with all due respect to the Botswanan Air Force, you can't stage a thousand heavy-lift sorties a day out of Molepolele Air Base, I should think.
Madness.
The cost of the parachutes might be an issue too. This shop has cargo parachutes and lines for $175 each.
ReplyDeletegdr, who says they need chutes? In Ethiopia they just chucked the stuff out of the rear door at about 100ft, no chutes needed.
ReplyDeleteDaniel, what's the point of this post?
ReplyDeleteI understand you have issues with the "Decent Left" but is the humanitarian disaster in Zimbabwe really an appropriate vehicle for your obsession?
What is the point you're making? "Man wants food dropped to hungry people. What a cunt"?
To be honest - I agree that this doesn't seem to be the most practical or workable policy. But he's just making a suggestion borne of desperation as the current programs aren't working.
I can't see anything to suggest Holman is advocating this as a "substitute" for NGO operations.
So it seems a bit odd, and a bit nauseating, that you should choose to use the Zimbabwean humanitarian crisis as a trojan horse with which to mock "Decent Politics" - especially when neither you, nor the commenters above, seem at all interested in providing an alternative solution to the crisis?
Phomesy
"I understand you have issues with the "Decent Left" but is the humanitarian disaster in Zimbabwe really an appropriate vehicle for your obsession?"
ReplyDeletethe wonderful thing is that I no longer feel any need whatever to respond to this kind of thing. It's not an obsession - it was a bit of an obsession back in the days when this sort of politics looked like it might be in danger of becoming influential - but these days, pointing out that various Decent ideologues don't have a clue what they're talking about is just a hobby.
So yes,
""Man wants food dropped to hungry people. What a cunt"?
is more or less the size of it.
to forestall further discussion, your error is the following:
"I can't see anything to suggest Holman is advocating this as a "substitute" for NGO operations."
Conor Foley's excellent new book "The Thin Blue Line" is very good on the subject of how pie-in-the-sky Decent wargames actually do interfere with NGO operations.