Many diaries and comments are focusing - for understandable reasons - on the parade of negligence that was the Bush response for the first 36 hours of this disaster: all "appropriate" aid; the initial 15 million dollars; the snide, shocking comparisons to Clinton issued from the press office; the president's unwillingness to break short his vacation, etc.
The similarity between Bush's immediate, initial response and the famous minutes reading "My Pet Goat" on 9/11 in the Florida classroom is also striking - although in this case, of course, each hour that was wasted translates into untold multiplying catastrophe for the world, since, of course, all relief is most effective the more immediately it can be mobilized.
But it's becoming clear that what's needed now is not so much money as men - and, more specifically, soldiers as well as the planes, boats and all-terrain vehicles that they operate. In essence, this is not only a medical or relief situation but a military one. In fact, U.S. military resources are now moving in. As one commentator on NPR put it, only the U.S. has the naval resources that would best facilitate the transportation of the food and supplies that we think of when we think of
"relief". And while individual citizens can give money toward these supplies, we can't do much about providing the sophisticated planes and ships that can actually be used to battle the devastated landscape and infrastructure that prevents aid from easily flowing.
The minute that the "relief" effort is cast this way, however, we can understand Bush's cowardly hesitation in a different light. As U.S. military personnel and supplies begin to be deployed in Asia as part of the relief effort, each soldier used (and each solider not used) takes on intense political meaning in relation to Iraq.
The tsunami disaster in fact illustrates the unpredictable consequences of our dangerously high troop-commitment in Iraq. Who knows where troops will be needed next? (This is grimly reinforced by the mounting realization that the tsunami disaster is implicated into the geopolitical terrain of 9/11, as Indonesia is the world's largest muslim nation). I think Bush's delay was in part caused by this sense that "diverting" resources to Asia could reflect badly on, or get entangled in, the Iraq war. But, in this very sense, Bush's delay (with all its terrible consequences) also provides the first evidence that the Iraq war is, in fact, entangled in this disaster.