The Senescent Man

The Diplomad, a Blogroll Blog mentioned in our sidebar, is comprised primarily of career US Foreign Service officers, and today The Diplomad reports that the UN is doing a lot of talking but not much else relative to needed humanitarian aid for the region around the South Asia tsunami:

Well, we're heading into Day 7 of the Asian quake/tsunami crisis. And the UN relief effort? Nowhere to be seen except at some meetings and on CNN and BBC as talking heads. In this corner of the Far Abroad, it's Yanks and Aussies doing the hard, sweaty work of saving lives.

Check out this interview (on the UN's official website) with SecGen Annan and Under SecGen Egeland shows,

Mr. Egeland: Our main problems now are in northern Sumatra and Aceh.
<...> In Aceh, today 50 trucks of relief supplies are arriving. <...> Tomorrow, we will have eight full airplanes arriving. I discussed today with Washington whether we can draw on some assets on their side, after consultations with the Indonesian Government, to set up what we call an “air-freight handling centre” in Aceh.

Tomorrow, we will have to set up a camp for relief workers – 90 of them – which is fully self-contained, with kitchen, food, lodging, everything, because they have nowhere to stay and we don't want them to be an additional burden on the people there.

I provided this to some USAID colleagues working in Indonesia and their heads nearly exploded.

And they say that the US has been slow and stingy. Yeah. (HT: Power Line).