The U.S. Involvement with Haiti - Essay Example

The U.S. Involvement with Haiti The Haiti earthquake was catastrophic, with a magnitude of 7.0 this earthquake was the most severe in the last 200 years history of the country. The damage done by this earthquake was very huge, there were approximately 3 million humans effected by this earthquake which is one 3rd of the total population, number of deaths put by Haitian government were approximately 220000, the number of injured people were approximately 300000, while nearly 1 million people were made homeless.

Damage to the infrastructure was also very huge. Nearly 300000 commercial and residential building were severely or totally collapsed, including thousands of schools, hundreds of hospitals, university building, factories, telephone networks, roads etc were all totally destroyed. Infrastructure necessary to respond to the disaster was also severely damaged including all the hospitals in the northwest including air, sea and land transport facilities and all the communication systems. Haiti is one of the poorest countries in America and it was totally impossible for Haitian government to cope with the damage of such scale.

United States was the biggest and most powerful country in that region and being the most powerful nation on earth they have the responsibility of taking the leading role in helping Haiti to come over that disaster. Luckily United States government knows this responsibility well enough and they were the first ones to came forward and respond to this disaster. United States government and United States civil organizations provided millions of dollars to help the people of Haiti right after the disaster took place and they planned to give much more in the coming days.

United States immediately send search and rescue teams to give help to those who need them immediately. But the damage being done by earthquake was so huge that it is going to take several months or even years to rebuild the infrastructure and make things normal again and this is what US government exactly understood, the US government said that they were in it for the long haul as it is going to take years to bring things on the normal course again.United States government had signed an agreement with UN to formalize the help process, it give United States responsibility and control over ports, roads, airports.

They also have been given responsibility to make Haitian authorities responsible for law and order. There are thousands of US troops in Haiti to take part in rescue and rebuild process. US is also controlling Haiti’s collapsed president palace building and important airports to coordinate the rescue process. Due to the collapse of infrastructure the crime rate is also gone up and US has also taken responsibility to maintain the law and order situation because Haitian police is ill equipped to do it themselves.

US government and Civil Organization have provided thousands of tons of food and medicines to the Haitian people after the Earthquake, and still huge amounts of aid is coming in, delivering this aid to the effected people and rebuilding the destroyed infrastructure in that region requires a well organized logistic support and that’s why United States requires thousands of troops in the region, especially when Haitian government is not capable of doing it on their own.There are some people in the world who are criticizing the US role in Haiti and saying that US intervention in Haiti is too much but they don’t realize that situation in Haiti after the Earthquake is disastrous, secondly the economy and resources of Haitian government are never going to handle the aftermaths of earthquake.

So the US role and involvement in Haiti is fully justified because these are the extraordinary times that require extraordinary measures and extraordinary decisiveness.