Not helping anyone

Go read this entry, Images of a Kinder, Gentler War, from Body and Soul. (via Lean Left)

The post talks about how we are seeing images of the military helping civilians out and while this makes for great PR, it can often do more harm than good, particularly the way we are going about it now. I admit to knowing little about aid workers and this post was very informative.

Distributing aid is not a matter of showing up with boxes of food and handing it out to whatever grateful souls come along. Professional aid workers are experts at assessing needs. They get into a community and find out what is needed most – food, water, shelter, medicine – and take care of the most urgent needs first, not the needs that make the best pictures (a medical corpsman holding a child is inspiring, but what he’s doing doesn’t come close in importance to a team of engineers repairing a water treatment plant – as the Red Cross recently did, off camera, near Basra – which might save thousands of lives by preventing a cholera outbreak.) Professionals know how to get aid to the people who need it the most.

It seems that our government’s attempt to “win the hearts and minds” of the Iraqis will cause danger to aid workers confused with soldiers, cynicism at home about our ability to help Iraqis, and most importantly ineffective aid given to the Iraqi people.