Let's invade Puerto Rico

29Sep2017

People are hurting. Buildings are collapsed, infrastructure is broken, communication is spotty at best. The situation in Puerto Rico a week after it was devastated by a hurricane is desperate. These are Americans suffering. More to the point, these are human beings – mothers, fathers and children and aunties and grands without the necessities of life. Butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers without the infrastructure and supplies they need to help their communities get back on their feet.

The airport went days without flights and still isn’t up to snuff because of problems with the radar and traffic control equipment and yet, we have the capability to invade a foreign land and stand up a brand-new airport from jungle in a few days’ time. But we wouldn’t have had to do even that – the runways in Puerto Rico were intact, we just needed to bring in the machines and a mobile power plant, of which we have plenty.

People are starving while our warehouses are full of MREs. People have no safe drinking water while we have air-deployable water plants sitting on the ground. 

Hospitals struggle to keep their pre-hurricane patients alive and then to deal with the newly injured and yet, a week later the largest hospital ship in the world – 1000 beds, capable of operating independent of shore power, with a helipad and its own boats for moving patients and caregivers in and out- was not authorized to move for several days and only now is getting under way for the island.

Emergency services are overwhelmed in large part because the first responders are at home caring for their own families. And yet our reserves of military police have not been mobilized to help.

Trucks full of relief supplies sit unmanned at the docks even though our Army and Marines have organic transportation units with qualified equipment operators who could be there driving within a few hours.

We invaded Grenada six days after Maurice Bishop’s death and that involved planning and practicing an armed attack. Does it not seem we could have ‘invaded’ Puerto Rico – our own sovereign territory, with no need for artillery preparation -  even more quickly?

When you have all the materials and capability standing at the ready and you fail to respond, it’s not ‘good news’ as our DHS Secretary said. And the problem isn’t ‘big water, ocean water,’ as her idiot boss proclaimed. It is unconscionable that Puerto Rico might have been better off had we invaded rather than being hit by a natural disaster and then depending upon us for assistance.

There was a way. We just didn’t have the will. And we should all feel ashamed.