An US plane headed to Tempelhof to deliver supplies to Berlin; children watched, hoping to catch some of the candy pilots often dropped on approach. NYT.
Not long ago, Squashed noted how preferable it would be for the United States to ”transform a quarter of our military into the best disaster response team ever assembled.” It’s certainly not an historically unprecedented phenomenon, as the above photo demonstrates: during the Berlin Airlift, which is quite wonderful to read about, the same massive harnessing of human power, mechanical capacity, logistical planning, and political drive that produced D-Day led to an amazing humanitarian achievement.
This is not to say that idealism motivated the Airlift; there was cold and hard strategic calculation behind it, but it was nevertheless a non-violent solution to a rather dangerous situation, and there were as many hawks then as now.
What’s unfortunate: presently, the ruling forces of America -by which I mean both politicians and many of the people- do not see such efforts as meaningful responses to the contemporary strategic conflict they perceive. That is, there is no real sense that humanitarian aid is an adequate response to our foes.
I hate to quote from the same damn Martin Amis essay I noted just a week ago, but he offered this just days after 9/11:
We would hope that the response will be, above all, non-escalatory. It should also mirror the original attack in that it should have the capacity to astonish. A utopian example: the crippled and benighted people of Afghanistan, hunkering down for a winter of famine, should not be bombarded with cruise missiles; they should be bombarded with consignments of food, firmly marked LEND-LEASE USA.
Amis is right to call this utopian, but it’s not so far from the Berlin Airlift in its stubborn hopefulness, its determination to respond to aggression without violence. We might have tried to smash the Soviet blockade; we might have gone to war to ‘liberate’ the Germans and everyone else. We didn’t, and there were historical consequences.
But I find the whole effort to be an excellent example, at the absolute least, of what a massive organization of well-trained people with enormous funding, loads of transportation capabilities, and expertise can do.
(Note: I am aware that there are not necessarily historical parallels here, and also that this all a bit sentimental, maybe even naive).