"Just a moment..."

So, both Instapundit and Rantburg are reporting on a situation that arose in Haiti over the weekend, in which a United Nations field hospital staffed by Belgians was evacuated by the staff, due to lack of security.  The original article is here; since it is a CNN piece, CNN Medical Correspondent and former Surgeon General Nominee Dr. Sanjay Gupta looks golden. 

Actually, he would probably look good here even if Fox had done the story:  Staff flees, leaving cable news reporter as sole medico in disaster zone...

Then, retired US Army General Russel "Don't Get Stuck On Stupid" Honore hammers the UN in general and the staff of the field hospital in particular for leaving: “Search and rescue must trump security".

I'm not so sure.

In the first place, General Honore, this was a field hospital, not a Search and Rescue team.  And it was certainly not a combat search and rescue team, nor (so far as I can tell) a military (combat) hospital.

In the second place, one of the things they hammered into our heads in CERT training was that our first responsibility was to ourselves:  "A dead CERT (medic, nurse, doctor) is of no help to anyone."

It is not clear from the stories I've seen what, if any, credible threat there was; that is to say, was there a palpable threat by an organized, heavily-armed criminal gang that had communicated a specific threat to kidnap and/or kill staff members?  Was there a large number of survivors/refugees in the area whose demands for aid and supplies was getting angrier and angrier?  (A large mob, on a looting rampage, would be as dangerous as a criminal gang.)(And Gupta himself stated in his report that there was a "concern about riots not far from here--and this is part of the problem.")

In either case, if there was a credible threat that the hospital would cease being able to perform it's mission, then withdrawing it was the right thing to do.  A field hospital in which the medical staff are all dead isn't much of a hospital.

Of course, I am sitting about as far from Haiti as you can get and still be in the Continental United States, so my opinion is worth the paper it's written on.  There is much I do not know, and may never know, about the situation.  The key question seems to me to be: Was the decision to evacuate based on actual intelligence, or was someone just jittery?

Another question, after the UN refused to have it's security personnel do more than evacuate, is :  Did anyone ask for US security support?  I can just imagine your average Haitian rioter:  "Oh, look, US paratroopers and/or Marines.  Let's go loot somewhere else..."*

And, after all, did anyone really expect the United Nations to do more?  Really?  And would anyone want them to do more? Considering that UN security troops are usually from nations about as poor as Haiti, and conduct themselves as such, what with rape, looting, graft, etc.? 

Frankly, based on the track record, if I was trying to run a third world nation and was receiving international security assistance, if it was not from an Anglophone nation, I'd say, thanks but no thanks.  (Since said third-world-nation leader would probably be unaware of the track record of, say, the Danes, the Norwegians, the Poles, the Czechs or Slovaks, and other Eastern European nations.)

This situation may not have been helped by years of M*A*S*H reruns, in which there was always a heroic doctor, usually with a heroic nurse, willing to risk their asses to save some poor wounded soldier, usually some commie, because that's what their Hippocratic Oath said to do.  Or the script, anyway...

Anyway.

So, yeah, go ahead and criticize the UN.  But think twice, and preferably, get the facts, before criticizing the poor bastards who were on the scene.

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*Granted, after Clinton's Operation "Just Because", they might not be so impressed.