AP Photo

The continuing desperate, post-earthquake crisis in Haiti must not be allowed to recede into just another emergency relief job. Haiti is a failed state with a tortured history, and would have received a good deal more tangible attention if it were not a Christian country of good-natured people who are inhospitable to the enticements of terrorism.

Already, we have seen some of the predictable jockeying among the players. France, while making only a modest contribution, and despite being absent from Haiti for nearly two centuries and thoroughly retrograde occupiers prior to that, has verbally asserted a vapid cultural patriarchate and grumbled, as only the French can, that the prompt, efficient, and generous U.S. response is an improper “occupation.”