Foreign Assistance To the Gulf – Administration finally accepts offers given from the Get-Go – Are the Truly Incompetent or Criminal?

The oil spill, which began with an explosion aboard a BP oil rig on April 20th, resulted in a seemingly uncontainable flow of oil into the gulf, with the Obama administration insisting every day that they were in control. On Tuesday, June 29th, the administration released a statement that 12 nations will be allowed to help with containment. The State Department was cited in the Yahoo.com news report filed under the news headline “Finance”.

However, the Dutch offered their assistance on Day 3 to help with the clean-up :

Three days after BP’s Deepwater Horizon drilling platform exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, the Netherlands offered to help. Ships could have set about clearing the oil using Dutch sweeping arms, but the US government didn’t take up the offer. Dutch Consul General Geert Visser in Houston told Radio Netherlands Worldwide he was disappointed.
The US response, says Mr Visser: “‘Thanks for your help, but at the moment we can manage ourselves.’ And that was it.” He puts the reticence down to pride.

Given the fact that additional nations, as well as entrepreneurs and scientists from the United States have been begging the administration to allow them to help since the beginning, one wonders why the administration has taken over 2 months to respond to offers of assistance, (or in the case of the Dutch, to respond in a timely manner in order for the offer of assistance to be effective.) The fact that deep water oil spills have happen in the Persian Gulf, and Contractors were able to contain and clean similar spills, (while offering aid to the U.S.) has not been widely reported. Nor the fact that Britain offered assistance immediately, but was rebuffed”

Although many note that the Obama administration used the oil crisis as an attempt to push the high price-tagged “Cap and Trade” environmental legislation through Congress, ( (14 days prior Headline):”After Oil Spill, Need for Cap-and-Trade Bill Is Urgent, Dems Say”) it appears that the administration is simply incompetent. Logic implies there cannot be another explanation. Otherwise, if it were true that a political party headed by a president who sat by and did nothing while the world and U.S. citizens begged to offer assistance and were refused for a period of sixty days, in order to use this economic and environmental disaster, (the proportions of which are massive in scale and the outcome in terms of the environment and economy unknown at this time) it would be criminal, period.

The fact that fishing, one of our nation’s oldest and more stable industries is threatened by the spill, is not lost on most people – let alone tourism in states where the oil is washing ashore on formerly pristine beaches. It is less about the oil and more about the impact on a way of life that has been established for centuries on the American coastline of the Gulf of Mexico -states from include Florida, Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana (to date), where wildlife and fish are in peril.

If it is true that environmentalists have influenced the decisions made in cleaning up this spill, in the first place, (the use of certain chemicals, etc. which may have been harmful in the short term), then shame on the administration for not taking a tough stand and doing the research necessary in order to get the situation under control quickly. It appears however, that it was a question of being “clueless”, one which gives the nation no confidence what-so-ever in the occupant of the Oval Office, or the hundreds upon hundreds of academics and appointed like-minded creatures that do his bidding rather blindly.

The United States, far from the world view perpetuated by the Obama administration is not a nation of incompetents, rather one which has risen to the occasion on more times than one might be able to count. It is a disaster yes, which could have been contained or at least attempted to be contained by those nations who have experience, and offered assistance on Day 3 - the fact that it is now at day 60, and the administration is finally accepting offers of help from “certain nations” they deem acceptable – is mind-boggling and smacks of the incompetent or criminally (ideologically) insane.