The New York Times reports that President Obama will give public remarks sometime today on the U.S. response to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. Among the details of our response:
The president will go beyond the 25-bed portable hospital that Pentagon officials said they would establish in Liberia, one of the three West African countries ravaged by the disease, officials said. Mr. Obama will offer help to President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia in the construction of as many as 17 Ebola treatment centers in the region, with about 1,700 treatment beds.
Senior administration officials said Monday night that the Department of Defense would open a joint command operation in Monrovia, Liberia, to coordinate the international effort to combat the disease. The military will also provide engineers to help construct the additional treatment facilities and will send enough people to train up to 500 health care workers a week to deal with the crisis.
Officials said the military expected to send as many as 3,000 people to Africa to take charge of responding to the Ebola outbreak.
And:
The American government will also provide 400,000 Ebola home health and treatment kits to Liberia, as well as tens of thousands of kits intended to test whether people have the disease. The Pentagon will provide some logistical equipment for health workers going to West Africa and what administration officials described as “command and control” organizational assistance on how to coordinate the overall relief work. The Army Corps of Engineers is expected to be part of the Defense Department effort.
This is welcome news. (Though efforts will likely have to expand beyond Liberia, and could possibly have to expand even beyond that.)
In a column just last week I wrote of a retreat from national greatness, using our then lack of response to Ebola as a prime example.
Have Americans forgotten that this is a great nation? And that great nations can shape events, and not merely observe them? More Americans think the country is doing too much to help the world than too little, even though a majority agrees that major threats to the United States exist and that the world is growing more dangerous. Switzerland should be allowed to hold those two views at the same time. The United States shouldn’t. Why is our response to these dangerous world events so passive and ambivalent?
I argued that “our responses have been passive” in part “because reactions to events are a two-way street between the American people and our leaders. The American people would be more inclined to act if President Obama were more inclined to act.”
Well, the president is acting on Ebola. A welcome change. But even “if actions do follow,” I wrote, “the president still needs to convince the American people that action is required. He needs to remind us that this is a great nation, and that from time to time, great nations go into the world to stop terrible things from happening. This is especially true if those terrible things could arrive one day on our shores — Ebola mutating…”
You can read my entire column here.
Americans should be proud that our country is going abroad to stop a massive human catastrophe. We should be proud, and we should be told to be proud. As a nation, we should stop walking down the street staring at our shoes. We should look up, and face the future with the confidence that we can meet our real and serious challenges, affecting positive change both at home and abroad.
— Michael R. Strain is a resident scholar and economist at the American Enterprise Institute. You can write to him on Twitter at twitter.com/MichaelRStrain.