The U.S. government? Really? You actually think that the senior officials of the USG care about this sort of thing, beyond PR concerns? The people who snuffed three million Indochinese and a million Iraqis? Doug
A better example might be Rwanda and many other cases entailing natural disasters where no evident state interest prevented relatively easy (albeit expensive) intervention to save many lives.
It's hard to believe the American system is strongly motivated by a desire to rescue people.
mbs