MCViewPoint

The guest columnist in the 12 Feb Erie Times is so happy Rick Santorum is on top, for this week anyway. Supporting a failed Department of Education, failing medicare system and failed foreign policy are Santorum’s strong points according to Grace Zimmerly. Foreign policy is the main topic in today’s article. I agree we should help our fellow man in times of disaster and the US does it better than anyone. I agree AIDS relief has been effective. But here is where it gets interesting. Ms Zimmerly feels the is US bound to aid those in repressive governments and create stable regimes. I can think of nowhere that the US aid has successfully stabilized any democratic regime. Already stable Korea, Japan, Israel plus all the NATO countries just get the added benefit of you and I paying their defense bill. The US government therefore forces taxpayers to subsidize foreign competition. We have given aid to Bosnia, Eqypt, Iraq, Israel, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen & Somalia to name a few. Not a lot of stability for the citizens in those places. We stabilize and give a lot of aid to those in repressive regimes, the repressive leaders. We give foreign aid to all the ‘Stan countries, not for humanitarian reasons but because they tend to be anti-Russian. They are the most brutal regimes on the planet. One of our ‘Stan allies actually has boiled political prisoners in oil! Foreign aid is mainly a political tool to keep the tyrant du jour on our side. It is an embarrassment that we keep Hamid Karzai on the foreign aid dole while he openly plays both ends against the middle. What the writer fails to mention or not even realize is that little aid gets to those that need it. A quick google will bring up scads of examples. “6.6 Billion in aid missing”, “Mubarek’s stolen billions”, “Somalia food aid stolen” are just a sampling of current headlines. Most foreign aid ends up lining pockets. Non-financial aid is usually stolen by the recipient government, and sold on the black market. There has been hundreds of millions in aid money sent to Iraq, in actual pallets of paper money, that have just disappeared. I remember listening to a general on NPR in charge of keeping accounts of Iraqi aid money. I couldn’t believe he actually admitted 80% of the aid going to Iraq disappears. Peter Van Buren’s book We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People describes our own government’s gross ineptitude in helping rebuild the Iraq the US destroyed. If Santorum manages to get elected the first aid he will deliver will be to his military industrial complex supporters by invading Iran and starting a Middle East war. He has made this quite clear. Just his humanitarian way of winning over hearts and minds. Foreign aid, like war, is a racket.