We are pouring massive amounts of aid into an area we have wanted to control for a long time.
We know the U.S. hopes to have troops fighting in tsunami territory.
The United States is trying for control of the Strait of Malacca. US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said during a visit to Singapore that he hoped to have US troops fighting terrorism in Southeast Asia "pretty soon". His comments fuelled speculation that the United States wants to deploy US forces in the Strait of MALACCA, the narrow and busy shipping lane straddled by Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore that is seen as a likely terrorist target. More than one million tonnes of oil a year -- well over 80 percent of China's imports -- are shipped through the narrow strait. #msg-3263991 #msg-3404130 #msg-4961588
However, history has proven we will invade a country militarily, as in Iraq, or through the following ways.
Illuminating background is available in a watershed USAID report, Foreign Aid in the National Interest: Promoting Freedom, Security and Opportunity, released in January 2003 but ignored by a press swept up in pre-invasion hysteria. In the report, USAID vows that development programs will no longer be directed primarily toward alleviating human misery, but will be committed to "encouraging democratic [i.e., US-friendly] reforms." This policy shift is explicitly linked to the National Security Strategy of the United States, the 2002 White House blueprint for a new, openly aggressive phase of US imperialism.
Henceforward, the report promises, only friendly regimes will be rewarded with development money, while hostile (or merely independent) states will be punished by NGO-driven "reform" programs that sound suspiciously like old-fashioned destabilization ops. #msg-1886015
John Perkins, a former respected member of the international banking community, in his book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man describes how as a highly paid professional, he helped the U.S. cheat poor countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars by lending them more money than they could possibly repay and then take over their economies.
AMY GOODMAN: How closely did you work with the World Bank?
JOHN PERKINS: Very, very closely with the World Bank. The World Bank provides most of the money that’s used by economic hit men, it and the I.M.F. But when 9/11 struck, I had a change of heart. I knew the story had to be told because what happened at 9/11 is a direct result of what the economic hit men are doing. And the only way that we're going to feel secure in this country again and that we're going to feel good about ourselves is if we use these systems we’ve put into place to create positive change around the world. I really believe we can do that. I believe the World Bank and other institutions can be turned around and do what they were originally intended to do, which is help reconstruct devastated parts of the world. Help -- genuinely help poor people. There are twenty-four thousand people starving to death every day. We can change that. #msg-4948785
The World Bank said it will consider significantly boosting its aid, perhaps to as much as $1.5 billion. It has already pledged $175 million in assistance, but bank President James Wolfensohn said he was flexible.
"We can go up to even $1 billion to $1.5 billion, depending on the needs ... our immediate focus is to provide relief to the affected people," he said at a news conference.
World governments, led by Australia and Germany, have pledged nearly $4 billion in aid the biggest relief package ever. The United States has pledged $350 million, which President Bush called only an "initial commitment" and essentially a line of credit that can be spent as American relief officials identify needs.
Relief organizations have calculated that as much as 75% of foreign aid is directly tied to trade access or other economic and political strategies. Some comes with so many strings attached, including preferential tendering on contracts and the hiring of consultants, that only 30-40% of dollar value is ever realized.
US policy dictates that much foreign aid be spent on costly imported medicines, weapons, agricultural produce or manufactured goods. Some European nations have a similar approach. #msg-5029134
-Am
Gunfire Underscores Tsunami Relief Dangers
Updated 9:01 AM ET January 9, 2005
Gunfire echoed through the main tsunami-hit city on Indonesia's Sumatra island Sunday, underscoring the threat to the scores of foreigner aid workers, while a tropical downpour lashed the airport in the provincial capital, turning a major hub for relief supplies into a muddy mess.
Meanwhile, hundreds of people protested in Sri Lanka's Tamil-dominated north after U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan agreed to a government request that he not visit tsunami-stricken areas under Tamil rebel control.
Two weeks after walls of water flattened wide swaths of coastland around the Indian Ocean, people were still emerging from isolated village and bodies were being pulled from the mud and debris as the death toll in 11 countries passed 150,000.
Indonesian authorities blamed separatist rebels for the shooting near the U.N. compound in Banda Aceh, where relief workers have gathered to help survivors of the Dec. 26 earthquake and tsunami that killed more than 150,000 people in Africa and Asia.
Violence in tsunami-ravaged Sri Lanka also raised security concerns. Christians and Hindus clashed in the eastern part of the country where a massive aid effort is under way, killing at least three people and injuring 37, although no relief workers were injured in either incident.
Clashes between Hindus and Christians are rare since both groups belong the Tamil minority and believe they are oppressed by the country's Buddhist Sinhalese majority.
Elsewhere, about 400 Sri Lankans gathered in a peaceful protest Sunday opposite the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees office in the predominantly Tamil city of Jaffna, demanding that Annan visit the northern region to inspect damage caused by the tsunami.
Annan said Sunday that he hoped it would not strain relations between the United Nations and the rebel group.
"I'm hoping to come back and be able to visit all areas of the country, not only those repaired, but also to celebrate peace," he said. "The U.N. is not here to take sides."
The Tigers, who have fought a 20-year war for a Tamil homeland, invited Annan to tour the northern province. But government officials said they could not guarantee the U.N. chief's safety.
U.N. officials in Indonesia downplayed the shooting, which took place near the home of a deputy provincial police chief, saying there was no indication the gunfire targeted efforts to feed the disaster's hungry and homeless.
"We don't believe that aid workers are targets," said Joel Boutroue, a U.N. relief official in Aceh. "We were told by guards that it was probably one person shooting a few rounds and that was it."
Indonesian officials regularly blame Free Aceh Movement rebels for shootings and violence in Aceh, even if there is sometimes little evidence of their involvement.
The rebels have waged a separatist war in Aceh for nearly three decades. Thousands have been killed. There was an unofficial truce after last month's disaster, which left more than 100,000 dead in the province, but a series of recent skirmishes have prompted Indonesia's military to step up patrols for the guerrillas.
Adding to security concerns is the appearance of Laskar Mujahidin, an extremist group with alleged links to al-Qaida. The group, which has set up an aid camp, says it is there to help and won't target foreigners, but its reassurances haven't dampened concerns.
The U.S. military, which says it has about 150 service personnel on the ground in Sumatra and 8,000 offshore, said aid workers must remain vigilant while working in restive areas.
"Security is a constant planning factor in all that we do," U.S. Army aid coordinator Maj. Nelson Chang said.
Rain pounded relief workers Sunday, soaking the Banda Aceh airport and the cardboard boxes of aid piled up on the tarmac. Scores of tents where aid workers and soldiers camped had become a quagmire.
It's the middle of the rainy season in Indonesia and the pounding downpours could further complicate a relief effort already hamstrung by damaged infrastructure, including roads and bridges washed away.
Staggered by the scale of the disaster, aid officials said they may have to feed as many as 2 million survivors a day for six months.
World leaders have been streaming into the region in an attempt to better assess the needs of tens of thousands of people.
World governments, led by Australia and Germany, have pledged nearly $4 billion in aid the biggest relief package ever. The United States has pledged $350 million, which President Bush called only an "initial commitment" and essentially a line of credit that can be spent as American relief officials identify needs.
The World Bank said it will consider significantly boosting its aid, perhaps to as much as $1.5 billion. It has already pledged $175 million in assistance, but bank President James Wolfensohn said he was flexible.
"We can go up to even $1 billion to $1.5 billion, depending on the needs ... our immediate focus is to provide relief to the affected people," he said at a news conference
Associated Press reporters Mike Corder, Emma Ross and Ed Harris in Jakarta, Chris Brummitt and Denis Gray in Banda Aceh, Burt Herman in Sumatra and Dilip Ganguly in Sri Lanka contributed to this report.
Uncle Sam is not Ebenezer Scrooge. The US government is the world's largest foreign-aid donor, contributing economic assistance to more than 150 countries. The US is also the largest national source of humanitarian and emergency relief aid. Before President George W Bush took office in 2001, the US government was providing foreign nations with nearly as much development aid and humanitarian assistance as did France, Germany and the United Kingdom combined.
When Jan Egeland, United Nations under secretary general for humanitarian affairs, called the US "stingy" last week in the wake of the tsunami disaster, he affirmed the belief of many that the Bush administration was not only arrogant and aggressive but also lacking in compassion and generosity. The failure of the president to make a personal statement of support and condolence until three days after the tragedy - and the paucity of the US initial commitment of emergency humanitarian aid - gave widespread credence to the charge that the US is not a good global neighbor but rather a self-centered Scrooge.
Egeland was quick to note that his measure for generosity was not total aid but economic aid as a percentage of national income or gross domestic product (GDP). A decade ago at the Earth Summit in Brazil, the US and the rest of the developed world promised to increase aid levels to at least 0.7% of national income. "If the foreign assistance of many countries is now 0.1 or 0.2% of national income, I think that is stingy," said Egeland.
Can the US$45 billion US economic and military aid budget of 2004 - roughly three times what the administration of president Bill Clinton allocated in 1997 - be described as "stingy"?
How does the US economic-aid commitment as a percentage of national wealth compare to the other 22 large aid donors? The latest comparative figures from 2002 place the US - with its 0.13% commitment - dead last behind Italy and Greece with their 0.2% contributions of national income. If military aid is included, the percentage jumps to nearly 0.2%.
Only five countries have met or exceeded this promised 0.7% benchmark set a decade ago: Denmark, Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands and Luxembourg.
As a percentage of national income, US foreign aid has steadily and dramatically dropped since 1949. Not since the Alliance for Progress years of the John Kennedy administration has the economic-aid budget exceeded 1% of annual GDP. According to an April 2004 report by the Congressional Research Service (CRS), even with the increases in US aid commitments since 2001 (excluding the nearly $25 billion committed to Iraq), current aid levels are among the lowest in a half-century of US foreign-assistance programming.
Post-Cold War blues During the Cold War, US foreign aid enjoyed what aid reformers now call "policy coherence". As the CRS analysts rightly point out in their recent report, until the 1990s "the underlying rationale for providing foreign aid was the same for all US foreign policy - the defeat of communism".
During the 1990s the US government was hard-put to find a new rationale to support Cold War aid levels. No longer could foreign aid - either economic or military - be justified as part of the Cold War against the advance of communism. The Clinton presidency settled on the concept of promoting "sustainable development" as the core principle of US foreign assistance, which proved to be a hard sell to the US public and Congress. This new difficulty in explaining how US aid served US national security and national interests, combined with the administration's determination to balance the budget, resulted in a gradual decline in foreign assistance.
In the last years of Clinton's tenure, foreign aid started to climb again - not out of any new congressional or executive-branch determination to foster sustainable development, but to complement US military operations in Colombia, Haiti, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo.
If one looks solely at the changing allocations of US foreign assistance, the Clinton years seem the age of austerity and the Bush administration in contrast appears generous. Starting in fiscal 2002, economic aid began a steady and dramatic rise - rising $4.3 billion over 2001. By 2004 the US government's economic aid commitments had risen to historic levels - rising to levels not seen since the post-World War II years with the Marshall Plan for European reconstruction.
Depending on how you view foreign assistance - total aid or as a percentage of income - Uncle Sam is either generous or a miser. But a narrow focus on dollar amounts and percentages misses the bigger picture of the changes in US economic aid in the past several years. What cannot be debated is that US economic aid is increasingly strategic.
The administration's "global war on terrorism" is the main determinant in the distribution of economic aid - not development needs, not humanitarian disasters, not hunger or the increasing numbers of the world population living on a dollar a day or less. In providing a new rationale for US foreign aid, the "war on terrorism" has provided a new policy coherence that integrates foreign assistance with foreign and military policy. When the officials of the State Department and the US Agency for International Development (USAID) justify their aid requests before congressional committees, they stress that aid is part of the country's national-security strategy. The "war on terrorism" has replaced the war on communism as the underlying rationale for foreign assistance. That makes selling increasing foreign-aid budgets much easier on Capitol Hill and has restored a bipartisan consensus in support of USAID programs.
Guns and butter The 2004-09 strategic plan produced by the State Department and USAID defines "security" as the main goal of US foreign assistance. The strategic plan aims to "align diplomacy and development assistance" with the president's National Security Strategy of September 2002 - the document that lays out the case for preventive war and for building the capacity for global military intervention.
Increasing equitable development, reducing poverty and hunger, and protecting the global environment don't figure into the strategic goals and objectives of this strategic plan. Instead, the main priorities are Arab-Israeli tensions, stabilizing Iraq, restructuring the "Muslim world" to increase democracy and economic freedom, stabilizing Afghanistan, North Korea, India-Pakistan tensions, drug eradication in the Andean region, strengthening alliances such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and reforming the United Nations. Further down on the list of priorities for USAID and the State Department are the AIDS crisis; food security, particularly in crisis countries such as Sudan, Iraq, Ethiopia and Afghanistan; and providing "accountable" development assistance through the new Millennium Challenge Account.
Responding to a spate of criticism in the 1990s that US economic aid lacked a strategic coherence, USAID over the past few years has addressed that criticism head-on by its determination to make foreign assistance coherent with US national-security strategy. This challenge to establish "policy coherence" was also addressed in the January 2004 USAID Commission report, "US Foreign Aid: Meeting the Challenges of the 21st Century", written in part by neo-conservatives from the right-wing Hudson and Hoover think-tanks. The paper calls for greater "selectivity" in US foreign assistance based on two criteria: "relevance to US national security" and "greater aid effectiveness".
Selective and strategic One has only to look at the major recipients of US economic aid to grasp the policy coherence with national-security strategy. But this new selectivity based on security imperatives can also be seen in the significant rise in economic (and military aid) to what USAID calls "front line" states in the "war on terror" - those like Poland that joined the "coalition of the willing" in the Iraq occupation, countries in Central Asia that have opened their countries to US military bases, and others like Indonesia that are regarded as key allies in containing Muslim militancy.
Starting in 2002, the executive branch began to underscore the "war on terrorism" as a top foreign-aid priority. According to the Congressional Research Service, the State Department now highlights the amount of US assistance going to some 30 "front line" states in the terrorism war. Aid to Pakistan, for example, jumped from $1.7 million in 2001 to $275 million in 2004.
Leading the list of top economic-aid recipients in 2004 was Iraq, which received $18.5 billion - more than the total USAID budget prior to 2002. Next comes Israel ($2.6 billion), followed by Egypt and Afghanistan, both of which received approximately $1.8 billion. Other top recipients were Colombia, Jordan, Pakistan, Peru, Bolivia, Turkey, Sudan and Indonesia.
Additional top recipients of US aid in 2004 were Sudan and Liberia as part of US conflict-resolution and humanitarian-aid initiatives, along with Uganda, Ethiopia and Kenya, reflecting Bush's $15 billion Global AIDS Initiative in Africa.
Clearly, the Bush administration was slow on the uptake to see the strategic implications of tsunami disaster relief. But the strategic and public relations benefits of US humanitarian aid in largely Muslim countries such as Indonesia are now recognized. Although Washington and US society desperately need some favorable public relations, the US government's apparent use of its aid efforts in Indonesia to solidify working relations with the Indonesian military (TNI), including the use of US helicopters by the TNI, may only contribute to strengthening the position of the highly abusive military forces in that conflicted nation.
Selective and effective Foreign assistance is one of the most flexible instruments of US foreign policy, since it can be used alternately as a carrot and a stick. Countries that cooperate with the US national-security initiatives - no matter their record on such foreign-aid objectives as democracy, human rights, or good governance - receive aid as carrots.
In addition to aid selectivity measured by national-security goals, USAID has established its own criteria of "effectiveness" when evaluating how development funds should be spent. In the past, USAID has used its project funding to foster such goals as privatization, economic liberalization, and austerity.
The World Bank's 1998 report "Assessing Aid" concluded that a "good policy environment" is an essential precondition for effective development assistance. The Bush administration has taken up this theme with a vengeance with its much-vaunted Millennium Challenge Corporation. Established after the 2002 Monterey Conference on Financing and Development, the $5 million in promised development funds are available only to countries that meet strict preconditions - including a commitment to free trade, cooperation with US foreign-policy initiatives, and no-holds-barred economic liberalization, as well as national treatment for US investors. In other words, instead of conditioning new aid to agreed-up reforms, countries need to meet US-imposed political, economic, and governance conditions in advance of new aid commitments. Largely as a result of this onerous pre-conditionality, the government corporation has been hard-put to find countries who have met the challenge of satisfying all the US requirements.
A long-running measure of the effectiveness of US aid has been its ties to US exports and technical assistance. According to USAID, 81% of its procurement comes from US sources. This falls short of the 87% US procurement rate for US military aid. That figure would be 100% if it were not for a special provision that allows Israel to use US military aid to buy from its own military contractors.
Promises, promises A few days after the criticism of penny-pinching in its tsunami disaster aid, the administration increased its promised aid from $15 million to $350 million. However, unlike the supplemental aid packages it has secured for Iraq and Afghanistan reconstruction aid, this $350 million doesn't represent an increase in the economic-aid budget, but rather is a commitment that is not backed by available resources. If the US is to deliver on its promise, it will either have to draw disaster aid from other accounts, ask Congress for supplemental aid, or go into the next fiscal year with a budget deficit. Because of US strategic priorities, US humanitarian aid and emergency disaster assistance - which represents 12% of total foreign and military aid - is largely used in conjunction with US humanitarian interventions and in conflict zones where US national-security interests are at stake. As the US global reach expands, the need for associated humanitarian aid also increases, thus compounding US budgetary pressures.
There is good reason to doubt whether the promised $350 will be anything more than just another broken promise by the Bush administration. The Bush White House has established a record of promising large sums of aid to reduce poverty, to fight the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and AIDS, and to help governments that are helping themselves with good governance and economic reform. The Millennium Challenge Corporation has failed to deliver any of the promised $5 billion, although the account continues to whittle down its resources in studies and evaluations that are establishing exactly what a "good policy environment" means with respect to US foreign, economic and military policy.
At first glance, a country's generosity in foreign aid seems a good measure of whether the US or any other nation is a good global neighbor. Certainly the high percentage contributions of the Nordic and other Western European countries make them immune to charges that they are stingy. Moreover, these same leading aid donors don't tie their aid to their own products and technical assistance.
But foreign aid is not always an unqualified good, especially when it comes from a country whose aid strategy is so closely tied to its global war strategy and to its neo-liberal economic policies.
Tom Barry is policy director of the International Relations Center, online at www.irc-online.org. He is the author of books on US economic aid including The Soft War: Uses and Abuses of US Economic Aid in Central America (Grove Press).
(Published with permission from the International Relations Center )
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