Washington Post columnist Sebastian Mallaby thinks President George W. Bush is "a little crazy," or so his analysis of the administration's stance on foreign aid implies. Since the President's approval rating is hovering between 80 and 90 percent, one must credit Mallaby for his willingness to alienate most of his audience with such an assertion. But then, he is inside the Beltway, where regard for what 80 or 90 percent of the public thinks is not particularly high.
Mr. Mallaby recalls that John F. Kennedy "boosted aid to poor countries by a quarter, arguing that 'without exception, they are all under Communist pressure.'" He then calls "Kennedyesque" a recent British appeal to double aid, and applies the aforementioned "crazy" label to the Bush administration's negative response. The difference between a 25 percent increase and a 100 percent increase is entirely ignored; one wonders if JFK would be so imprecise in converting his own name into an adjective.
No matter. The interesting thing here is the logic of his analysis, or rather, its illogic. He begins with the conviction that poverty breeds terrorism, and that if aid can relieve poverty, it can stop terrorism before it starts. He calls Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill's observation that "Over the last 50 years the world has spent an awful large amount of money in the name of development without a great degree of success," both wrong and interesting. He has four reasons.
First, he points out that far fewer people in the world are below the poverty line, a fact he attributes to aid programs. Fair enough. Mr. Mallaby has managed the tautological observation that if you give people money, they have more money. Surely Mr. O'Neill would not argue with this. But that observation falls well short of establishing any causality between aid and security; indeed, that same 50 years has seen a tremendous increase in worldwide terrorist activity, the current and dire threat to American security. The hijackers of September 11 were living like Americans; this relative opulence did little to dissuade them from terrorism.
Second, Mr. Mallaby says that aid "can help the occasional failed state that is lucky enough to acquire enlightened leadership," citing Uganda as an example. He ignores the flip side, which is that a significant percentage of the world's known terrorists hail from Egypt and Saudi Arabia, two states that have received more than their share of American aid and trade. Again the causal link between aid and security, at best, eludes. At worst it seems closer to an inverse than to a direct proportion.
Third, he cites the advances made by aid donors in "channeling money around" lousy regimes. He goes on to suggest a kind of anti-madrasa, a Western-financed anti-terrorist secular school, in places like Nigeria or Pakistan. How this beast is to exist under a "lousy" regime that will doubtless not be hospitable to such "Western propaganda" is unclear. Even more unclear is this: if the point of aid is to improve the lives of those living under lousy regimes, would not this goal be better served by destroying the lousy regime, thereby affording not only economic opportunity, but political and religious freedom as well? And would this not serve American interests better than contributing money to the economy of a lousy regime, which will, after all, wind up with at least part of that largesse in its own coffers?
Finally, Mallaby cites what he calls the Bosnian lesson: "If you prescribe policies for sick countries from afar, nothing improves, but if you intervene forcefully, you can impose progress." Now, that sounds aggressive, imperialist, like a call for spreading pax Americana. At last a notion that at least addresses the subject of American security. But what does it have to do with aid? He concludes that "we can either build stability in chaotic nations now, or wait until we feel forced to flatten them in another Afghan-style campaign - and then try to rebuild them afterward."
I could not agree more. But one cannot "build stability" on the foundation of a "lousy regime," anymore than one can erect a skyscraper on a swamp. Any contractor will tell you that the first step of construction is to clear the site, which brings us back to the eradication of "lousy regimes." Mr. Mallaby set out to prove the necessity of doubling (!) the foreign aid budget; he succeeded in constructing an argument for doubling the defense budget.
