Earlier tonight GFactor pointed out that the rest of the world has been rather
silent about the ongoing disaster in New Orleans.
Later on I talked to my brother who reminded me of a good reason why the rest of the world might not care very much...and it has nothing to do with Iraq.
It has to do with southern Asia.
I'm sure that no one has forgotten the
tsunami disaster in south asia.
The number of people presumed dead in December's earthquake and tsunami rose to more than 290,000 today, with Indonesian authorities announcing a further increase in the number of dead.
But do you remember the Bush Administration's
original response to it?
In a news conference at U.N. headquarters in New York, Egeland called for a major international response -- and went so far as to call the U.S. government and others "stingy" on foreign aid in general.
"If, actually, the foreign assistance of many countries now is 0.1 or 0.2 percent of the gross national income, I think that is stingy, really," he said. "I don't think that is very generous."
King George actually took offense with that characterization and
said, "the person who made that statement was very misguided and ill-informed."
Thanks for clearing that up George.
Eventually Bush backed down and increased the tiny amount of aid to the cataclysmic disaster.
Fortunately, not
everyone in Washington was so willing to "educate" the rest of us as Dubya is.
"It's embarrassing," said Tim Rieser, an aide to Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), who works on foreign aid issues in the Senate and was in the Sri Lankan capital when the tsunami struck. "Nothing illustrates this more vividly than that out of a trillion-dollar budget, we provide less than 1 percent for foreign assistance and far less than 1 percent for humanitarian aid.
"Our ability to give far exceeds what we do give," Rieser said.
Of course, even when the aid amount was increased, it had
strings attached.
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.
You don't suppose that the rest of the world might actually remember what happened so recently and judge our country for it? Of course on the same day that dozens of people are dying or dead in Louisiana and Mississippi,
56 Iraqi civilians died from American bombs and the American news media hardly even noticed.
Of course the right-wing media
jumped to Bush's defense and announced: US Isn't "Stingy," It's Strategic.
Whatever the Hell that means.
And speaking of our helpful right-wing media, I noticed when making my way around Instapundit that the first group listed for giving aid to the victims of Katrina was the Red Cross.
Let's remember just a few years ago what the right-wing thought of the Red Cross when they had the nerve to poke their noses around Gitmo.
A new report by Senate Republicans lumps the 140-year-old, three-time Nobel Peace Prize recipient into the "anti-American" category and calls on the Bush Administration to reassess its funding support. "The ICRC is no longer an impartial and trustworthy guardian," writes the Senate Republican Policy Committee. "It has become yet another clamoring interest group" that has "lost its way" by adopting positions that are in "direct opposition to the advancement of US interests." The report warns, with no hint of irony, that ICRC actions threaten to "sap its credibility."
Senate Republicans thus duly prescribe the full UN-treatment: a comprehensive review by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to determine whether the annual US contribution ($1.5 billion since 1990) is advancing American interests and a GAO audit of the ICRC's core and non-core activities. The crimes committed by the ICRC, in Republican eyes, include such ghastly activities as upholding the Geneva Convention and lobbying for the Chemical Weapons Convention and the treaty against landmines.
[...]
Now, when a Red State is in trouble, suddenly the Red Cross is first on the list to give aid. Aren't those same Republicans concerned that the ICRC will work in the direct opposition to the advancement of US interests? Has Instapundit become a tool of the LiberalMediaKonspiracy?
