The Mystery of Foreign Aid

I couldn't say that I have an informed opinion about the controversy that makes for the subject of this Glenn Kessler article in The Washington Post. I was, however, somewhat heartened to read this lead: "Shortly after Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice took office in 2005, she was surprised to discover that her staff could not answer a simple query: How much does the United States spend each year on promoting democracy overseas? [...] After nine months, Rice finally got her answer: $1.2 billion."

It dawned on me to wonder about this one morning in 2004 and I was foolish enough to think that Google and Nexis would cough up the answer. It's possible that critics of the streamlining process that Rice has tried to implement are right, but she's certainly correct to be disturbed by how murky the traditional process has made things.

Comments

Whoa. I thought we were spending $12 billion a MONTH on democracy promotion in Iraq. The Prez said we're bringing "freedom and democracy to the Iraqis". Doesn't that count?

Posted by Dennis Doubleday | July 22, 2007 1:04 AM

yeah, it seems simultaneously too high and too low.

I have a hard time seeing where they're spending $1.2 billion on 'democracy promotion' where that consists of the exchange of ideas as opposed to the exchange of gunfire.

Posted by Jon H | July 22, 2007 1:17 AM

Yeah, it must have been hard for her to adjust coming from the outside...

Wait she was NSA for years before that? And she just thought about that when she got State?

Posted by Rob | July 22, 2007 1:59 AM

You would think that the NSA who was asleep at the switch on 9/11 would have been fired instead of promoted, wouldn't you?

Posted by merlallen | July 22, 2007 2:43 AM

there's a perennial game/serious journalistic enterprise about how silly the Merkins are for thinking that we spend X percent on foreign aid but we really spend Y percent of X percent. But I think there's a genuine sense that all our military bases, military adventures, military supplies to prop up various crappy regimes are just pissed away, and that is pretty accurate. Maybe the ignorant masses are onto something.

Posted by Little Boots | July 22, 2007 3:20 AM

I think we can all see the difference between the "let's buy mosquito nets and build clinics in Thailand and Mozambique" form of foreign aid that are more humanitarian orientated and the "let's give Israel and Egypt military supplies so they don't kill each other" and other forms of foreign aid that are military aid.

Posted by Reality Man | July 22, 2007 6:18 AM

Everything you need to know about U.S. foreign aid is right here:

http://qesdb.usaid.gov/gbk/index.html

"Democracy" is kind of a vague term, though.

Guns and butter are better terms.

Posted by alphie | July 22, 2007 7:23 AM

This is one of those questions that really reveals the emptyness at the top, and the glassy-eyed apathy at the bottom, of our society.

We know, of course, the real question Rice was asking- how much are we spending on propaganda and funding for rightwing groups that want to overthrow actual foreign democracies like Venezuela?

At this point, any rational person could only reach for the bottle and pour a stiff one, reflecting that it will indeed be a long night that follows the twilight of our reason. To even discuss the matter requires the hard-bitten cynicism of one of Raymond Chandler's private eyes, and a descent into a cine noir world composed of colorless shifting shadows. A world in which every official person is rotten to the core and there are no happy endings.

But we can simplify the matter by looking at the big picture and asking what the net effect of our policies and actions are on democracy. Here the answer becomes quite plain- a heavy US involvement in the matters of a foreign nation will usually result in delaying the development of democratic government by 20-30 years. Tens of millions of people will be driven from the land into urban slums where they will be ruled by gangsters working with politicians. Our spending for mosquito nets will be reckoned in a few millions, our subsidies to the police and army of the dictator will be reckoned in the tens of billions.

By now the bottle should be about half empty and you should be ready to confidently pronounce, as most Americans do when asked by pollsters, that we spend about a quarter of our national budget providing foreign aid, because we want to promote democracy.

Because we are The World's Leading Democracy and The Most Generous People In The World. Everybody knows that!

Posted by serial catowner | July 22, 2007 11:14 AM