Category Archives: Foreign Aid

Foreign Interventionism Chickens Come Home to Roost in Balkans

America, Foreign Aid, Islam, Neoconservatism, The West

Europeans take a little longer than Middle Easterners to get lathered up over American meddling. Clinton and his coterie of left-liberal neoconservative advisers led the 1999 NATO intervention into Yugoslavia, intervening in this centuries-old, ongoing dispute on the side of the ethnic Albanians (and their terrorist arm, the al Qaida-backed Islamic Kosovo Liberation Army).

There was no genocide. The killings were of the large scale craven kind the locals had engaged in for centuries. Soon after the “salve” we Americans applied to solve the problem, Serbs were ethnically cleansed from Kosovo, leaving only approximately 120,000 under NATO protection. Ancient churches were burned to the ground by the triumphant Albanian Muslims who turned on the Serbs.

America’s national interests were not served in choosing Albanian Muslims over Christian Orthodox Serbs, although Kosovars promise they practice what they term euphemistically “Islam lite.”

Bush followed in Clinton’s trails to hail Kosovo’s recent declaration of independence. Kosovo is home to the most sacred of Serbian relics and lands. It was Christian before it was Islamized.

Up-to-the-minute reports speak of close to a million Serbians gathering in Belgrade to protest the Kosovo declaration of independence and to express anger at the US. It’s all very well when a handful of people on the Side We Don’t Like break into the U.S. embassy and wreck it. But when close to a million march in solidarity against American policies—a decade hence, no less—they become harder for neocon think tanks to dismiss and diss.

For once, the blame lies squarely at the feat of Hillary’s husband. Former Clintonite, James Rubin, Christiane Amanpour’s toy boy, blames the Russians for the fever that is gripping Serbians—the Russian and Serb leadership. We all know that the people upon whom we visit our policies are but puppets manipulated by evil marionettes–unless those pulling the strings are American. Then the puppets—or puppies—are praised.

Looking for Love in the All the Wrong Places

Africa, Bush, Constitution, Foreign Aid, Terrorism

As if you needed more proof of Bush’s worth:

Africans love him—and not only because he is a Strongman, a real tribal chief—but because he has been more generous with his tribe’s money that his predecessors.

The idea that Bush has saved African lives is idiotic—any government-to-government transfer, which is all foreign aid is—goes to maintaining the mandarins that man the aid bureaucracies in the US, and straight into the Swiss bank accounts of the recipient African heads of country. The latter don’t even conceal their cupidity.

American individuals, estates, foundations, and corporations gave $241 billion to charity in 2003. Foreign aid through the state amounts to only $15 billion per year, most of which is squandered.

If we are to help Mr. Shabalala, who has practically screwed himself to death (and infected his wife with HIV, private, voluntary charity is the mightiest, most moral, and most efficient way to do so.

Bush’s legacy on this front is to have gone from preaching “trade not aid,” to instituting trade tariffs, and increasing U.S. foreign aid during his unfortunate tenure many times over. Where Bush has certainly innovated is by tying new spending to his terrorism-fighting strategy, thus ending for good the debate on the corrupting effects of foreign welfare, since anything that ostensibly fights terrorism is sacrosanct.