Reckonings: a journal of justice, hope and history

CARE cares

A note by Hendrik Hertzberg of The New Yorker. It's good to see evidence of thoughtful development policy. Too bad that, as in this instance, it's so often a decision to resist or reject the bad development policy of the US government. Better by far, though, than attending to one's own bottom line and ignoring pernicious effects on others.

Here's Hertzberg:

This story, from last Thursday’s front page of the planet’s only indispensable newspaper, details an admirable act of courage and leadership by a venerable nonprofit.

The gist: CARE—one of the world’s great relief organizations, founded in 1945 to help victims of the Second World War, the outfit that gave the language the “care package”—is refusing $45 million in federal handouts because “American food aid is not only plagued with inefficiencies, but also may hurt some of the very poor people it aims to help.” The way the system works, the Times’s Celia Dugger writes,

the United States government buys the goods from American agribusinesses, ships them overseas, mostly on American-flagged carriers, and then donates them to the aid groups as an indirect form of financing. The groups sell the products on the market in poor countries and use the money to finance their antipoverty programs. It amounts to about $180 million a year.

To put it, er, less charitably, the program subsidizes the already amply subsidized American megafarming and shipping industries in the guise of (and, no doubt, with the more or less sincere aim of) helping the starving millions. CARE and the other relief organizations give moral cover (and pocket the cover charge). A conspicuous result is that indigenous farmers are driven to ruin when the local market is flooded with cheap substitutes for local produce. It’s a high-tech, lobbyist-driven variation on the old theme of giving a man a fish instead of a fishing pole. CARE has concluded that despite its cut, the game is at best a wash as far as its humanitarian goals are concerned.

Even for one of the biggest relief organizations on earth, $45 million—that’s $45 million a year—puts quite a hole in the budget, one that will have to be filled contributor by contributor on the phone, plate by plate at benefit dinners. This wouldn’t be a bad moment to kick in a few bucks.

“What’s happened to humanitarian organizations over the years is that a lot of us have become contractors on behalf of the government,” said George Odo of CARE. “That’s sad but true. It compromised our ability to speak up when things went wrong.”

This story, from last Thursday’s front page of the planet’s only indispensable newspaper, details an admirable act of courage and leadership by a venerable nonprofit.

The gist: CARE—one of the world’s great relief organizations, founded in 1945 to help victims of the Second World War, the outfit that gave the language the “care package”—is refusing $45 million in federal handouts because “American food aid is not only plagued with inefficiencies, but also may hurt some of the very poor people it aims to help.” The way the system works, the Times’s Celia Dugger writes,

the United States government buys the goods from American agribusinesses, ships them overseas, mostly on American-flagged carriers, and then donates them to the aid groups as an indirect form of financing. The groups sell the products on the market in poor countries and use the money to finance their antipoverty programs. It amounts to about $180 million a year.

To put it, er, less charitably, the program subsidizes the already amply subsidized American megafarming and shipping industries in the guise of (and, no doubt, with the more or less sincere aim of) helping the starving millions. CARE and the other relief organizations give moral cover (and pocket the cover charge). A conspicuous result is that indigenous farmers are driven to ruin when the local market is flooded with cheap substitutes for local produce. It’s a high-tech, lobbyist-driven variation on the old theme of giving a man a fish instead of a fishing pole. CARE has concluded that despite its cut, the game is at best a wash as far as its humanitarian goals are concerned.

Even for one of the biggest relief organizations on earth, $45 million—that’s $45 million a year—puts quite a hole in the budget, one that will have to be filled contributor by contributor on the phone, plate by plate at benefit dinners. This wouldn’t be a bad moment to kick in a few bucks.

Chris Hedges: “The war in Iraq is about to get worse—much worse.”

No one has said it as compellingly, as plainly and persuasively, as Chris Hedges.

Beyond Disaster

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20070806_beyond_disaster/ 

Posted on Aug 6, 2007

By Chris Hedges

Chris Hedges, the former Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times, spent seven years in the Middle East.  He was part of the paper's team of reporters who won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for coverage of global terrorism.  He is the author of "War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning." His latest book is "American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America."

The war in Iraq is about to get worse—much worse.  The Democrats' decision to let the war run its course, while they frantically wash their hands of responsibility, means that it will sputter and stagger forward until the mission collapses.  This will be sudden.  The security of the Green Zone, our imperial city, will be increasingly breached.  Command and control will disintegrate.  And we will back out of Iraq humiliated and defeated.  But this will not be the end of the conflict.  It will, in fact, signal a phase of the war far deadlier and more dangerous to American interests. 

Iraq no longer exists as a unified country.  The experiment that was Iraq, the cobbling together of disparate and antagonistic patches of the Ottoman Empire by the victorious powers in the wake of World War I, belongs to the history books.  It will never come back.  The Kurds have set up a de facto state in the north, the Shiites control most of the south and the center of the country is a battleground.  There are 2 million Iraqis who have fled their homes and are internally displaced. Another 2 million have left the country, most to Syria and Jordan, which now has the largest number of refugees per capita of any country on Earth. An Oxfam report estimates that one in three Iraqis are in need of emergency aid, but the chaos and violence is so widespread that assistance is impossible.  Iraq is in a state of anarchy.  The American occupation forces are one more source of terror tossed into the caldron of suicide bombings, mercenary armies, militias, massive explosions, ambushes, kidnappings and mass executions.  But wait until we leave.

It was not supposed to turn out like this.  Remember all those visions of a democratic Iraq, visions peddled by the White House and fatuous pundits like Thomas Friedman and the gravel-voiced morons who pollute our airwaves on CNN and Fox News?  They assured us that the war would be a cakewalk.  We would be greeted as liberators.  Democracy would seep out over the borders of Iraq to usher in a new Middle East.  Now, struggling to salvage their own credibility, they blame the debacle on poor planning and mismanagement.

There are probably about 10,000 Arabists in the United States—people who have lived for prolonged periods in the Middle East and speak Arabic.  At the inception of the war you could not have rounded up more than about a dozen who thought this was a good idea.  And I include all the Arabists in the State Department, the Pentagon and the intelligence community.  Anyone who had spent significant time in Iraq knew this would not work.  The war was not doomed because Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz did not do sufficient planning for the occupation.  The war was doomed, period.  It never had a chance.  And even a cursory knowledge of Iraqi history and politics made this apparent.

This is not to deny the stupidity of the occupation.  The disbanding of the Iraqi army; the ham-fisted attempt to install the crook and, it now turns out, Iranian spy Ahmed Chalabi in power; the firing of all Baathist public officials, including university professors, primary school teachers, nurses and doctors; the failure to secure Baghdad and the vast weapons depots from looters; allowing heavily armed American units to blast their way through densely populated neighborhoods, giving the insurgency its most potent recruiting tool—all ensured a swift descent into chaos.  But Iraq would not have held together even if we had been spared the gross incompetence of the Bush administration.  Saddam Hussein, like the more benign dictator Josip Broz Tito in the former Yugoslavia, understood that the glue that held the country together was the secret police. 

Iraq, however, is different from Yugoslavia.  Iraq has oil—lots of it.  It also has water in a part of the world that is running out of water.  And the dismemberment of Iraq will unleash a mad scramble for dwindling resources that will include the involvement of neighboring states.  The Kurds, like the Shiites and the Sunnis, know that if they do not get their hands on water resources and oil they cannot survive.  But Turkey, Syria and Iran have no intention of allowing the Kurds to create a viable enclave.  A functioning Kurdistan in northern Iraq means rebellion by the repressed Kurdish minorities in these countries. The Kurds, orphans of the 20th century who have been repeatedly sold out by every ally they ever had, including the United States, will be crushed.  The possibility that Iraq will become a Shiite state, run by clerics allied with Iran, terrifies the Arab world.  Turkey, as well as Saudi Arabia, the United States and Israel, would most likely keep the conflict going by arming Sunni militias.  This anarchy could end with foreign forces, including Iran and Turkey, carving up the battered carcass of Iraq.  No matter what happens, many, many Iraqis are going to die.  And it is our fault. 

The neoconservatives—and the liberal interventionists, who still serve as the neocons' useful idiots when it comes to Iran—have learned nothing.  They talk about hitting Iran and maybe even Pakistan with airstrikes.  Strikes on Iran would ensure a regional conflict.  Such an action has the potential of drawing Israel into war—especially if Iran retaliates for any airstrikes by hitting Israel, as I would expect Tehran to do.  There are still many in the U.S. who cling to the doctrine of pre-emptive war, a doctrine that the post-World War II Nuremberg laws define as a criminal "war of aggression."

The occupation of Iraq, along with the Afghanistan occupation, has only furthered the spread of failed states and increased authoritarianism, savage violence, instability and anarchy.  It has swelled the ranks of our real enemies—the Islamic terrorists—and opened up voids of lawlessness where they can operate and plot against us.  It has scuttled the art of diplomacy.  It has left us an outlaw state intent on creating more outlaw states.  It has empowered Iran, as well as Russia and China, which sit on the sidelines gleefully watching our self-immolation.  This is what George W. Bush and all those "reluctant hawks" who supported him have bequeathed us. 

What is terrifying is not that the architects and numerous apologists of the Iraq war have learned nothing, but that they may not yet be finished.

 

Retire that metaphor!

On reflection, I think it's time to retire the metaphor of canary in the mine, at least in our assessment of environmental well-being. I nominated honey bees for that role a couple of days ago, and their disappearance is dramatic and ominous. But any review of the range of precipitous species decline and destruction offers so many other candidates for that grim distinction that I imagine a mine more full of innocent birds and beasts than miners. Consider only the birds. I don't know how canaries are faring, but Audubon Society research published in 2004 says 70 percent of grassland bird species, 36 percent of shrub-land birds and 25 percent of forest birds are declining.