On famine and responsibility

It's a funny thing about we humans. A whole nation can stand transfixed over the tragic death of a lone child in Florida. Or the death of a princess. But we can lose hundreds of thousands in a typhoon or to genocide or famine and there is a general disconnect. The numbers get too big for us to grasp the enormity of the pain and the anguish and the large scale tragedies somehow lose significance. The larger the event, the more inpersonal and somehow the easier it gets for us to tune it out.

There is a horrible famine besetting the people of Somalia that is said to endanger about 2.5 million people. Al Shabaab, the local islamic terrorist front, says that the numbers are overblown and is refusing to allow international aid to the worst areas in the south and central region.

I was listening to a few aid workers on NPR saturday night and they were talking about the difficulties of working in the region. Refugees are streaming into neighboring Ethiopia and Kenya, countries suffering from their own drought, people are weary from a two decades old civil war. They come with reports or rape and robbery. Women are abandoning dying children by the sides of the roads.

The aid workers brought up an interesting statistic. There have been on the order of 15 transitional governments in Somalia over the last twenty years and scholars point out only one thing the government has been good at; stealing aid. 96% percent of all foreign aid is shunted off by the authorities. 4% reaches its intended destination. The islamist rebels in turn try to direct it to their base. Food becomes a strategic weapon.

Four percent is a horrible number. International groups have attacked the United States for not doing more in recent days but you have to wonder about the propriety when a corrupt Africa once again
puts its people in a circular firing squad. What can we do that will save starving people without reinforcing terrorists and corrupt regimes?

The aid workers say that one of the problems they are facing is that United States laws forbid dealing with terrorist groups like Al Shabaab and it works against the dying people who live in their sphere. I wish I had an answer, I don't.

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My friend Rich was over this saturday. Rich is a retired attorney and an ardent libertarian, with a capital L. While I admittedly have my own libertarian streak, there are precepts that they hold dear that I strongly disagree with, such as cessation of all foreign aid and the right of a person to privately discriminate. I have written about the latter before, the cover the Libertarians give to white supremacist groups like Stormfront that have supported them materially in the past.

In regards to the former, I think that we as Americans can never fully disengage from the world. Libertarians that advocate for total cessation become Pat Buchanan, Neville Chamberlain style isolationists.  Volunteerism can never adequately fill the void after a Killing Fields or Fukashima. The Libertarians who advocate for a complete end to foreign aid want to answer the age old question about being their brother and sister's keeper with an emphatic no.

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Maybe the libertarians are on to something. Does it make any sense to keep pouring good money after bad in areas of the world where the people don't have the good sense to elect good leaders or overthrow those that would enslave them? But can we sit back and watch and allow a couple of million people to die? Tough questions.

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In other news, The House Foreign Affairs Committee cut billions of dollars from the foreign aid requested by the White House, including funding for the UN, in a vote late on Thursday night. Barack Obama’s total request of approximately $50b. was slashed by $6.4b., including 25 percent of the budget allocated for international organizations, among them the UN.

Committee Republicans were said to be frustrated at the UN’s treatment of Israel  and that was said to be the impetus for the UN funding cut, among other concerns about the international body, as well as in the passage of an amendment prohibiting American aid to any country that votes against the United States at the UN more than 50% of the time.

This last one I find especially pernicious, you don't vote the way you want you to, we are taking our ball and going home. Not a very mature attitude for a superpower if you ask me.