International Affairs: June 2005 Archives
(More on the follies of foreign aid.)
Another illustration of why most foreign aid does more harm than good: "£220bn stolen by Nigeria's corrupt rulers".
Gordon Brown, the Chancellor, has spoken of a new Marshall Plan for Africa. But Nigeria's rulers have already pocketed the equivalent of six Marshall Plans. After that mass theft, two thirds of the country's 130 million people - one in seven of the total African population - live in abject poverty, a third is illiterate and 40 per cent have no safe water supply.With more people and more natural resources than any other African country, Nigeria is the key to the continent's success.
Mallam Nuhu Ribadu, the chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, set up three years ago, said that £220 billion was "squandered" between independence from Britain in 1960 and the return of civilian rule in 1999.
Unless we get to control how the money is spent and distributed, we're fools to give the thugs that rule Africa another penny. Every cent we give them is used to further entrench their own power and to oppress the African people. Most foreign aid is a literal crime against humanity -- it's too bad that ridiculously ignorant celebrities can't see the effects of their bleeding hearts. The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.
Saddam Hussein is delusional and he really doesn't know what's going on in the world outside his prison. According to some of the soldiers who guarded the former dictator, he even expects to return to power.
Sean: "But he wanted to be friends with them. Towards the end, he was saying that he doesn't hold any hard feelings and he just wanted to talk to Bush, to make peace with him."Jesse: "He thought that Bush could forgive and forget about what has happened. 'He knows I have nothing, no mass weapons. He knows he'll never find them.' "
Based on my understanding of Arab culture (poor at best), Hussein wants to make "friends" with President Bush because in his experience power is built and maintained through personal relationships with other powerful people. Arab governments are not ruled by laws, but by the whims of individual "power brokers" who conspire together to stay on top (much like mob bosses). They promote and reward people who are loyal to them personally and punish dissenters. When threatened, they resolve the issue by either killing the boss who's threatening them or making "friends". Hussein was never the only power in Iraq, but he stayed on top because he knew who to make friends with and who to kill. He knew how to play all the other sides against each other, and he made it profitable for other ambitious bosses to fall in line rather than fight him. Hussein probably thinks that if he could talk to President Bush they could reach an arrangement of some sort that would put Hussein back in power. Think Sopranos.
A final thought: all bureaucracies work this way to some degree. The benefit of rule-of-law is that it reduces the ability of the wielders of public power to use that power for their own benefit. Loyalty to a person is undermined by loyalty to an ideal, the law, which in and of itself does not hand out favors or punishments based on personal ambition. This idea is why, for instance, I'm so opposed to the lack of enforcement of our immigration laws. When laws are only enforced based on the whims of the individual enforcers, a society will eventually decay into a feudal bureaucracy.
I agree with the Saudi Oil Minister who says they have plenty of oil; even though Saudi Arabia may one day sell all its oil, the oil reserves of the world will never be depleted, thanks to market forces and aside from any technological innovation. I wonder though: what advantage does Saudi Arabia gain from trumpeting its wealth? The scarcer oil is, the higher its price, so why reassure people that oil is plentious?
WASHINGTON -- Saudi Arabia has plenty of oil _ more than the world is likely to need _ along with an increasing ability to refine crude oil into gasoline and other products before selling it overseas, a top Saudi official says."The world is more likely to run out of uses for oil than Saudi Arabia is going to run out of oil," Adel al-Jubeir, top foreign policy adviser for Saudi Arabia's de facto ruler Crown Prince Abdullah, said Wednesday. ...
High oil prices benefit the Saudi economy in the short run, but al-Jubeir said his nation wants a stable price that won't hurt consumers so much that they reduce their energy demands.
Maybe that's the real problem then. The Saudis are the world's largest oil producers -- and have the lowest production costs -- but they don't have the ability to increase production volume enough to take advantage of surging demand and high prices. If they can push prices down, they can put their competition out of business because their competitors can't produce oil for the same low cost the Saudis can. Not only that, but as al-Jubeir said, lower oil costs will reduce the incentive for consumers to move to alternate fuels.
Update 050628:
Then again William Tucker and Matthew R. Simmons think the Saudis are lying, or deceived themselves.
My brother Nicholas emailed me with the following great idea:
On C-SPAN today, a professor (he's from Berkeley, but he's a conservative economist and law professor) named John Yoo had a cool idea: the US should create a mock terrorist organization to compete with Al Qaeda. There could be websites, recruiting efforts, they could claim credit for others' terrorist attacks, etc... the whole effort would draw people and money AWAY from Al Qaeda, and would make Al Qaeda's claims and communications suspect in the Muslim world, among common people and potential/current terrorists.Of course, the whole strategy might be illegal according to current
law, but it is totally interesting.I can't find any article by John Yoo describing this, and the
transcript is not available yet....
Anyone hear of anything like this before?
Paul Wolfowitz took over as president of the World Bank yesterday, and despite what many leftist writers think I have a feeling that he'll do more good for the poor of the world than most commentators expect. Even those who don't like him admit that he's smart, and the main complaint seems to be that he seems more keen on lending money for hard infrastructure programs than soft social programs.
For the past decade or two, the World Bank had been making an effort -- or at least talking more -- about making low-to-zero interest loans to social development projects in developing countries, stuff like pensions and education. This is contrast to the old school, wherein the WB would make enormous loans to huge infrastructure projects -- highways, hydropower, etc. -- that would enrich the huge American companies (see: Halliburton) that built them, leave the poor poor, and put the countries themselves in crippling debt to the U.S., which they could never possibly hope to escape from, leaving them, effectively, permanently indentured American colonies.
Except, of course, that many non-American companies win these contracts also. Even in Iraq, which America dominates militarily, the plan Mr. Wolfowitz drafted for reconstruction opened prime contract bidding to 63 countries. Bidding means that the contracts are awarded to the company with the best/cheapest proposal. Even though some countries were (initially) excluded as a matter of American foreign policy, that same explicit consideration wouldn't apply to the World Bank.
