(bottom & links
FOREIGN AID
jerry
jerry-VA@speakeasy removethistext dot net
Rev 11Sept05; 22Aug06
(left) $5 million from India.
India's Ambassador to the USA, Ronen
Sen, left, hands a check for five million dollars to American Red Cross
President & CEO, Marsha Evans, 8 September 2005.
(right)
United States Ambassador to East Timor, Joseph Grover Rees and
East Timorese Prime Minister Min Mari
Alkatini carry wreaths of flowers down to the waters of the sea on 9
Sept. The ceremony in the East Timorese
capital of Dili was meant to show mutual respect for nature and East Timorese sympathy for American's
suffering.
(left) British and French aid
arrives in a European Airbus cargo plane and
waits to be unloaded at Brookley
Airfield, Mobile, Alabama.
(right)
Grain piles up in the Midwest.
Leon Corzine, President of the
National Corn Growers Association,
tries to arrange shipping in
Assumption, Illinois, 9 Sept 05.
POST-SCRIPT
As we look back on the turn of the
millennium and the US's loss of the power to lead the world,
people will point to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the futile
attempts to invent a new enemy, a terrorist in every temple.
What went wrong?
Some will say that, just as a new
ideological war against Muslim fundamentalism was beginning, the United
States turned around and attacked its own values of individual
freedom. How can you win a war of ideas by trashing your
own? Many will never offer a cogent analysis, because they are
just rolling on the floor laughing -- at bringing democracy to the
world while you decimate your own, of fighting religious fundamentalism
overseas with a government based on exploiting the same thing at home (Evangelicals, the Rapture),
laughing at running a science-and-technology civilization based on denial of physical reality and Nature.
But the most unanimous agreement on
why the society seemed only able to destroy itself will come from
the scholars of foreign policy and foreign aid. The once-great
country turned to unilateralism and bullying just when the planet
became globalized and interdependent. Arguments raged --
did they fail to see it, or were they unable to understand it?
But all agreed it was the central failure.
Rev 13Aug2011, better links, minor text fix
