An On-Line Publication of the Anonymous Anything Society
FOREIGN AID
According to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace,
the U.S. administration submits its annual budget every year to our
Congress. This year, an appropriation of $49-billion went to our allies and
partners in the Middle East to finance the purchases of U.S military
hardware and the cost of training foreign troops to use it.
Congress rubber-stamps these requests with little regard for
whether this assistance achieves U.S. foreign policy objectives.
Such docility might be good for the American economy. It
creates jobs in many key congressional districts and provides corporate
welfare for our defense industry, but it often makes for bad foreign policy.
Too often, U.S. Military assistance disappears down a rat-hole
of corruption.
Case in point: The $89-billion that has benefited the Saudis in
the past 10 years, yet has not prevented the kingdom from getting bogged
down in a costly quagmire in Yemen.
-Phil Richardson, Storyteller and Observer of the Human Condition