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Last week the White House got the green light for yet another $75 billion to be spent on the Iraqi invasion and on it’s favourite new form of at-home repression, homeland security. This is on top of the $360 billion budgeted for ‘defence’ every year – an annual military budget that exceeds the combined annual military budgets of the next 25 top countries! The sums are mind-boggling, but to put them in some sort of perspective, the cost of a single cruise missile costs $800,000, which means that the opening blitz on Baghdad, when 320 missiles were dropped in a single day, cost the US a stupendous $256 million. Considering that the war was touted as a “humanitarian war,” this has to be the biggest single expenditure of “aid” in world history.
Last year, after America finished bombing the living hell out of Afghanistan (while still never managing to get hold of Osama bin Laden), the United Nations estimated that Afghanistan would need at least $10 billion for reconstruction over the following five years. The US, which had just spent $4.5bn on bombing the country, offered a measly $300m for the first year of reconstruction and refused to make any commitment for subsequent years. This year, George Bush managed to “forget” to produce an aid budget for Afghanistan at all until he was forced to provide another $300m by Congress. That George Dubya! Ain’t he such a great liberator! SchNEWS is overwhelmed by his boundless generosity and concern for oppressed and suffering peoples throughout the world. However, the US government’s true priorities are highlighted by the amount it’s willing to shell-out on a single stealth bomber—$1.26 billion—which is about the same amount as America gives in aid each year to sub-Saharan Africa.
And while the US and UK have focused their budgets and military might on Iraq, the United Nations is facing a massive shortfall in feeding the world’s poorest people: In the drought-struck Horn of Africa, 11 million Ethiopians are at risk from hunger, yet only half their food needs have been pledged by richer nations. In neighbouring Eritrea, two thirds of the population face starvation, but just over 2 per cent of the $163 million asked for by the UN has been offered. Southern Africa is also in the grips of drought with 14 million people in desperate need of food aid yet Western aid has been trickling in. In Burundi, almost one sixth of the inhabitants have been forced out of their homes by conflict and natural disasters. The country has now been officially listed as the third poorest nation on earth, but has received only 3% of its UN request.
Two and a half years ago at the Labour party conference, Prime Sinister Blair talked about Africa as “a scar on the conscience of the world, but if the world focused on it, we could heal it.” Now, however, Tony’s so focused on scarring Iraq with his war of conscience that any chance of helping Africa is remote at best. As journalist George Monbiot points out, “The payments and promises that have been extracted so far chart the collapse of international concern for the people of almost every nation except Iraq.” Yet in the post war carve-up of Iraq, while Western companies battle for control of resources, it will be the Iraqi people’s turn be forgotten by their ‘liberators’, just as the people of Afghanistan have been.
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