If you think more than a trickle of that $ made it past the sticky hands of African dictators whose favor Bush sought, you are delusional. Speaking of billions of tax dollars going to corrupt organizations...HALLIBURTON!
Haliburton got several $billions/year in contracts from Clinton too. Could it just be they're actually qualified to do what the govt. wants to contract them for? In any case: http://www.thenational.ae/article/20081022/OPINION/193766832/1080?template=opinion Could Africa be the real legacy of George Bush? Sean Jacobs Last Updated: October 22. 2008 11:54PM UAE / GMT US policy towards Africa since the late 1950s has been characterised by neglect, incoherence or wilfully undermining the continent and its people. That’s until George W Bush, whom many are crediting with a much more substantial commitment to Africa’s welfare. Only this week, the former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan and the international aid campaigner Bob Geldof have both showered praise on the efficacy of the president’s African initiatives. Before he came to power in 2000, Mr Bush said he “was not into nation building” in Africa, but 9/11 changed that: he publicly rejected “the paternalistic notion that treats African countries as charity cases, or a model of exploitation that only seeks to buy up their resources”, and backed his words with action. Pepfar (the President’s Emergency Programme for Aids Relief), created in 2003, supplies 1.7 million Africans with antiretroviral drugs. Development assistance tripled from $2 billion in 2000 to $6 billion in 2008, mainly to eradicate tropical diseases such as malaria, and the Millennium Challenge Account promises to spend $3.7 billion in 10 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa that practise “good government”, tackle corruption and promote free market policies. Bush also takes credit for the democratic transition in Liberia. In 2003, when he first visited Africa, Liberia was engulfed in a violent civil war. Journalists and Africans he met peppered him with questions about US intervention. A small contingent of 100 US troops was stationed in the country, which Bush tripled. US observers credit that “surge” as a major factor in hastening the rebel leader Charles Taylor’s flight to Nigeria. Not everyone, of course, is impressed. Critics say Pepfar is driven by ideological considerations that undermine its effectiveness. A third of its funds must be spent on abstinence programmes and it discourages condom distribution, except to high-risk groups such as truck drivers and prostitutes. And they argue that the three factors driving US policy in Africa skew priorities away from real needs. The first is access to natural resources. Africa produces 90 per cent of the world’s cobalt (used in aircraft jet engines), 80 per cent of coltan (computers and cell phones) and 20 per cent of petroleum. America imports 18 per cent of its crude oil from West Africa against 17 per cent from the Gulf, and the projection is 25 per cent by 2015. Second is China’s growing influence. Chinese state-owned companies have built factories, roads and other infrastructure across the continent. It supplies governments with large loans with few strings and has shielded rogue African states (Sudan and Zimbabwe) from sanctions in international bodies. Finally there is the “war on terror”. Mr Bush said as much in February: “If Africa were to continue on the old path of decline, it would be more likely to produce failed states, foster ideologies of radicalism and spread violence across borders.” America says it wants to create a different legacy for the United States on the continent that emphasises partnership, democracy and respect, but democracy activists cannot square this with some recent actions. The US was the first western government to declare the violence in Darfur genocide, but the CIA has also been accused of working with Sudan’s notorious state security agency. US officials insist that the two issues — condemning genocide and partnership with Sudan to fight terrorism — are unrelated. The Ethiopian President, Meles Zenawi, who won a biased and fraudulent election in 2005 (more than 200 people were killed in election violence), remains a key US ally. With tacit American backing, he invaded Somalia to remove an Islamist government that had some popular legitimacy and replace it with one run by weak warlords. As Reuters reported last week: “That government and the Ethiopians are now bogged down in an Iraq-style insurgency while Somali suffering has increased.” In December last year, the US was quick to declare flawed Kenyan elections free and fair despite internal intelligence that its ally, Mwai Kibaki, had been defeated. Now comes the official unveiling of Africom, the US military’s new regional command to coordinate its military affairs on the continent. Until now, these responsibilities were divided between its regional headquarters in Europe, the Middle East and the Pacific. US officials are spending much of their time on the defensive about Africom’s motives. The catastrophic American military presence in Iraq does not help their cause. Since it was first publicly mooted in 2003, plans for Africom have been vague, ill-defined, confusing, and in many ways doomed. Some critics, including US congressmen and the Washington-based Africa Action, have described Africom as “the militarisation of US aid to Africa” since its arrival coincides with increased US military sales, financing and training expenditure on African countries seen as strategic for the “war on terror”. The military, clearly skittish, has announced that, for now, the Africom headquarters will be in Stuttgart, Germany. So while Mr Bush’s legacy in Africa is in many ways impressive, it is far from uncontested. It is telling that on his swansong trip to five African countries in February, US journalists travelling with the President noted that the locals — including senior officials of host governments — often cared less about Mr Bush than about Barack Obama and what he would do in the continent should he become president. They did not, it appears, ask after John McCain. Sean Jacobs is assistant professor of Afro-American and African Studies and Communication Studies at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He is co-chair of Concerned African Scholars, and blogs at Africa is a Country.
I'm going to go on a limb here and say I'm the most qualified to speak about AFRICOM, since I just spent 2 months in West Africa as the AFRICOM (still 6thFleet at the time) liaison to the French Navy and various West African countries. The average African on the street, once they found out I was American (can't hide the accent yet) said "You voting for Obama?" Politics is a big deal there. They think if you don't vote for him, it's probably because you're racist...they think it would be a good novelty to have an African-American as President. Neither the French nor the Africans could generally tell me about Obama's policies, whether it was Arrican-related or not. OTOH, our culture is very different from theirs. We come in with a checklist of things they've asked us to do to help, we do them, and leave. They are very much about "friendships" first, and if the work gets done, great. If not, next time. Our interest there is NOT about oil. It's about helping those countries develop their militaries/police (at least my part of the job was) and to increase regional cooperation to stop bad guys (pirates, oil thieves, drug smugglers, illegal fishermen, etc).
