United States Agency for Inter ... WTF?

Seriously, WTF?

Image by me.

The United States Agency for International Development has always been a vehicle to project soft power for the purpose of furthering the interests of the United States. It was ginned up as a way to supply funding for people who may have had the same general ideas as us¹, but actually funding them via trackable methods might have been a bit diplomatically … iffy.

Certainly, they did some legitimate funding, but most of it was quite less than legitimate. Yes, a million dollars from Uncle Sam to the survivors of a natural disaster in Outer Graustarkia goes some way towards engendering happy thoughts towards Americans², but $50k to a anti-government group in a country where the official government motto is “Death To America” makes a great deal of strategic sense.

When you’re sending money to an Congolese African warlord to enable him to make the lives of Soviet troops foreign mercenary advisory staff short uncomfortable³ you don’t label the funds “Payments For Ears”, you call it something like “Bonus Infant Formula”, everybody’s conscience is clean, and folks sleep well at night⁴.

So when the news started coming out about where current USAID funds were going, I was mildly amused. I thought that some kids in the office were getting really inventive about naming stuff, and while I approve of inventiveness I thought they were putting maybe a little too much brain-sweat into making up items — hell, I had a pretty good idea of why the U.S. gov’t might spend $7.9 million in Sri Lanka, but putting “Avoiding Binary-Gendered Language” on the line item was just a bit over the top.

And I sighed, realising that the average American just wasn’t going to understand the intricacies of the Great Game.

Then I found out that, yeah, USAID actually funded a Sri Lankan organisation called MEND that … educated journalists on the “importance of using gender pronouns”.

Pretty sure Rita heard the Windows shut-down noise coming from my ears, as I sat, blinking at the screen in confusion.

I am not a naïf. I understand — rather well — the complexities of politics and diplomacy on the global scale, and why funding the purchase of Hi-Luxes for a splinter group anxious to make Boko Haram’s world a little less safe might need to appear to be something else. I have no problem with tax dollars being spent on the sneak to make enemies of the United States uncomfortable, and I realize that if the vast majority of Americans were informed as to how the international sausage was made, it would “Look bad in the newspapers and upset civilians at their breakfasts.”⁵

If my tax dollars are spent furthering the interests of the United States of America by putting cheese-wire around the necks of scaffy little terrorist bugsnipes in the night, calling the funds “Pakistani Production of Pirates of Penzance” makes perfect sense to me.

However, spending USAID funds on projects that DO NOT further the interests of the United States of America — indeed, furthering projects that will set-back the interests of the United States of America — is not in the purview of the United States Agency for International Development. That agency has lost its way, and either needs to be brought back into the fold with a quickness, or be dissolved.

Ian

1. Scum-sucking Siberian Snow-Pimps are Bad, mkay?

2. Less so than you’d think, honestly.

3. Allegedly.

4. Except for those nasty mercenary advisory staff. Allegedly.

5. The eternal wisdom of Lieutenant Gonville Bromhead.