America's Ignorance
Is A Threat To Humanity
By Jeffrey D.
Sachs
09 June, 2004
The International Herald Tribune
George
Tenet's resignation last week came after failures of American intelligence
in the Iraq war as well as in the lead-up to the Sept. 11 attacks. But
the U.S. government's intelligence failures extend far beyond the CIA
and the countries where America is at war or chasing terrorists.
In the world's poorest
regions, from the Andes to Central Asia, the U.S. government seems to
operate almost blindly, facing challenges that it simply does not understand
and therefore can't resolve.
This isn't a problem
that started in this Bush administration, though the combination of
ignorance and arrogance in President George W. Bush's foreign policy
has proved especially lethal.
Since the early
1980s, American development programs have been gutted, to the point
that there is little institutional understanding about societies seething
because of mass unemployment, rapid population growth, pervasive disease
and chronic
This is too bad,
because the low-income world (roughly, those who live and die on less
than $2 per day) constitutes half of humanity - and most of the places
where American troops have fought and died in recent decades.
When I went to key
Bush administration officials in 2001 to urge stepping up the battle
against the AIDS pandemic, my counterparts were lawyers, holdovers from
the cold war and political operatives.
What was lacking
was professional expertise, which was bottled up at the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health,
neither of which had been given the lead in setting AIDS policy. Nor
was USAID any better. Its budget and expertise had been so sapped by
2001 that there were few independent thinkers left, and even fewer who
knew the details of the AIDS catastrophe in Africa.
Even though there
is genuine interest in the Bush administration for battling AIDS, too
much politics and too little professionalism resulted in years of delay
in starting Bush's global AIDS initiative, and millions died as a result.
That disheartening loss of time and opportunity has been matched in
other circumstances.
When it has been
urgent in recent years to confront challenges arising from African poverty,
Andean political instability or environmental catastrophes in Asia,
there has been almost nobody to speak with in senior U.S. government
positions.
When an economic
crisis pushed Bolivia's democratically elected government over the cliff
last year, for instance, senior U.S. officials with responsibility for
South America showed that they were utterly unqualified to respond.
In truth, worrying
about places like Bolivia or Ethiopia is considered hopelessly soft
or politically irrelevant in high government circles - until disaster
strikes. That attitude is the key to understanding why the U.S. government
was unable to anticipate and head off disasters in Afghanistan, Cambodia,
Haiti, Nicaragua, Somalia, Vietnam or the many other places where America
has squandered lives and money.
The undoing of U.S.
foreign policy is captured in the budget numbers. Long gone are the
Marshall Plan times, when America dedicated several percent of its gross
domestic product to European reconstruction. The United States will
spend about $450 billion this year on the military but only $15 billion
on official development assistance.
The 30-to-1 ratio
is mirrored by a similar imbalance in American thinking. America's military
expertise is undoubted. America's ability to understand what exists
before and after wars in low-income countries is nearly nonexistent.
Changing all of
this will require much more than recognizing the errors of the Iraq
war. A good starting point would be to rebuild USAID into a pre-eminent
agency for understanding and resolving human catastrophes and security
threats arising from extreme poverty.
This agency requires
a professional, nonpoliticized leadership and staff; a new mandate to
study a world economy of startling inequalities; increased financial
resources to help fragile and impoverished countries before they fall
into chaos; and a rank as a cabinet-level department, so that expertise
gets a hearing at the centers of power. America's efforts will need
to go beyond one agency, however. The United States must have leaders
who recognize that the problems of the poor aren't trifles to leave
to do-gooders, but are vital strategic issues. For the first time in
decades, America must strive to understand problems - tropical disease,
malnutrition and the like - that are unfamiliar to Americans but are
urgent concerns of billions of people abroad.
In the case of a
superpower, ignorance is not bliss; it is a threat to Americans and
to humanity.
Jeffrey D. Sachs
is the director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University.
Copyright ©
2004 the International Herald Tribune