America's Warrior Women

FIGHT OF THE VALKYRIES: Update Tues Mar 23 3:45pm: Maureen Dowd in NYT also notes (colorfullly) the Lady Hawks vs. Male Doves split in the Administration on Libya

Breaking news 7pm: US starts bombing Libya to knock out anti-aircraft missiles, to begin enforcing no-fly-zone.

The Christian Science Monitor notes one difference between those in the Administration who argued for the war in Libya, and those who argued against it.

FOR: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, UN Ambassador Susan Rice, and National Security Council senior aide Samantha Power

AGAINST: Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen, and White House chief of staff William Daley

Let me see, what difference, um, do we notice here, um,  some difference, let's not get too essentialist here...if you figure it out, let me know.

David Rieff takes on Hillary’s “new approach” to global health

In a blog post for The New Republic, author David Rieff calls Hillary Clinton’s approach to development naïve, contradictory, and muddled. His post is a response to Clinton’s speech, delivered last week at SAIS, about the administration’s six-year, $63 billion Global Health Initiative. Rieff’s critique rests on three main arguments, all of which will be familiar to Aid Watch readers.

1) Insisting that development is going to be “elevated” to the level of diplomacy and defense won’t make it so. Better to follow the money and see where the real priorities lie:

The secretary was already on record as claiming that the initiative would be a “crucial component of American foreign policy and a signature element of smart power.” On its face, this seems highly unlikely. Anyone doubting this should ponder the fact that one military program, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter—a weapons platform that no one claims is needed for the counter-insurgency operations that are currently at the core of the U.S. military’s requirements—is on course to cost $325 billion, and may well go higher....In other words, Washington is going to spend on a ‘signature element’ of its smart power less than one-fifth of what it is already committed to spending on something that even the Pentagon does not claim is a signature element of our hard power. No, money may not be everything, but 'follow the money' remains the best advice for understanding what the priorities of the American government really are, as she has claimed before.

2) The bureaucratic structure of the initiative verges on the absurd, fails to make any one agency responsible for success or accountable for failure, and seems almost designed for a meltdown:

[I]n either designing or at least signing off on a program which grants authority for day to day running of the program to three separate agencies (USAID, the Centers for Disease Control, and PEPFAR, the Bush-era President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief), each with their own institutional interests, while calling on the resources and expertise of the National Institutes of Health, the Peace Corps, not to mention the departments of Defense and of Health and Human Services (“among others,” as Secretary Clinton said, without irony, in her speech), all reporting to Deputy Secretary Lew, the administration has laid the groundwork for a bureaucratic calamity.

[We would add to this only that Jack Lew, the designated leader of this crew, is leaving his post, no word yet on his replacement, which could take months.]

3) Politicians who assert, as Clinton does here, that health aid can be used as a public diplomacy tool to win the hearts and minds of America’s reluctant allies are basing this view on too little evidence and simplistic assumptions about how aid recipients come to their perceptions of the US:

A far graver mystification is Secretary Clinton’s claim that investments in global health are an important tool of public diplomacy....

…[I]f the secretary really is suggesting that that recipients of foreign aid in very poor countries are so childlike that they view these contributions as dispositive about the nature of America’s values and intentions, then however unintentionally, she is speaking of these adults as if they were children.

But perhaps this hyper-conceited, hyper-complacent conviction of America’s good intention is so internalized in U.S. policymakers—even in one as intelligent as Secretary Clinton—that they are incapable of thinking clearly about how U.S. foreign aid, whether for emergency relief, health, or long-term development, is received by its beneficiaries.

Rieff’s whole, incendiary piece is worth reading in full.

Teasing my friends at Center for Global Development: censoring for Hillary?

More updates on coverage of the big Clinton Development Speech, following up on the previous post: Chris Blattman has a negative take. Change.org some negatives, some positives, so a mixed review. The Center for Global Development (CGD) blog is positive, although mostly only about the idea of the Secretary of State even giving a whole speech devoted to development. Duncan Green at Oxfam liked some of the specific ideas in the speech. The Chronicle of Philanthropy gave an overview, citing "mixed reviews."

Mead Over disagreed with my "selectivity" complaint, saying Clinton was right to be LESS selective in health (don't just do AIDS treatment, strengthen health systems!) I confess that Mead is right on that one.

The speech host, CGD, aggregated now all the news coverage they could find, except, wait, they don't include any negative coverage...  They cited Foreign Policy — but they just gave the FP posting of the speech itself, not the review column (mine) at FP.

Oh, my dearest CGD friends, this couldn’t be some unconscious censorship of a negative view, could it?

The speech at least seems a focal point for a good discussion! Please continue to post your comments.

UPDATE: CGD has now put out a new press coverage aggregrate that includes negative coverage. I knew I could count on them, they're good people. (They certainly are a LOT more responsive than the USAID that Hillary wants to reform, who would either not answer or refuse to change or both.)

Let's show some compassion for gifted individuals like Secretary Clinton, whom politics forces to babble

This is my blog that just went up on the Foreign Policy web site on Hillary Clinton's development speech today. There's a positive ending! Plus my wife likes it! MORNING UPDATE: News coverage of Hillary's speech was overwhelmingly dominated by her plans to visit New Zealand. This supports one of two theories: (1) there was indeed too much babble, eliminating any newsworthiness, (2) the media doesn't care about development.

UPDATE 2: Nick Kristof has a much more favorable take.

Audience check: am I too nasty? should we accept a certain amount of babble as unavoidable?

Hillary illustrates perils of fuzzy human rights concepts

There is an interview with Hillary Clinton in today’s Wall Street Journal. Matthew Kaminski of the Journal asked her:

Why push human rights and democracy so hard in Africa, and not in Russia or China? Some see a double standard.

Excellent question! Hillary answers:

First I think it is important to stress that human rights remain a central driving force of our foreign policy. But I also think that it's important to look at human rights more broadly than it has been defined. Human rights are also the right to a good job and shelter over your head and a chance to send your kids to school and get health care when your wife is pregnant. It's a much broader agenda. Too often it has gotten narrowed to our detriment.

Uh oh. Is Hillary saying:

Don’t emphasize so much the traditional human rights where you can actually hold someone like Chinese and Russian rulers accountable – like the right for dissidents not to be tortured, jailed, and killed –

Because we are going to add fuzzy human rights where you can’t hold anyone accountable—rights to jobs, shelter, education, health?

Rights to basic needs have enormous moral appeal, but do they work? Progress on the first kind of human rights has happened because you could hold somebody accountable, while there is little evidence that second kind of human rights has pragmatically contributed anything to better employment, shelter, education and health (as this blog previously argued). So shifting emphasis from the first to the second slows down progress on the first, while doing little on the second.

And if the second acts as an excuse to not speak out on the first kind of traditional human rights,as Hillary seems to say...NOT good.

Hillary offers trade opportunities to Africa – unless we don’t feel like it

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had good news for Africa in the Nairobi forum yesterday on the US African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA). AGOA offers breaks from quotas and duties on African exports to the US. First enacted under Bush, AGOA is at least a partial success story, with exemplars like textile exports in Lesotho and Madagascar. Secretary Clinton yesterday endorsed new efforts to “maximize the promise of AGOA.” She declared “we are committed to trade policies that support prosperity and stability.” Except when we aren’t. AGOA privileges can be revoked for political reasons, like if the President and the US Trade Representative (USTR) decide a country does not have sufficient “rule of law.”

Which is exactly what is threatened now with that success story of textiles in Madagascar. Ever since a political crisis and change in government in Madagascar last spring, the USTR has been threatening to revoke Malagasy eligibility for AGOA, which would effectively destroy the Malagasy textile industry (worth between 6.5 and 8 percent of GDP and accounting for 50,000 jobs).

We had a previous blog post on this, which had a dramatically nonexistent effect on USTR actions.

Of course, the USTR implementing AGOA has good intentions – to promote good governance. There are two problems with this: (1) we don’t have a clue how to do this in Madagascar, and (2) why try to do it by punishing private individuals instead of the government?

On (1), Malagasy politics are not really that hard to understand, as long as you have a Ph.D. in Malagasy history, political science, sociology, economics, and familiarity with the byzantine maneuvers of the FOUR way-far-from-perfect quarreling rivals for power. All the US government asks in exchange for continuing AGOA is that these four guys who hate each other come to an instantaneous consensus on early, free, and fair elections. USTR officials confirmed to us on background yesterday that these efforts continue.

It’s not totally clear why USTR is being so insistent, when “rule of law” is so vague as to allow the eligibility of DRC, Guinea, and Guinea Bissau (as we ineffectively pointed out last time). (This arbitrariness is what justifies the snarky title of this post.)

On (2), all I have to say to elaborate on “why punish private individuals”, is – why punish private individuals?

Time is running out for Madagascar, as incentives to invest and produce for advance US orders are disappearing further the longer the USTR dithers. Political risk comes not from the Malagasy or other African governments, but from the US government’s failure to follow any consistent rule of law on how to apply the AGOA rule of law provision. This arbitrariness weakens the AGOA incentives for ALL African countries.

Please USTR, try to make Secretary of State Clinton’s promising words come true, don’t throw away one of our all-too-scarce development policy successes.