Asia-Pacific, Development & Aid, Headlines, North America

TSUNAMI IMPACT: Bush Belatedly Ramps Up Disaster Response

Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Jan 3 2005 (IPS) - Amid a growing debate over whether the U.S. is "stingy" in its aid to poor countries, President George W. Bush moved quickly over the New Year’s weekend to demonstrate his concern over the plight of the survivors of last Sunday’s tsunamis that killed at least 150,000 people across the Indian Ocean.

Heeding his critics, Bush announced Friday that Washington would increase its earlier 35-million-dollar contribution to the aid effort to 350 million dollars. He then followed up Monday with personal visits to sign the condolence books at the embassies of the hardest-hit nations – Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, and Thailand.

He also made an appearance at the White House Monday morning with two former presidents, his father, George H.W. Bush, and, remarkably, Bill Clinton, to announce their leadership in a drive to solicit contributions from individual citizens and U.S. businesses for relief and reconstruction efforts. Bush Senior and Clinton then accompanied Bush on his rounds to the four embassies.

In another symbolic gesture, Bush ordered flags to be flown at half-mast all week to honour the victims.

"I think someone finally persuaded him that his early response was a (public relations) disaster," noted one Congressional aide, whose boss had called for a strong show of concern for political, if not humanitarian reasons.

"We’re showing the compassion of our nation in the swift response," Bush said Monday, noting that a U.S. aircraft carrier task force and other naval vessels, as well as U.S. supply and patrol aircraft, have already deployed as part of the relief efforts. "But the greatest source of America’s generosity is not our government: it’s the good heart of the American people."

Indeed, private charities here are reporting an unprecedented outpouring of individual contributions; in the five days immediately after the tsunami, citizens had contributed almost nine million dollars to CARE USA, one of the biggest U.S. relief organisations, while Save the Children USA reported six million dollars in contributions, and the U.S. branch of Oxfam, 7.5 million dollars.

The administration’s belated mobilisation – which included a hastily arranged trip by Secretary of State Colin Powell and Bush’s brother, Florida Governor Jeb Bush, to the region Sunday – was clearly spurred by the growing sense over the days that followed the tsunamis that this not only was just any ordinary disaster, but also that the president was missing a golden opportunity to improve his own largely disastrous image overseas, and particularly among Muslims, since the hardest-hit nation, Indonesia, is the world’s most populous Islamic country.

Whatever the concern, the pressure on Bush was exacerbated by the escalating contributions of other nations that quickly made Washington’s grudging 35 million dollars – Bush had announced 15 million dollars initially – look, as the New York Times editorialised, "miserly".

As total international contributions, led by 68 million dollars from Spain and 98 million from Britain, climbed past 500 million dollars, even Powell, who had privately argued for a greater show of concern, compared the situation to "an auction house where every day somebody has to top someone else". Bush, apparently determined to end the bidding war and restore Washington’s status as global leader, immediately approved a ten-fold increase. (It has been exceeded so far only by a 500-million-dollar commitment by Japan.)

Even while Bush was bending toward the critics, however, his right-wing supporters continued to defend the earlier pledges. In varying tones of outrage, they insisted that Washington was not "stingy" at all and pounded away at both the United Nations and its chief for humanitarian relief, Norwegian Jan Egeland, who launched the controversy in remarks to reporters a week ago.

It was Bush himself who had denounced Egeland’s characterisation of U.S. and western aid as "very misguided and ill-informed" and had gone on to insist, correctly, that the 2.4 billion dollars Washington spent in emergency aid in 2003 represented 40 percent of the total amount of emergency assistance from all bilateral donors provided that year.

Bush backers on the right-wing editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Times, and the National Review, as well in interviews on FoxNews, CNN and other media, have since indignantly claimed Egeland’s "stingy" remark as yet another reason for the U.S. to cut its ties to the U.N., in addition to their charges that Secretary-General Kofi Annan was somehow complicit in the diversions by former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein of billions of dollars in the Oil-for-Food programme.

In the last several days, they have marshaled new statistics purporting to show that, in the words of former Bush speechwriter and currently American Enterprise Institute fellow David Frum, "Americans give more and do more – not just absolutely more, but proportionately more – than any other people on earth".

The statistics, summarised in a Washington Times column by Bruce Bartlett at the right-wing National Center for Policy Analysis Monday, rely heavily on a 2003 article by Carol Adelman, a senior fellow at the neo-conservative Hudson Institute here, in which she argued that data compiled annually by the intergovernmental Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) that shows the U.S. as the stingiest western donor as measured against its gross domestic product (GDP) were misleading because they do not include private giving.

If private giving – which she defined as including all donations by U.S. citizens, churches, foundations, universities, and corporations, as well as remittances by U.S. immigrants to families in developing countries – were included, U.S. official development assistance (ODA), estimated at nearly 10 billion dollars in 2000 would rise to 71 billion dollars that year, she concluded

In his Times article, Bartlett argued that foreign direct investment (FDI), and U.S. imports from developing countries, as well as some portion of the U.S. defence budget should also be considered because of their role in maintaining global peace. "The United States carries much of the world on its back, providing other nations security, aid, and much of their investment and income," he wrote, concluding that "the charge of stinginess is unfounded".

However, one study that incorporated some of these variables released by the Washington-based Center for Global Development (CGD) and Foreign Policy (FP) magazine last spring found that, while relatively generous compared to other donor countries, private U.S. citizens did not give enough to overcome Washington’s overall cellar position among major western donors.

Including private contributions, the study found that each U.S. citizen gives the equivalent of 18 cents a day to foreign aid, of which 13 cents is from ODA. Of the 21 major donor nations, the U.S. ranks 14, but far below the leader, Egeland’s Norway at 1..26 dollars per person per day (of which 1.02 dollars is ODA), Denmark at 84 cents a day, the Netherlands, at 61 cents a day, or even Britain at 25 cents a day.

When a broader set of variables, including trade, investment, and environmental policies, as well as aid, were included, the U.S. was found to rank 20 out of the 21, just ahead of Japan. But on ODA itself, Washington was dead last.