White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

Requiem for America’s Helping Hand in the World

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I have seen the U.S. Agency for International Development in action — in Bolivia, Botswana, Pakistan and in Eastern Europe — and I can say that it is sometimes ragged and sometimes wasteful, but overall it is a great value for the money.

It is the face of America in 100 countries and its work is independent of the State Department, which has been one of its strengths.

The purpose of State is to represent American policy abroad and all that it entails. The purpose of USAID is to extend a helping hand.

It is the agency which shows the world through its actions our goodness, our decency, our humanity. USAID makes a difference, whether it is fighting AIDS, Ebola and malaria in Africa or helping electrify the Americas.

I have chanced upon — and that is the word — USAID at work in my travels. In Bolivia, I saw a village enjoying the luxury of electricity for the first time. In Pakistan, I saw trucks of American grain going into an Afghan refugee camp — the only source of food for the inhabitants.

I have heard from my family about the work in Southern Africa, about the treatment of AIDS, malaria and other diseases, where it is most needed. My father suffered from malaria, and I have a special feeling for its ravages.

My wife, Linda Gasparello, has a special feeling for Egypt, where she has lived. She has noted the impact of USAID in Egypt, where it has helped build schools and train teachers, helped create jobs in agriculture and tourism, helped provide access to clean water, helped reduce child and maternal mortality, and helped eliminate polio.

USAID has probably convinced more people that the United States is the good guy in the world than most diplomatic efforts or even the reporting of the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, and Radio Free Asia.

If the work of USAID ceases, as Elon Musk has engineered, or is subsumed into State, people will die and Russia and China will fill the vacuum. They won’t fill it with the same human touch, but they will be there and we will be gone — and our good works and influence with the departure.

I grew up in Zimbabwe and even before President John F. Kennedy created USAID, there was general hostility to the idea of foreign “do-gooders.” In those days, the do-gooders were volunteers and the churches. The white community worried about ideas of democracy and equality that would upset the balance of privilege in colonial society.

Later, in the countries I know best (Zimbabwe, Zambia, Botswana, Malawi and South Africa), that fear and resentment was transferred to the international aid community. The dethroned white ruling class spread the word that foreign aid was corrupt, wasteful, and ineffective. American conservatives signed on.

Did Musk — who is irrational and pathological in his hatred of USAID and wants it abolished, and has  gone a long way to achieving that aim — absorb these prejudices when he was growing up in South Africa?

Musk and President Donald Trump have presented no evidence, sought no information nor commissioned a study on USAID’s efficacy. Based just on hearsay and a paranoia that the world is out to cheat America, take its money and otherwise kick sand in its face, they are dismantling one of our pillars of statecraft.

It is an abiding myth among MAGA conservatives that foreign aid is a sinkhole, corrupt and indefensible. I have seen otherwise. But you can’t see if you don’t look.

Remember the Marshall Plan, the expensive but so worthwhile rebuilding of devastated Europe after World War II? It is cherished here and in Europe as an act of American magnanimity and statecraft that was unique in its scope and its preparedness to use American wealth for the good of others.

The plan paid off as one of the smartest investments we could have made as a country. It is an extreme example of the effectiveness of soft power.

It convinced Europe of the fundamental goodness of the American project and enabled more than 70 years of openness and sharing, convincing generations that America had certain values of human concern that would always prevail even when there were disputes.

In trashing USAID — and what mindless trashing it has taken! — the United States has opened the door to Russia and China to take on the good-guy mantle and to manipulate global opinion in their favor; and to make an always dangerous world into a more hostile one for the United States.

Without food and medicine, staples of the USAID efforts, the poorest and most wretched will suffer unspeakably. In Africa, where Musk and I grew up, people will die.

There is a ghastly irony that they will do so at the hand of the richest man in the world, acting for the richest nation in the world.

Harassment in Egypt, Then and Now

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A recent front-page story in The New York Times about harassment and sexual assaults on women in Egypt, which have increased over the past two years, reminds me of my own experience there more than three decades ago.

I was a graduate student at the American University in Cairo in the late 1970s. From my arrival in Egypt to my departure, I can't remember a harassment-free day. Indeed, the harassment began on the day I landed at Cairo International Airport.

Arriving at the airport, bleary from a difficult overnight flight from London, I grabbed the only taxi at the outside stand. I spoke some Egyptian Colloquial Arabic and I asked the driver, Mohammed, to take me to the American University.

The sun had barely risen when I got into Mohammed's cab, but when he dropped me off at the university at closing time, I'd seen much of Cairo as well as the Great Sphinx and the pyramids of Giza. Throughout the abduction Mohammed would try to steer the car with his left hand, while trying to grope one of my legs with his right hand – a driving feat, considering I had pinned myself against the right backseat door.

Mohammed wasn't just running up the meter, he wanted to marry me. In fact, we stopped briefly at his uncle's souvenir shop and perfume palace near the pyramids and Mohammed told him that we were getting engaged.

“May God grant a successful conclusion [to the engagement],” his uncle said, handing me a small green glass vial of eye kohl through the cab window.

God, in his mercy, concluded this unwanted tour around 5 p.m. But Mohammed stalked me for another week, showing up at the university and at the apartment on the Nile River island of Zamalek, which I shared with two roommates. They had a head start on harassment management, and I seem to remember that they told Mohammed to hit the road.

The city bus we rode to the university was a daily opportunity for groping by Egyptian men. One morning, I remember getting on the bus which was overloaded with workers — especially men in drab pants and v-necked sweaters, mostly bureaucrats who worked in government administrative offices around Tahrir Square. I was clutching my textbooks and pocketbook, and trying to keep my balance.

As the bus sped along 26th of July Avenue, I heard a woman behind me say sharply to a man in his twenties who was standing close behind me, “You are very wicked.” I looked over my shoulder and saw that he had parted my wraparound skirt and had unzipped his pants. Caught almost in the act, he smiled that smile I came to abhor; the smile that said, “Don't blame me. You're a woman out in public and a khawaga [a foreigner, a loose woman].”

My roommates and I became inured to bad behavior by the boys (shabbab), who crawled under the seats in darkened movie theaters and grabbed our ankles, flashed us in street alleys in Alexandria, encircled us like sharks when we went swimming in the Mediterranean, and muttered ishta (cream) when we walked by them. We chalked it up to their sexual frustration due to the lack of socialization between the sexes, especially among the lower classes, starting at puberty.

“A dog's tail never stands straight,” says an Egyptian proverb about incorrigible habits, including the harassment and abuse of women by men.

In President Anwar Sadat's Egypt, which was opening to the West and modernizing, I was often harassed physically and verbally by men, but I never once feared for my life. Fear of Sadat's police and mukhabarat – the intelligence agents, who my roommates and I called the “green meanies” after the color of their uniforms — prevented men from public attacks on women, which are now so frequent and violent in the Arab Spring Egypt of President Mohammed Morsi.

Sexual assault of the kind that CBS News correspondent Lara Logan and many Egyptian women have suffered since the Jan. 25, 2010 revolution, which ousted President Hosni Mubarak, are the result of the general security breakdown. But they are also the result of a breakdown of human respect and decency, which is a growing worldwide phenomenon.

Innovation and modernization, including the empowerment of women and girls, is suspect and shattering for many men in Egypt, so they beat a dusty retreat into traditional mores. A substantial presence of women in public life in Egypt, and elsewhere in the world, might get the dog's tail to stand straight.