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PATRICK MCILHERAN; Facts Not Getting in the Way of Bush-Bashing

Posted on: Sunday, 13 November 2005, 15:00 CST

By PATRICK MCILHERAN

The protests in Argentina last weekend show how the case for Bush hatred resembles one of those cumulative nursery rhymes: This is the trade pact that pleased the oil guys who financed the neocons who faked the intel that toppled the tyrant who defied the regime that George and his hanging chads built.

The left has a flow chart of conspiracy mapped out, and at the center they've put this cowboy who instead of engaging with the world wants puritanically to rule it from atop his high horse.

It falls apart when you realize he's riding a Trojan horse.

The United States and that means you, dear taxpayer is now the world's largest public-sector distributor of condoms. By the end of 2005, you will have shipped about 612 million of them to anti-AIDS programs worldwide, up two-thirds since 2000.

This hardly fits with the conventional wisdom on President Bush.

This is part of the $15 billion he's spending over five years to combat AIDS in poor countries. Critics have been picking apart the effort since Bush announced this tripling of the budget in 2003, primarily for an approach that starts with avoiding promiscuity.

But the U.S. is spending more for AIDS prevention worldwide than all other nations combined, according to the U.S. Agency for International Development. Its administrator, Andrew Natsios, stopped by Milwaukee recently to tout its work.

The agency, he says, isn't handing out condoms willy-nilly, in part because of that abstinence-first attitude. That view didn't come from Texas, either: The approach was first promoted by Uganda in the 1980s and has proved popular in other African countries where, it seems, people have traditional views. Instead, says Natsios, U.S. prophylactics have gone mainly to truckers, miners and prostitutes, where the rubber hits the road, so to speak, in AIDS prevention.

Contrast this with the swaggering, bullying, warmongering, poor- people-hating imperialist effigy that the left imagines to inhabit the White House. It's enough to make reasonable people rethink what they think.

Or if it's not, consider that you, via taxes, are the largest donor to pro-democracy efforts in the world, and that doesn't include anything involving the Marines. It does include the experts on constitutions that the U.S. sent to Afghanistan. The experts, says Natsios, were from Australia and Kenya, further thinning the notion it's all an imperialist plot.

Overall, says Natsios, U.S. taxpayers spent about $19 billion being nice to people around the world in 2004, up from $10 billion in 2000, with $2 billion of that for Iraq. As of Wednesday, your government has sent $97 million just in earthquake relief to Pakistan and India, more than three times as much as any other donor. Not that the jihadists in the hills will appreciate it, but Natsios points out that our piles of aid to tsunami survivors in Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim country, for a while made the U.S. more popular there than Osama bin Laden.

This counts because the leftist knock on Bush is that he has hopelessly alienated the world by abandoning diplomacy, giving up on persuasion and making a naked grab for oil and empire in Iraq. The claims are marked by absoluteness: It's all about oil, Iraq is hopeless, Bush's every act makes us hated.

But never has an empire worked harder to pass off the keys to the locals as we have in Baghdad. And puritans don't pass out 612 million condoms.

This is timely, too, for two reasons.

First, the left is again trying to convince people that Bush's prewar assertions about Iraq's threat were not mistakes but were warmongering lies. Their hope, plainly, is to make Bush and all his works seem foul. Because Iraqis don't deserve a return to thugocracy and because a freer Mideast probably saps the anti-American jihad's power, we should demand that MoveOn.org move on.

Second, we see France aflame at the hands of Islamists.

Remember, according to Bush's critics, France knew how to relate to the Middle East. France counseled accommodation while Bush rushed to war. Internally, France managed to tame savage capitalism with social conscience.

None of this seems to have bought it immunity from gas-bomb- hurling youths who are united not just by unemployment it isn't all French youth, among whom unemployment hovers around 20%, who are rioting but by their alienated form of Islamism. The Washington Post reported last month that France discovered terror networks were training its own citizens for attacks, and The Wall Street Journal reports that economic dysfunction has opened the door for new Islamist groups hostile to their host country.

So much for appeasement.

There is much to criticize in Bush's policy, particularly in Iraq's handling.

But what doesn't stand scrutiny is the belief that Bush has flipped off the world. Such nonsense closes off the chance for rational debate about how to make the world healthier and freer.

Patrick McIlheran is a Journal Sentinel editorial columnist. His email address is pmcilheran@journalsentinel.com

Copyright 2005, Journal Sentinel Inc. All rights reserved. (Note: This notice does not apply to those news items already copyrighted and received through wire services or other media.)

Source: Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

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