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Bush's African safari hits right notes but ignores problems

Written by Dan Simpson

Wednesday, 27 February 2008

PRESIDENT Bush's Africa policy, the inevitable focus as he lapped the continent last week in a five-nation, six-day trip, puts me up a tree as an American Africanist in terms of assessing it.

On the one hand, I am now at the point in looking at America's overall posture in the world of judging that the predominantly military approach of the Bush Administration has been disastrously disproportionate. Not only has it resulted in a large part of the world hating us - or at least our government - it does not reflect the basic principles and sentiment of the American people. I don't think Americans want the face of the United States overseas to be a heavily armed soldier in battle dress.

Working from that general stance, U.S. policy toward Africa under Mr. Bush has been appropriate - in general, an accurate reflection of America at its best. It is also largely unknown. That can be blamed in part on us, the media, who are not in a hurry to herald a speech by Mr. Bush or anyone else on a subject like the African Education Initiative. The American media give Africa scant coverage, consistent with the U.S. media's money-driven reduction of Africa and other international coverage in general. But the Bush Administration has done a lot in Africa in the humanitarian field. On top of the Africa Education Initiative of 2002, there is now the International Education Initiative of 2007. Mr. Bush is seeking to double the U.S. commitment to fight AIDS, a horrible scourge in Africa, from an already hefty $15 billion to $30 billion over the next five years. An initiative to fight malaria, another hideous killing disease very widespread in Africa, has now reached 25 million people.

Boring, isn't it?

This is what the United States can and should be doing in Africa. But, instead, the focus is on what the United States hasn't done in Africa, on the problems we could perhaps have addressed but didn't.

Mr. Bush visited a collection of largely good news, pussycat countries, although this status is fairly newly arrived at and perhaps fragile in Rwanda and Liberia.

He went to Benin, on the West Coast, one of the first countries to spring for democracy as Africa emerged from its military-dictator stage in the 1990s. Then he went to Tanzania, in East Africa. It has emerged in recent years from catastrophic experimentation with "African socialism." There, Mr. Bush signed a $698 million agreement as part of the U.S. Millennium Challenge Account, which links U.S. aid firmly to anti-corruption efforts and open-market policies.

Rwanda, his next stop, is a special case. As a victim of genocide that in 1994 claimed some 800,000 victims, ignored by the Clinton administration, Rwanda has emerged to some degree into the sunlight. Mr. Bush signed a bilateral investment treaty and praised Rwanda's government for sending peacekeeping forces to the Darfur region of Sudan.

Rwanda is now generally considered a success - albeit still a ticking time bomb - but the genocide that occurred there points a finger dramatically at Darfur, for Mr. Bush and the world.

Darfur - a very sour note.

Mr. Bush then went to Ghana, which celebrated its 50th anniversary of independence last year and is doing well. Starting early, it has worked its way successfully through a messianic dictator and repeated military coups to relative stability and an engaging, avuncular, democratically elected president.

Liberia, for America and Mr. Bush, was the cherry on top of the sundae. On his watch, with the help of Nigeria and some other West African states as well as a few U.S. Marines, Liberia ended a very ugly civil war, got rid of a brutal dictator, the notorious Charles Taylor, and chose Africa's first democratically elected female president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. Ms. Sirleaf's people call her "Ma." She is an experienced banker and economist.

There were two recurring sore points in Mr. Bush's safari. One was U.S. military intentions in Africa. The second was where he didn't go and the African problems he thus did not address. And this is where my own ambivalence toward his administration's Africa policy comes.

There were good reasons for the creation of a U.S. African Command (AFRICOM) last year. One was that the other regions of the world had had them for many years. The other was that it meant that the U.S.-African interface in military affairs suffered from a lack of effective coordination on the U.S. side. On that basis, African countries should have welcomed its creation.

Instead, largely because of what they have seen the United States do in Iraq, Africans are enormously suspicious of U.S. military goals in Africa.

With good reason, I would have to say. The United States, working with Ethiopia, last year knocked down the first government that had brought peace to Somalia since 1991, the Islamic Courts Group. We did that mostly because it was Islamic and might have evolved into a harbor for radical Islamists hostile to the United States.

We now have some 1,500 U.S. troops in Djibouti, up the Indian Ocean coast from Somalia. That command is called the Combined Joint Task Force Horn of Africa. The Africans know it is there. They know what U.S. forces can do if Washington chooses to intervene militarily somewhere, and they are afraid. Mr. Bush was thus obliged to deny vigorously that he was looking for U.S. bases in Africa, even though AFRICOM headquarters remains stuck in Germany.

I think it was a good thing for America to stress through Mr. Bush's visit its constructive humanitarian and economic role in Africa. The trouble is that scandals and wars - in Darfur, Zimbabwe, the Congo, Ethiopia, and Eritrea - thus remain unaddressed. This is another aspect of the foreign policy mess we are in now.

Dan Simpson, a retired diplomat, is a member of the editorial boards of The Blade and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

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Last Updated ( Wednesday, 27 February 2008 )

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