Monday, January 19, 2009
U2's new single: Is 'Get on Your Boots' any good?
So it was with somewhat low expectations that I sat down to check out their newest single, "Get on Your Boots," the first track from the upcoming album No Line on the Horizon. (You can hear the song here.) Sure enough, things start unpromisingly: a generic heavy metal guitar riff quickly gives way to a shameless rip-off of "Subterranean Homesick Blues," with Bono chanting about "love and community" and "candy floss ice cream."
But just as I was about to shut down the computer and go back to the amazing new Animal Collective album (see Leah Greenblatt's review), a funny thing happened: the bridge kicked in, and "Boots" suddenly took off. A wash of vocal harmony sets things up nicely, and then Bono comes soaring in, insisting (to whom? who knows?) that "you don't know/you don't get it do you/you don't know how beautiful you are." It's one of those great U2 moments, the kind of thing that has kept fans on board for more than 30 years now. The song then takes a few more twists and turns, eventually landing back on that original guitar riff, which, by the end of the song, has gone from annoying to insistent and memorable (somehow the "get on your boots" chorus that lays on top totally transforms it).
After just a few listens, "Get on Your Boots" doesn't seem like one of U2's all-time great songs, but it's still interesting -- and different -- enough to make me pretty excited to hear the whole album.
Why I'm not sorry that George W. Bush beat Al Gore and John Kerry.
I wouldn't reconsider my vote for Barack Hussein Obama, in other words, and when he takes the oath, I hope to have a ringside seat. I already know something about "the speech" and its Lincolnian tropes. (If you want your own understated preview, take a look at what he said to the crowd in Baltimore Saturday, as his whistle-stop train made its way from Philadelphia to D.C.'s Union Station.) But, on the last day of his presidency, I want to say why I still do not wish that Al Gore had beaten George W. Bush in 2000 or that John Kerry had emerged the victor in 2004.
In Oliver Stone's not very good but surprisingly well-received film W., there is an unnoticed omission, or rather there is an event that does not occur on-screen. The crashing of two airliners into two large skyscrapers isn't shown (and is only once and very indirectly referred to). This cannot be because it wouldn't have been of any help in making Bush look bad; it's pretty generally agreed that he acted erratically that day and made the worst speech of his presidency in the evening, and why would Stone miss the chance of restaging My Pet Goat?The answer, I am reasonably certain, is that it is the events of Sept. 11, 2001, that explain the transformation of George Bush from a rather lazy small-government conservative into an interventionist, in almost every sense, politician. The unfortunate thing about this analysis, from the liberal point of view, is that it leaves such little room for speculation about his Oedipal relationship with his father, his thwarted revenge fantasies about Saddam Hussein, his dry-drunk alcoholism, and all the rest of it. (And, since Laura Bush in the film is even more desirable than the lovely first lady in person, we are left yet again to wonder how such a dolt was able to woo and to win such a honey.)
We are never invited to ask ourselves what would have happened if the Democrats had been in power that fall. But it might be worth speculating for a second. The Effective Death Penalty and Anti-Terrorism Act, rushed through both Houses by Bill Clinton after the relative pin prick of the Oklahoma City bombing, was correctly described by the American Civil Liberties Union as the worst possible setback for the cause of citizens' rights. Given that precedent and multiplying it for the sake of proportion, I think we can be pretty sure that wiretapping and water-boarding would have become household words, perhaps even more quickly than they did, and that we might even have heard a few more liberal defenses of the practice. I don't know if Gore-Lieberman would have thought of using Guantanamo Bay, but that, of course, raises the interesting question—now to be faced by a new administration—of where exactly you do keep such actually or potentially dangerous customers, especially since you are not supposed to "rendition" them. There would have been a nasty prison somewhere or a lot of prisoners un-taken on the battlefield, you can depend on that.
We might have avoided the Iraq war, even though both Bill Clinton and Al Gore had repeatedly and publicly said that another and conclusive round with Saddam Hussein was, given his flagrant defiance of all the relevant U.N. resolutions, unavoidably in our future. And the inconvenient downside to avoiding the Iraq intervention is that a choke point of the world economy would still be controlled by a psychopathic crime family that kept a staff of WMD experts on hand and that paid for jihadist suicide bombers around the region. In his farewell interviews, President Bush hasn't been able to find much to say for himself on this point, but I think it's a certainty that historians will not conclude that the removal of Saddam Hussein was something that the international community ought to have postponed any further. (Indeed, if there is a disgrace, it is that previous administrations left the responsibility undischarged.)
The obvious failures—in particular the increasing arrogance and insanity of the dictatorships of Iran and North Korea—are at least failures in their own terms: failure to live up to the original rhetoric and failure to mesh human rights imperatives with geo-strategic and security ones. Again, it's not clear to me how any alternative administration would have behaved. And the collapse of our financial system has its roots in a long-ago attempt, not disgraceful in and of itself, to put home ownership within reach even of the least affluent. So the old question "compared to what?" does not allow too much glibness.
Inescapable as it is, "compared to what?" isn't much of a defense. And nor has this column been intended exactly as a defense, either. It's just that there's an element of hubris in all this current hope-mongering and that I am beginning to be a little bit afraid to think of what Wednesday morning will feel like.
Bruce Anderson: History will vindicate George Bush
It is not difficult to make the case against George Bush. There have been mistakes. But in their abuse of him, many of his liberal critics demonstrate their own weak hold on reality. In trying to belittle him, they merely reveal their own littleness. George Bush is a much more considerable figure than the caricature version. As he has set great events in motion, it will be impossible to judge his Presidency for many years. It is not impossible that history will offer a partial vindication.
The outgoing President did have one problem, especially in Europe. He may have finished off his father's war against Saddam Hussein. He was not able to avenge his father's defeat at the hands of the English language. Although some of George Bush junior's speeches will rank high in the annals of political oratory, once he was without a text, he often went adrift. But this was not due to lack of ability.
Early on, a friend of mine on the National Security Council went to a Bush Cabinet meeting. He had heard the reports that George Bush was a constitutional monarch with Dick Cheney as his prime minister, so he was interested to see what would happen. He watched as Mr Bush ran proceedings like a strong chief executive, while Mr Cheney did not say a word.
But it all comes back to the Iraq War, which was a tragedy, for a reason worthy of a great tragedian. It was fought in a spirit of excessive idealism. After 11 September, the US Administration asked itself one repeated and agonised question. Why do these people hate us? The Bush team came up with their answer: because they live in failed states, which offer their young no hope in this world and thus leave them open to the temptations of fanaticism and a better deal in another world.
Baghdad was one of the foremost cities in the Muslim world. Iraq was a rich country with a large educated middle class. Yet it had become a police state and many of its ablest people had fled into exile. Moreover, Saddam had been trying to acquire weapons of mass destruction. We could not be certain that his quest had failed. So should we wait until the certainty of a mushroom cloud? It seemed that all the routes to progress in the Middle East and safety in the West led to Iraq.
There was one problem. Largely because of the malign influence of that fraud and tautology, international law, we have grown squeamish about regime change. As a result, the overwhelming desirability of regime change in Iraq had to be downplayed, and there was a further difficulty: the most unfortunate un-meeting of minds in recent public policy. After 2001, in both Washington and London, there was a split between those who knew Iraq, who were generally hostile to the War, and those who wanted war but usually knew nothing about Iraq. George Bush had little confidence in his Secretary of State, Colin Powell. Unable to sack Mr Powell, he made up for it by not listening to the State Department. Tony Blair never took much notice of his foreign secretaries.
As a result, the Arabists' expertise was disregarded and two vital conversations never took place. I will give the London version. Foreign Secretary: "There is no point in continuing this discussion. The PM has decided to go to war alongside the Americans, and that is that". Permanent Secretary: "All right, Foreign Secretary, but in order to give yourself any chance of success, you have got to do the following..." Foreign Secretary: "Now you're talking. I want a paper explaining all that on my desk by close of play tomorrow, and I will stand over the PM till he's read every word."
That never happened. Instead, the direction of events was left to the neo-conservatives, most of whom were dangerous idealists who believed that democracy was an infallible political antibiotic.
In that onrush of naivety, two crazy decisions were taken: to abolish the Iraqi army and to de-Baathise the civil service. In 1945, the allies were content to employ large numbers of former Nazi party members in the new West German bureaucracy. The practical arguments were equally strong in Iraq. There would have been one problem which had not been present in Germany; the army and civil service were Sunni power-centres, and the Shia would have demanded changes. But that could have been manageable. In a sullen and far from idealistic spirit, large parts of Iraq are now sort of working. But that could have happened much earlier had the mistakes not been made. If so, George Bush's ratings would be much higher.
His critics also insist that he should not have used the phrase "war on terror". That tells us a lot about their unwillingness to face up to a dangerous world. George Bush meant that America could not afford to relax until all terrorist organisations with a global reach had been defeated. That is not inflated rhetoric. It is common sense.
There was one unfortunate side effect of the war on terror: Guantanamo. At the time, it seemed a good idea: a cunning means of preventing American lawyers from undermining America's security. But the US prides itself on being a nation founded upon laws. It follows that a legal vacuum is only tolerable for a brief period. It has now dragged on for far too long. That said, anyone who denies that there are some exceedingly dangerous men in Guantanamo should be forced to live among them.
On the economy, and like Gordon Brown, George Bush could be accused of failing to fix the roof while the sun was shining. But two years' ago, it all seemed to be working. Growth was strong. Even after the Bush tax cuts, tax receipts were at record levels. A country with a young population, America did not have Europe's demographic weaknesses: too few earners and too many pensioners. Back in the days when sub-prime mortgage holders were just ordinary Americans trying to climb the ladder, there were grounds for hoping that the US could grow its way out of deficits and back to fiscal prudence. George Bush did not foresee the crisis. Who did?
It now looks as if there will be many more continuities between the Bush Administration and the Obama one than many of the new President's supporters had hoped. That is a tribute to George Bush. It will not be the last.
what does Dave Fanning think of the new U2 single
On Monday morning, the world finally gets to hear Get On Your Boots. As usual, the person to premiere the track will be Irish TV and radio presenter Dave Fanning, someone who's been championing the band since he first started playing their demos on pirate radio more than three decades ago. Ever since, Dave's got the first play of a new U2 single. We tracked him down at 2FM in Dublin.
So you’ve heard the single, which the rest of the world will hear on Monday - first impressions?
First impressions is that there’s eleven tracks on the album and ‘Get On Your Boots’ is the one you’d instantly say is the single. It’s the ‘Vertigo’ of the album - although a completely different kind of song. That was a new song which was an instant hit night after night on the last tour and this song will be the same on the next tour. People will be impressed, it’s very U2 and there’ s nothing wrong with that, a big song with lots of layers but not overproduced. Great track.
Sounds like you’ve heard the album too?
I have, just a few times though and it’s hard to give you first impressions because I need to hear it in the car and in the bath. But certainly you know in hearing it that they remain a great creative force as a band, what I’m not sure of yet is whether it is the beginning of a new sequence of albums or the third in a series that began with All That You Can’t Leave Behind.
It’s a big record though and I was struck by the running order, that tracks 2 (Magnificent), 3 (Moment of Surrender), and 4 (Unknown Caller) alone are almost twenty minutes of music. Normally you find longer songs at the end of a record, but these come before you even reach Get On Your Boots. Some of the lyric writing seemed more personal than usual to me, and there’s lots of buried songs on there too, songs that will grow on you – like if you ask your average U2 fan to sing ‘A Man and A Woman’ or ‘Crumbs Under your Table’ from How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb they might not be able to, but they were gems. The album has plenty of songs like that, songs to return to.
There was a time when they let you choose the single release.
Yes, it’s hard to believe that thirty years ago they came into my show, all four of them every night for a week, and we played three of their songs a night and asked the audience to decide what the single should be. Out of Control got it, with Stories for Boys as a b-side and we threw in Boy-Girl too. I remember a thousand copies of the single were pressed and we launched it at Windmill Lane and about 15 people turned up.
I’d been playing their demo tapes since being on pirate stations in 1978, I just got behind them, I never even knew they would get as far as another demo. I’m not brilliant, I couldn’t predict anything, I was more into The Undertones at the time but U2 just seemed to be going along the same lines as me and I liked them.
Ever since you’ve always had the world premiere of a new U2 single from a new album.
I’ve had the world exclusive ever since, Paul McGuinness always likes to start a new campaign with me. I asked him about it this morning, he said he thought I was a good luck charm. But my feeling on this album is that while it’s been a really long wait, it is worth the wait. They were the biggest band of the eighties, then they dominated the nineties and now they’re writing a whole new chapter in another decade - not young anymore but still looking very cool. I think of all the 17 year olds who are going to buy this record and it will only be the third or fourth record they have bought - they’re still right up there.
One other song that really stood out for you ?
Stand Up Comedy – the nearest thing they’ve ever done to Led Zeppelin. But I could change my mind, wait till I’ve heard it in the bath a few times. One - from Achtung Baby - never hit me for months.
Exit Bush
The inauguration parties will be breaking up, and we'll be in a new
political era. I shan't be celebrating much myself: a quick toast to old
Bush, and good luck to the new Obama (there seems to be a new one every
day). Then back to reading Ausonius.
No predictions today; I intend to look only backwards.
I was young and callow then (now, at least, I'm no longer young), when
Pierre Trudeau was installed as Canada's 15th prime minister. I was, well,
15 myself, and already beginning to recover from Trudeaumania. I'd worked my
little behind off for the Liberals (can you believe it?) and had had the
honour of meeting the Great Man. I think it was in the moment I looked into
his icy blue eyes that my enthusiasm began to relax.
Still vaguely remember: the attitudes among such of my elders as did not
like or trust him, in the moments immediately before the Great Man took
power, and the foreseeable catastrophe began. People think, "Nah, this isn't
going to be so bad. In fact he's going to be like every other prime
minister." And anyway, the whole thing happens in slow motion.
Let us complete the highly unoriginal observation. The lobster hardly
notices the temperature rising in his pot. Time passes. And what has
changed, after all? Before he was green, afterwards orange. But it's the
same lobster!
Not everyone agrees that the Trudeau years were a disaster for Canada. My
own view is based on a candid assessment of the before and after, and it is
the view of a lobster. From the point of view of the diner, in our Nanny
State, much was improved by expending the country's moral capital.
But you know me, gentle reader: I tend to disregard received opinion, itself
a transient product of passing history. This includes, to return briefly to
the present, the view that George W. Bush was, if not the worst president
the United States ever had, at least the worst in living memory.
He has been demonized, in the progressive media and among the progressive
classes -- to the point where even those who are inclined to defend him,
instinctively flinch. Which is to say: he has been demonized by people who
do not concern themselves overmuch with the question, "What would you have
done in his position, instead," given each successive crisis he faced. Or,
when asked that question, they reply in some rhetorical way that betrays no
serious interest in the likely consequences of the alternative course.
I have found that one cannot argue with history: things happened just as
they did. But also, one cannot argue with people who are not anchored in
prudential reasoning.
After eight years of him, I would say, that of all the U.S. presidents in my
life (from Eisenhower forward), Mr. Bush has been the most impressive,
except Reagan. This is mostly a judgment on his foreign policy, in which --
instant history requires cliches -- he has taken various bulls by their
horns, and has not been flipped by them.
I think it will be seen more clearly, as hindsight develops, that the stand
he took in Afghanistan, then Iraq, prevented the exponential growth of
Islamism. Ditto: his refusal to be horse-whipped by international public
opinion very far along the ridiculous "roadmap to peace" between Israel and
her fanatic adversaries. His confrontational attitudes toward other rogue
regimes held the line -- against Libya, Syria, North Korea, and even Iran.
We would be in a far worse position if such regimes had been persuaded that
America really was a "paper tiger."
Mr. Bush, as the saying goes, "kept America safe," and in so doing, defended
universal Western interests. We are all indebted not only to him, but to the
American taxpayer, and American soldiers, for missions to which we did not
contribute adequately. Forward positions were taken and maintained. It
remains to be seen whether Mr. Obama will give all these positions away.
In domestic policy, as Mr. Bush has himself been confessing in final
interviews and a rather moving final press conference, he very likely
sacrificed too much. His own free-market instincts, and his sense of the
limitations of the U.S. federal government, were overcome in the course of
various tax-and-spend responses to domestic problems over-magnified in the
media. More precisely, spend alone, for he did fight taxes, and thereby left
(as Reagan before him) a legacy of public indebtedness. At least this will
crimp his successor.
No matter how he is depicted, the man himself has been honest, thoughtful,
courageous, modest -- and remarkably free of personal vindictiveness. He has
done consistently what he thought right under the circumstances, from a far
broader view of those circumstances than his vindictive enemies have
acknowledged, or would be able to acknowledge.
David Warren
Download "Get On Your Boots" from iTunes
There’s been some error at iTunes because you can buy the single today, even thought it’s not supposed to be out until Feb. 15.
click this link to access it.
U2.com -- Get On Your Boots, the first single from U2's new album No Line On The Horizon, will be released as a digital download on February 15th with a physical format to follow on February 16 through Mercury/Universal (UK).
Bush Got the Big Things Right
"Especially as a Social Democrat," said German foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier a few days after the U.S. elections, "I am glad that Barack Obama won. All night I sat in front of my TV and was enthusiastic and elated." The minister's merriment reflects the mood all over Old Europe: anticipation of the end of the Bush nightmare and hope for change under St Obama, the lightworker. It's a wonder there were no parades--yet.
While such views are not new among Europeans and the American left, it was astounding to witness the sheer number of conservatives jumping ship and bashing Bush. With even erstwhile staunch Bush supporters such as John Bolton attesting the Bush administration's "total intellectual collapse" (on occasion of the North Korea deal), the verdict is in: President Bush, especially because of his foreign policy, has been an utter failure.
Contesting this judgment is not a popular pastime these days, not even among Republicans. Given the glum political atmosphere in a year of dismal election results, this might be understandable. And true enough, many of the Bush administration's key foreign policy decisions have turned out more difficult than anticipated--most notably the prolonged wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In the long run, however, the Bush legacy will most certainly receive a fair treatment, emphasizing those achievements now buried under partisan politics and veiled by the inevitable problems that accompany the implementation of every groundbreaking policy. In fact, future U.S. administrations will be well-advised to build on the core ideas formulated and realized by the Bush administration. After all, there are at least three reasons to applaud the Bush foreign policy.
1. The Bush administration developed the first coherent vision for an American role in the post-Cold War world.
Victory in the Cold War led to years of confusion in American politics. Bush senior, troubled by the "vision thing," was the steward of stability whose "New World Order" never had any meaning until Hulk Hogan introduced the concept to World Championship Wrestling in 1996. After the realist stasis, the liberal internationalist Bill Clinton embraced the buzz word of the decade, "globalization," and cast an ever-more intricate web of international treaties and institutions, designed to create an interdependent world of peace and prosperity--under the headline of "engagement and enlargement." Well, this tumescent globaloney was too much to take even for Clinton's own Secretary of State, Warren Christopher, who deemed the whole visionary strategy "a trade policy masquerading as foreign policy."
On 9/11, it became obvious that foreign policy needs to be about more than making money. The twin challenges of (mostly Islamist) anti-modern backlash and failing states breeding instability had been rising all throughout the 1990s, but it was due to the catalytic attacks of 9/11 and the Bush administration's leadership that the U.S. finally came up with a viable approach to post-Cold War foreign policy. The new doctrine identified the main threats to a liberal world order: terrorism, states sponsoring terrorism, and the nexus between weapons of mass destruction, irresponsible regimes, and terrorist organizations. It also outlined a strategy of forward deterrence to counter these threats: combat al-Qaeda militarily and destroy the structures which made its rise possible by stabilizing failed states and democratizing the Broader Middle East.
Granted, despite considerable progress in some areas, none of these ambitious goals has been fulfilled yet. Still, Bush has given the unfolding global conflict a name, identified the enemy, developed a doctrine to fight and win this struggle, and has begun to implement a strategy based on this doctrine. That is, in historic terms, not a small achievement.
What most contemporary critics fail to recognize is that at its most basic, this "Bush Doctrine," just as the war on terror, is less about preemption and regime change than about the understanding that the liberal international system is in peril and that the United States is the only capable custodian of this system. Even without a Cold War substitute, the free world depends on U.S. leadership and assertiveness--this is the lesson his successors should learn from Bush.
2. The Bush administration fought the right wars and laid the groundwork for winning them.
There can be no doubt that the war in Afghanistan was a war of necessity. The regime of the Taliban provided safe havens and training camps for al-Qaeda. After 9/11, there was not a single serious politician in the civilized world who did not call for an eradication of this manifest threat. Moreover, the wounded superpower needed to demonstrate that such a violation of the rules of the international system as committed on 9/11 comes at a huge price. Add the moral obligation of the mighty to assist the brutalized people of Afghanistan and you have a powerful case for a lasting commitment to OEF and ISAF.
For the usual reasons--domestic inhibitions, strategies of free-riding etc.--not all NATO allies and partner countries put their full weight behind the effort in Afghanistan. Even the United States has not always directed the necessary attention at the complex task of simultaneously liberating, pacifying, and rebuilding the country. Considering the history of tribalism and the intrinsic opposition to outside interference, it is no surprise that progress in Afghanistan can only happen incrementally. The real story, however, is that there is any progress at all. The United States and its allies traveled an uneven learning curve, but with the comprehensive approach of combined security and state-building measures taking ever more hold there is much reason to be optimistic.
In 2003, Iraq was a war of necessity as well, and despite a disastrous post-war policy it remains exactly that. Although no WMD could be found in the country after the removal of Saddam Hussein, this does not alter the fact that Saddam had been prepared to build just such weapons within ten years had the United States not intervened. His record of acquiring and using WMD, of betraying and ridiculing the UN inspections and sanctions regimes as well as his many proven connections to Islamist terrorist organizations thus turned Iraq into a manifest and urgent threat to U.S., regional, and world security.
In addition, Iraq has always played a key role in the war on terror. The root cause of Islamist terrorism, according to the Bush analysis, is not poverty or Western policy but political disenfranchisement. The vast majority of the people in Islamic dictatorships have no access to education, no opportunity to pursue independent economic success, no say in the political process, and no investment in their individual future. Especially under conditions of demographic and economic pressure--as is the case virtually everywhere in the Middle East--they therefore fall easy prey to those who instrumentalize Islam to further their own personal or ideological goals. In order to achieve sustained success in fighting terrorism, Bush had to change the political dynamics in the Middle East, and Iraq was the most plausible point to start.
Again, as in Afghanistan, implementation proved tricky. But with the tangible success of the surge--less violence, uprooting of Al Qaeda in Iraq, spread of thriving, pacified areas of civil society etc.--there is plenty of reason to be optimistic. Iraq in, say, 2040 might quite possibly be the showcase for a modern, liberal, Islamic democracy in the Middle East Bush had envisioned. One thing is certain: This would not have happened without the forceful change of regime. Indeed, thanks to the initiative of President Bush, both the people of Afghanistan and the people of Iraq are better off already than they were in September 2001--and the same holds true for the world's liberal democracies.
3. The Bush administration implemented a constructive, principled, and interest-oriented Pacific policy.
The focus on the Middle East and the war on terror leads many observers to overlook one of the crucial achievements of the Bush foreign policy: The American position in the Pacific area is stronger than it has been in decades. U.S. China policy, defined by a delicate balance of engagement and pressure, is the envy of realist and idealist policy-makers alike and led to the most constructive relationship both nations have enjoyed since the days of Nixon. American-Japanese relations since 2000, particularly under Prime Ministers Koizumi and Abe, have never been better. This is underlined not just by the photogenic and good-natured celebrations of friendship during state visits but, more importantly, in Japan's significant and increasing contributions to global security as in the cooperation with NATO in Afghanistan. With India, the third major power in the region, Bush's courageous and far-sighted stance on the nuclear issue helped establish another strategic partnership. It is remarkable that the administration managed to escape the rivalries between all three of these states and shaped efficient bilateral relations with all of them. Especially with regard to the longstanding power competition between Beijing and New Delhi, Washington embarked on a course that will impress historians as a modern version of the British divide and rule method: embrace and govern.
Moreover, Bush strengthened ties with Australia which as a principal ally in the war on terror became a more important actor in the Pacific sphere. The U.S. also maintained strong commitments to traditional partners such as South Korea and Taiwan while also expanding its influence among the former Soviet Republics in Asia.
Taken together, these efforts signify a subtle preparation for an ongoing shift in international power from the Atlantic to the Pacific region. Bush made sure that despite this development the United States will not lose its strategic focus and will be well positioned to take on the power struggles of the future. Therefore, in the long run, Bush's foreign policy in the Pacific will be lauded as his coup de main.
Great modern presidents were hardly ever considered such at the end of their time in office. Harry Truman for instance could never quite shake the image of the bumbling simpleton, and in his final months as president his low approval ratings helped Republicans reclaim the White House for the first time in twenty years. It took more historical distance to appreciate Truman as the architect of an American foreign policy for a new age. Similarly, when Ronald Reagan left office shaken by the Iran Contra Affair, his public approval was at a low point, his derisive opponents numerous. Today, he is not only credited with restoring American strength and winning the Cold War but he is idolized by conservatives everywhere. On the other hand, achievements of presidents such as Bill Clinton who most probably would have been popular enough to win a third term often fade with time.
In that sense it is plausible to assume that history will be kind to the Bush presidency. Bush never flinched in the face of public disapproval or resistance in the international arena. He has protected the United States--and the free world--from the threats of global terror networks. He began to implement a strategy for winning the global war on terror and created a vision of a world worth fighting for. While George W. Bush certainly was not the greatest president in American history, he was a principled leader and more successful than most observers acknowledge. Once the heated debates of the day give way to the somber retrospective of historians, the administration of George W. Bush will finally receive a fair assessment--and it is going to be a good one.
Dr. Patrick Keller is the Coordinator of Foreign and Security Policy at the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung in Berlin, Germany. Dustin Dehez is a historian and Lecturer in International Relations at the Freie Universität Berlin, Germany.
Listen To the New U2 Single, "Get On Your Boots"
GET ON YOUR BOOTS
The future needs a big kiss
Winds blows with a twist
Never seen a moon like this
Can you see it too?
Night is falling everywhere
Rockets at the fun fair
Satan loves a bomb scare
But he won’t scare you
Hey, sexy boots
Get on your boots, yeah
You free me from the dark dream
Candy floss ice cream
All our kids are screaming
But the ghosts aren’t real
Here’s where we gotta be
Love and community
Laughter is eternity
If joy is real
You don’t know how beautiful
You don’t know how beautiful you are
You don’t know, and you don’t get it, do you?
You don’t know how beautiful you are
That’s someone’s stuff they’re blowing up
We’re into growing up
Women of the future
Hold the big revelations
I got a submarine
You got gasoline
I don’t want to talk about wars between nations
Not right now
Hey sexy boots...
Get on your boots, yeah
Not right now
Bossy boots
You don’t know how beautiful
You don’t know how beautiful you are
You don’t know, and you don’t get it, do you?
You don’t know how beautiful you are
Hey sexy boots
I don’t want to talk about the wars between the nations
Sexy boots, yeah
Let me in the sound
Let me in the sound
Let me in the sound, sound
Let me in the sound, sound
Meet me in the sound
Let me in the sound
Let me in the sound, now
God, I’m going down
I don’t wanna drown now
Meet me in the sound
Let me in the sound
Let me in the sound
Let me in the sound, sound
Let me in the sound, sound
Meet me in the sound
Get on your boots
Get on your boots
Get on your boots
Yeah hey hey
The Doctrine of Fakism
Have you heard the news? The foreign policy realists are here. No more of that silly worldview stuff for us. On Tuesday, during her Senate confirmation hearing, Hillary Clinton set the record straight:
The President-Elect and I believe that foreign policy must be based on a marriage of principles and pragmatism, not rigid ideology. On facts and evidence, not emotion or prejudice. Our security, our vitality, and our ability to lead in today’s world oblige us to recognize the overwhelming fact of our interdependence.
“Interdependence” played a big role in Clinton’s speech. So did diplomacy. Once again, speaking for both herself and Barack Obama, Hillary outlined the new direction of the coming foreign policy:
The President-Elect has made it clear that in the Obama Administration there will be no doubt about the leading role of diplomacy. One need only look to North Korea, Iran, the Middle East, and the Balkans to appreciate the absolute necessity of tough-minded, intelligent diplomacy – and the failures that result when that kind of diplomatic effort is absent. And one need only consider the assortment of problems we must tackle in 2009 – from fighting terrorism to climate change to global financial crises – to understand the importance of cooperative engagement.
But the real star of the show was “smart power”:
We must use what has been called “smart power,” the full range of tools at our disposal -- diplomatic, economic, military, political, legal, and cultural -- picking the right tool, or combination of tools, for each situation. With smart power, diplomacy will be the vanguard of foreign policy.”
In a planned attack of simultaneous “cooperative engagement,” John Kerry supported Hillary’s new realism with an opinion piece in Tuesday’s Boston Globe. Kerry wrapped up as follows:
The common element in this formula for a new foreign policy is replacing military solutions and unilateral action with diplomacy and multi-national consensus. Clinton's work on the Armed Services Committee, her lifetime of public service, and her global stature have prepared her well to help pave this new road for American leadership.
Interdependence, diplomacy, cooperative engagement, multi-national consensus, “replacing military solutions.” If these are to be the hallmarks of a new foreign policy, how strange that on the very same day that Hillary Clinton spoke to the Senate about the sensible employment of “smart power” against Iran, and John Kerry wrote about enhancing “the ability of US diplomats to play the leading role in solving” global problems, Vice President-elect Joe Biden was in Iraq reassuring leadership in Baghdad that “the new administration will stick to the timetable in the [U.S.- Iraq status of forces] agreement,” and keep American troops in Iraq for at least three more years, if not much longer.
And how un-diplomatic was Joe Biden’s message of the following day. He told Barack Obama that things in Afghanistan will get worse before they get better, as Americans are soon to see an increase in the fighting. All this hardly seems like a new direction designed to highlight the “leading role of diplomacy.”
That’s because the most distinguishing feature of the new mushy realism is that it’s shamelessly fake. Hillary Clinton couldn’t possibly believe that, “The best way to advance America’s interest in reducing global threats and seizing global opportunities is to design and implement global solutions,” because she can’t even explain what that means. Barack Obama does not believe (at least not now) that Iran can be talked out of the bomb any more than he intends to “end” the Iraq War, and John Kerry doesn’t think, “we have an opportunity to reshape the way the United States does business with the world.” These fakists have settled on a language to use in public and this is it. Global, interconnected, diplomatic, sustainable, endurable, smart, multilateral, non-ideological. You know -- Obamese. The biggest change Barack Obama has brought to American politics is linguistic. Leaders are now required to create cuddly, meaningless word salads while continuing the implementation of aggressive policies.
The Bush Doctrine is alive and well. This is because George W. Bush was not, as Clinton and Kerry imply, too blinded by ideology to be pragmatic. On Tuesday, Hillary Clinton said of smart power, “This is not a radical idea. The ancient Roman poet Terence, who was born a slave and rose to become one of the great voices of his time, declared that ‘in every endeavor, the seemly course for wise men is to try persuasion first.’” But she didn’t need to reach back to the second century B.C. to make her point. She could have simply adduced the behavior of the current President. Before attacking Afghanistan, President Bush pleaded both directly and through back channels with the Taliban in hopes that they would hand over Osama bin laden. Before going into Iraq, the President got the UN Security Council to pass a cycle of extra resolutions aimed at getting Saddam to disclose his weapons and weapons programs without having to go the military route. In both cases, Bush doggedly sought UN approval for action – something Hillary Clinton’s husband did not secure before launching operations in Haiti, the Balkans, and Iraq.
What’s so bad about the doctrine of Fakism, some might ask. Are Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton not merely speaking softly and carrying big sticks? After all, even most of President Bush’s fans agree that his gunfight slang probably did more harm than good. If bold Bush policy has now been complimented by better PR, hasn’t the one sorely missing piece fallen into place?
Not exactly. If you enter into a contract with your leaders whereby you agree to be lied to, where is the accountability? Signing off on a government whose preferred mode of domestic communication is one big wink leaves you very little room to complain down the line. When can you say, “Alright, knock it off, you did something I don’t like,” if your leaders have already made it clear that what they do need not connect to what they say. And on what grounds would you trust their pledges to change course?
We are about to come under the governance of an administration that promises the end to wars it is simultaneously extending or ramping up, and that pretends it will keep doomsday weapons out of the hands of madmen by persuasion. Words matter. Until they don’t – wink wink.
AIDS and the President--An Inside Account
It will be years, maybe decades, before something resembling a consensus emerges on the Bush presidency. But if there is one area where Bush has already been given credit even by some of his harshest critics, including Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, it is for his leadership in combating the worldwide devastation inflicted by HIV/AIDS. As the President’s deputy domestic policy adviser when the global AIDS initiative was being developed, I believe the story of this program is eminently worth telling, not only for its intrinsic historical interest but for what it reveals about the character of George W. Bush, who doggedly pursued his vision through a minefield of conflicting interests, despite the absence of any tangible political benefit to himself or his party, and at the risk of a costly break with one of his core constituencies.
Bush’s interest in AIDS as a critical global problem was evident from the very beginning of his presidency. In March 2001 he established a cabinet-level council chaired by his top foreign-policy and health aides, Colin Powell and Tommy Thompson. On May 11, he gathered in the Rose Garden with UN Secretary General Kofi Annan and Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo to announce a maiden contribution of $200 million (subsequently increased to $500 million) to a new international AIDS fund now known as the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria. This represented a 30-percent increase over Bill Clinton’s final budget in total foreign spending on the disease (on top of the $13 billion being spent annually on the domestic crisis).
Although by autumn the President would be consumed with the aftermath of the September 11 attacks and the war in Afghanistan, his interest in the AIDS issue never wavered. In early 2002, he told Josh Bolten, his deputy chief of staff for policy, that he wanted to do more.
A meeting in Bolten’s office marked the first time I recall any discussion about developing a structured plan. Present were Anthony Fauci, a senior researcher at the National Institutes of Health who was leading its work on an AIDS vaccine; Gary Edson, the President’s deputy national-security adviser, with special responsibility for the developing world; and Bolten’s deputy Kristen Silverberg. Relating the President’s desire to focus on the international AIDS crisis, Bolten turned to Fauci, who had just returned from a trip to Africa with Secretary Thompson and whom we all expected to propose an enormous infusion of funding for his vaccine project.
But we were wrong. Putting more money into research, Fauci said, would not necessarily produce a vaccine any more quickly. Instead, he pointed to one of the most acute problems within the AIDS world: transmission of the virus from mother to child. In Africa, more than two million women with HIV were giving birth each year, resulting in at least 700,000 babies infected during pregnancy, during birth, or through breastfeeding. Because most of these women were unaware of any treatment for AIDS, it was difficult to convince them to seek help. “If you know you have a death sentence,” Fauci summarized, “why bother going to a doctor?”
But the good news was that a new drug, Nevirapine, had come on the market that had already proved effective in reducing the odds that a pregnant woman infected with HIV would transmit the virus to her baby. If we could purchase enough of the drug and develop a system of delivering it to those in need, we might be able to affect significantly the spread of AIDS.
Thus began work on what would become the President’s second major AIDS effort: the Mother and Child Prevention Initiative. The initial objective was to have a policy ready to announce in late June at the G8 summit in Canada. As the President’s chief aide for international development and his “sherpa” for the forthcoming summit, Edson took the lead in working out the details of the new initiative: which countries to target, how to recruit volunteer medical and nursing personnel, and most important, how to identify the obstacles to administering such a program in foreign countries.
The global fund to which President Bush had already promised support was formally launched in January 2002. It received a great deal of attention, quickening public interest in the worldwide dimension of the crisis. Then, in mid-March 2002, Bush invited the rock star Bono, a strong advocate of debt relief for developing nations and a spokesman for AIDS victims in Africa, to a ceremony announcing a $5-billion program called the Millennium Challenge Account to help reduce global poverty through the promotion of sustainable economic growth. Bush’s speech suggested that the scourge of AIDS was still very much on his mind. “In Sierra Leone,” he noted, “nearly one-third of all babies born today will not reach the age of five” because of the disease.
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By now, our Mother and Child initiative had become sufficiently fleshed out to present to Bush. The objective was to increase the availability of preventive care, including drug treatments, and to devise delivery systems that would reach pregnant women and newborn children in two Caribbean nations and eight African ones (with four to be added later). At a detailed briefing in the Roosevelt Room in June, the President embraced the plan, as well as its price tag of $500 million, and announced it the same month.
Together with the $500 million given to the Global Aids Fund, this meant that, only eighteen months into his tenure, Bush had doubled U.S. spending on the international AIDS crisis. But it was only the beginning. Even before announcing the new initiative, Bush had told Bolten that, while “a great start, it’s not nearly enough,” and encouraged him to come back with fresh ideas.
Ironically, in light of the unprecedented generosity already shown by this administration, the President would soon be attacked by AIDS activists for not having done enough. Nor were his motives spared. Almost immediately after the announcement of the Mother and Child program, two leading advocacy groups, ACT UP and the Global AIDS Alliance, issued a statement asserting that “the plan [was] all for show.” They could not have been more off-base. In line with the President’s desire to do more, Bolten once again summoned our group to review possibilities. This time, he said that “the President wants us to think really big about AIDS” and asked Fauci what was the single most consequential thing we could do, adding: “Assume that money is no object.”
As it happened, a transformation was taking place in the medical treatment of AIDS. Beginning in 1996, it had been determined that a “cocktail” combining three or four different drugs could extend life significantly for those infected with HIV. The problem was that, at a cost of $10,000-15,000 per person per year, the treatment, known as highly active antiretroviral therapy, was too expensive to be made available to all the HIV-infected people in the developing world. But in mid-2001, an Indian company had started to offer a generic version of this combination therapy at an annual rate of as little as $295 per person.
There was now a window of opportunity in which to accomplish something truly revolutionary, and Fauci suggested a large expansion of the Mother and Child program. The challenge was essentially the same, but the scale was much larger and the problems commensurately daunting. As we discussed the issue, Edson mapped out on a piece of paper a system—he called it a “network” model—that might work to deliver the drugs to the furthest parts of Africa. We would use primary, secondary, and tertiary medical facilities where they existed and, where transportation systems were unavailable, employ teenagers to deliver the daily regimens by bicycle.
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At the time, the White House was looking for a new director of its AIDS office, and responsibility for the search fell to me. One of the résumés belonged to Joseph O’Neill, an official at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). During the Clinton administration O’Neill had managed the $1.9-billion Ryan White CARE Act, and he was now serving as acting director of HHS’s office of HIV/AIDS policy. He was also a practicing HIV/AIDS physician, a volunteer member of the faculty of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore, openly gay, and, we assumed, a Democrat. But from the moment we began to discuss the President’s purpose with him, it was evident that on these issues he was a kindred spirit.
Before the July 19 announcement of O’Neill’s appointment, I brought him into the Oval Office for a ten-minute meeting with the President. The get-acquainted session turned into a 45-minute discussion in which Bush questioned O’Neill about his medical practice, discussed antiretroviral treatments, and asked for an honest critique of the government’s various AIDS programs. “We have to start treating this like a public-health issue,” the President said—“like a disease.” To a physician, this was precisely the right attitude, and as we left O’Neill said in a whisper that any doubts he might have had about working with the Bush White House were gone.
As the summer progressed, the working group, now joined by O’Neill and Mark Dybul (one of Fauci’s key staffers, he would later become Bush’s global AIDS coordinator), began sketching the outlines of the gigantic program that would become the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). Since whatever we came up with was going to cost a great deal of money, we henceforth included in our meetings another key participant, Robin Cleveland of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB).
Over the next few months, we held countless rump discussions, most often in my office in the West Wing, in the situation room next to Edson’s office, or in unused conference rooms in the Old Executive Office Building across the street. We consulted with non-governmental organizations active in the battle against AIDS, collected data from research institutions around the world, met with doctors, researchers, and AIDS activists, and began to examine the enormous logistical and bureaucratic challenges facing the program we were envisioning. Knowing that a major Bush initiative on AIDS would meet with media skepticism, we kept our meetings secret and told interested outsiders that we were simply studying the issue.
It was during this time that Bono began to show up frequently at the White House, always bringing us some new information or someone involved in AIDS relief work. We also met with and benefited from the expertise of AIDS organizations that were among the President’s toughest critics—groups like the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation and the Global Health Council. Especially valuable was the opportunity, arranged by the global-health expert Nils Daulaire, to get together with Paul Farmer of Harvard and Jean William Pape of Cornell, both of whom had worked extensively on AIDS in Haiti, and Peter Mugyenyi, the director of the Joint Clinical Research Center in Uganda. The network of clinics established to treat AIDS patients in that country, in tandem with a three-pronged counseling approach stressing what the Ugandans called the ABC’s of abstinence, monogamy, and condoms, had helped to reduce dramatically the prevalence of the virus—from 21 percent of the Ugandan population in 1991 to approximately 5 percent in 2002.
Bush had no objection to the network model that had originated in Edson’s notebook and been refined by our discussions with Mugyenyi, but insisted in each meeting that we establish proper “metrics” for determining whether federal funds were being well utilized and effective. He was also concerned about the task of coordinating activities in far-flung foreign lands. Many members of Congress, as well as advocacy groups, had been pushing for the U.S. to focus its AIDS spending on the Global Fund. About this the President was adamant. Although we should continue contributing to the Fund, developing and administering our own programs seemed to him by far the more effective approach. Any significant new increase in funding should therefore be administered by agencies of our own government and not through multinational organizations. Time and again, Bush insisted that the program be placed under the supervision of a single federal official, accountable to the White House and American taxpayers. Edson and I debated where this “accountable individual” should be placed—we considered both HHS and AID (the Agency for International Development), but eventually, for reasons of prestige and international clout, decided on the State Department.
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In early November, before seeking Bush’s final approval, we held a meeting with Bolten to which we invited Fauci, Daulaire, Farmer, Pape, and Eric Goosby, another leading AIDS clinician who had served in the Clinton administration and done much work in Rwanda. The meeting ran for a couple of hours, with our invited experts responding to dozens of questions from us about implementation and infrastructure. By the time we finished we were convinced that we had been as thorough as we could be. As Edson would later tell the President, speaking as one MBA to another, “We’ve created a model; it’s scalable; and we’ve done our due diligence. But it’s still like making a venture-capital investment. We cannot be sure it will work.”
On the day of the White House Hanukkah party in December 2002, we gave Bush a final overview of the plan and asked for his approval. As I went over the details and outlined the projected cost of the program—$15 billion over five years, with about $2.5 billion to be disbursed in the first year alone—Mitch Daniels, the director of OMB and the person charged with making sure we had sufficient funds for the imminent war in Iraq, questioned whether we really needed the full amount and specifically whether we needed to commit $2.5 billion the first year. Condoleezza Rice, who was present as Bush’s national-security adviser, had a different question. Observing that the AIDS pandemic was spreading well beyond Africa, she asked whether the President might not want to extend the plan’s purview to Russia, China, and India. To this Bush replied that the latter three countries had plenty of resources of their own, and that the focus should remain on sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean.
By coincidence, immediately before our briefing the President had met with a dozen Jewish leaders who were at the White House for the party that evening. One of them told briefly how his own father had been part of a delegation that President Roosevelt had refused to see in the early 1940’s when it came to plead the cause of the Jews trapped in Nazi Europe. “If,” he said to Bush, “you had been President at the time, with the moral clarity you have displayed in the war against terrorism, there would be millions more Jews alive today.” Visibly moved by this encounter, Bush, I believe, was still registering its effect 30 minutes later as he leaned back in his chair, looked at all of us, and said forcefully: “We are too wealthy a nation, and too compassionate a nation, not to take this step. It’s a chance to save millions of lives. We have to do this.”
The announcement came the next month in the President’s 2003 State of the Union address. Midway through his remarks, he turned to the issue of AIDS, pointing out that nearly 30 million people in Africa were infected, including three million children under the age of fifteen. Yet across the entire continent, observed Bush, only 50,000 AIDS victims were receiving medication. Calling his initiative a “work of mercy beyond all current international efforts to help the people of Africa,” he declared his intention to commit to it a full $15 billion over the next five years. This time, the reaction from AIDS activists was a resounding chorus of approval.
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No sooner had the dust settled on the State of the Union speech than the initiative faced its first controversy. Although the heart of the plan lay in the disbursement of funds for prevention, treatment, and care, the President had made clear that he wanted to follow the Ugandan model of counseling. This raised the touchy issue of condom distribution (the C in the ABC). It also raised the issue of whether organizations performing or even promoting abortions as a method of family planning would be eligible for federal funds in violation of the President’s own Mexico City rules—named for the highly controversial position initially taken by the U.S. at a UN conference in that city in 1984.
I was immediately besieged by angry calls from conservative Congressmen vowing to oppose any legislation authorizing the program unless and until we clarified that the Mexico City rules would apply in full. I went to see the President. He listened as I outlined the various options, and then explicitly stated that he viewed the initiative “as a health-care issue, and we should not deny anyone who commits to the objectives of our program the right to participate.” For a man who, only weeks into his presidency, had reinstated the Mexico City rules, originally promulgated under Ronald Reagan but subsequently reversed under Clinton, this was not only a very strong sign of personal resolve but an important decision from a practical perspective. In many of the more remote areas of Africa, there was only one health-care provider, and if that provider was an organization like Doctors Without Borders, which performed abortions, the refusal of AIDS funds might cripple the program and deprive the most needy of care.
But getting from here to there with Congress was altogether turning out to be a challenge. Even as we in the White House set about drafting legislation, the members of Congress with whom we were meeting almost daily were working on their own version of a bill. In the Senate, meanwhile, we had to deal with internal partisan politics. The previous year, William Frist, the majority leader, and John Kerry had proposed AIDS legislation of their own, calling for $4.7 billion in spending on prevention over the next two years and a large new contribution to the Global Fund. Both men felt upstaged by the President’s announcement, which had come as a surprise to them. Kerry, moreover, had already started his own campaign to challenge Bush for the presidency in the following year—another reason for him not to cede a major legislative victory to his rival.
Frustrated, the President suggested to Frist that he use his influence as majority leader to move the White House bill directly to the Senate floor. But Frist was reluctant to buck Senate procedure, and Richard Lugar, chairman of the foreign-relations committee, was especially uncomfortable pushing a bill through his committee that did not enjoy the support of Kerry and Joseph Biden, two of his Democratic members.
Recognizing the challenge in the Senate, we were simultaneously working on a preemptive strategy in the House, coordinating closely with the staffs of the Republican Henry Hyde and the Democrat Tom Lantos. After a couple of weeks of negotiating and re-drafting, we had a bill that we thought could pass. It was not the bill the President ultimately wanted to sign into law, but it was the only one with a chance of getting to the floor of the House, where it could always be improved with amendments.
On April 2, 2003, the bill was voted out of committee, only to be subjected to an assault by conservative advocacy groups upset that the administration had compromised on the Mexico City rules and that the legislation failed to place sufficient emphasis on abstinence education or to allow recipients of federal funds to opt out of condom distribution. (I particularly remember one Wednesday-morning meeting at which, attempting to mobilize support for the program, I was ambushed by a group of conservative organizations that felt betrayed by the President.) Bush, however, persevered, speaking individually with members of Congress and, in a White House speech, declaring that “this cause is rooted in the simplest of moral duties. When we see this kind of preventable suffering, when we see a plague leaving graves and orphans across a continent, we must act.”
Things now moved quickly. On May 2, the House took up the bill. As we had hoped, it was amended in three ways to accommodate the President’s objectives: first, by ensuring that federal monies would not be turned over to the Global AIDS Fund but remain under the control of a coordinator appointed by the President; second, by requiring that at least 33 percent of prevention funding be used on abstinence-until-marriage programs of the kind whose efficacy had been demonstrated in Uganda; and third, by ensuring that organizations with a moral objection to condoms not be disqualified from the program.
With these amendments in place, the full House voted to approve the bill. Two weeks later, not without a fight, it passed the Senate on a night when Frist, by now a strong proponent, kept the Senate in session until 2:00 a.m. to ensure passage. On May 27, the President signed it into law.
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Back in the fall of 2002, Bush had kept reminding us that he wanted a means of measuring the program’s rate of progress. In formally unveiling the initiative, he had articulated three goals in particular: over the next five years, he said, we would “support treatment for two million HIV-infected people; support prevention of seven million new HIV infections; and support care for ten million people infected and affected by HIV/AIDS, including orphans and vulnerable children.”
The five years have passed and enough evidence has been gathered for an initial evaluation. The results so far are extremely positive. By the end of 2008, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief had provided antiretroviral treatment to two million individuals, a dramatic increase from the 50,000 who were receiving treatment in 2002. As of March 2008, the last date for which we have comprehensive government figures, the program had provided transmission-prevention services for women during approximately 13 million pregnancies and given antiretroviral prophylaxis in more than one million pregnancies. Health officials estimate that this has resulted in the prevention of approximately 200,000 infant infections.
Finally, it has supported care for approximately 6.6 million individuals, including 2.7 million orphans and vulnerable children, and offered more than 33 million counseling-and-testing sessions for men, women, and children. Prevention-outreach programs have helped 60 million people. Over 20 million have received condoms.
This is not to say that the program is without problems. As with all government initiatives, there are inefficiencies and duplications of effort, resulting mainly from a lack of coordination among government agencies and non-governmental partners. Adding to the challenge is the weak infrastructure in target countries, as well as the insufficiency of qualified health-care workers. There also continues to be carping about some of the policies embedded in the law—which does not, for example, support needle or syringe exchanges and which prohibits the distribution of funds to any group not explicitly opposing prostitution and sex-trafficking.
Finally, many AIDS activists persist in criticizing the United States for what they believe is its circumvention of the Global Fund, despite the fact that the U.S. contribution to the Fund has increased to $2 billion. The ironical fact is that the President’s commitment to the AIDS issue not only launched the most significant effort the U.S. has ever made to combat the disease but also may have sparked the growth of the Global Fund itself. If, before the AIDS initiative, contributions to the Fund stood at under $1 billion with the U.S. paying half, today the Global Fund has received international pledges of nearly $20 billion with $12 billion paid.
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When George Bush paid a courtesy call on outgoing President Bill Clinton in January 2001, Clinton turned to him with his trademark grin and remarked: “Compassionate conservatism. That’s brilliant. Why didn’t I think of it first?” Now, at the five-year mark, it is safe to say that President Bush’s dream of building the largest humanitarian effort in history to address the global AIDS pandemic is a remarkable success—a success that in itself has turned the phrase “compassionate conservatism” into an incontrovertible reality.
As for Bush’s motives in inspiring, developing, and perpetuating this landmark achievement, they too will no doubt continue to be a subject for debate. But the plain fact is that he himself spelled them out with perfect clarity as long ago as his Inaugural Address of January 2001. Invoking the parable of the Good Samaritan, he said: “And I can pledge our nation to a goal. When we see that wounded traveler on the road to Jericho, we will not pass to the other side.”